Architecture Overview

• Can you describe your current data architecture at a high level?
• Do you have an enterprise architecture team or data governance function?
• What integration patterns do you currently use? (point-to-point, hub-and-spoke, ESB, iPaaS)

Infrastructure

• What is your server environment? (OS, virtualization, cloud infrastructure)
• What are your network constraints? (Firewall, DMZ, VPN)
• What authentication systems do you use? (Active Directory, LDAP, SSO, MFA)

Data Characteristics

• What is your largest single file transfer requirement?
• What is your peak transfer volume?
• Do you have any latency-sensitive transfers?
• What character encodings do you need to support?
• Do you need to handle compressed or encrypted files?

Source Systems Detail

• List your critical source systems (System, Type, Version, Data Format, Volume, Frequency)
• How do you currently extract data from these systems?
• Are there any API limitations or rate limits to consider?

Target Systems Detail

• List your critical target systems (System, Type, Version, Data Format, Requirements)
• What are the data loading requirements for each target?
• Do targets require specific file naming conventions?

Transformation Requirements

• What types of data transformations do you need? (Format conversion, field mapping, filtering, aggregation, validation)
• Do you need to maintain referential integrity across transfers?
• Are there data quality rules that must be enforced?

Security & Compliance

• What encryption standards are required? (AES-256, etc.)
• What secure transfer protocols are approved? (SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, AS2)
• Do you need PGP encryption for files?
• What are your key management requirements?
• What audit and logging requirements do you have?
• How long must transfer logs be retained?

Operations & Monitoring

• What monitoring tools do you use? (Splunk, Datadog, AppDynamics)
• What alerting mechanisms are required?
• What is your change management process?
• Do you have a DevOps/CI-CD pipeline for deployments?

High Availability & DR

• What are your uptime requirements? (99.9%, 99.99%)
• Do you need active-active or active-passive failover?
• What is your RTO (Recovery Time Objective)?
• What is your RPO (Recovery Point Objective)?
• Do you have a DR site? Where is it located?

Integration with Existing Tools

• What scheduling tools do you use? (Control-M, Autosys, cron)
• What ITSM tools do you use? (ServiceNow, Jira)
• Do you need integration with any workflow/BPM tools?