Attention Developers – New Guidance For Connecting To Your SFTP/ Blackbaud Hosted Files Location

Heather McLean

When your database is hosted either in Microsoft Azure or COLO, Blackbaud provides a secure file transfer protocol (FTP) location, where you can store files for use in your hosted database. The SFTP (Secure File Transfer protocol) capability allows you to upload or download files to and from your Blackbaud environment.


Many of you have come to rely on your SFTP, also known as your Blackbaud Hosted Files location, as a critical function for business processes. As organizations define new ways to use SFTP service, the system is experiencing a high volume of traffic. A recent increase in support cases, community posts, and emails that cite issues with connectivity or “Bad Gateway” errors led us to perform a root cause analysis.


We've determined that this intermittent issue is driven by the number of open, concurrent connections to the SFTP. As an immediate step, to protect the service for all customers, we've changed the terms of our SLA for SFTP.
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Clients can make a call to the secure file transfer protocol (FTP) location once every 30 minutes to check for the latest file updates. Clients are not to exceed the limit of twice an hour call to the secure file transfer protocol (FTP) location and are subject to responses from Blackbaud in case they are adversely impacting our systems or are in breach of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The response may be suspending access to the secure file transfer protocol (FTP) location while we work with you on the resolution of the issue.

Note:

When using the Power Automate SFTP-SSH Action to connect to your Blackbaud Hosted Files Location / SFTP, we highly recommend you use two Power Automate workflows (one for retrieving the file(s) with the SFTP-SSH Action and a second for processing said file in your workflow(s)). These two flows can be packaged as a solution.

We will be discussing options for optimizing your workflows that rely on this method during the upcoming Power Automate User Group on 1/17. Join us.
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