I came across an interesting request recently in my company. Someone in marketing asked me why they couldn’t send an 80 MB file via email to an outside company. After I was done laughing — as they had attempted to do this 5 times already — I set out to figure out the best way to get the file from us to them. It turns out I had a few options:
FTP
SFTP
HTTP/HTTPS file transfer solution
CD/DVD and the US postal service
Well a couple of these solutions were out of the question. FTP and HTTP are un-secure. Security should be something that ever company looks at today. Every day, no matter what type of industry you’re in, people try to break in to your systems and take information that isn’t theirs. Why make this easier for them? CDs and DVDs were also out of the question since we all know that our users want things NOW, not overnight or two-day express. This left me with SFTP and HTTPS file transfer solutions.
I decided to tackle SFTP first. I looked at two products that allowed SFTP transfers. First was JSCAPE Secure FTP Server software. JSCAPE’s software worked very well. The setup was simple and the features were numerous. It allowed remote administration, virtual file structures, HIPPA compliance, integrated web file transfers, and LDAP integration among other things. All of these were important features for us and for many of the companies out there that would use this technology. JSCAPE however had two hard things to overcome. One, it was expensive. The enterprise edition cost $5999 per server. This meant that not only did we have to spend almost $6000 for the software but we still needed to purchase a server and maintain the OS that was on it.
In the SFTP realm, I looked at GlobalSCAPE’s Secure FTP Server for Windows. GlobalSCAPE’s solution was within our price range and offered a wealth of features that we were interested in as well. The price of their solution was $690/server but required and additional $2294 for an integrated web file transfer piece and $2294 for an audit and reporting module. Both of these were important features to us as well. The software itself ran on top of another server which would need to run on Windows and would require us to maintain this server as well. While both of these solutions were viable, I decided to look into the HTTP/HTTPS file transfer solutions that were out there.
Lucky for me there were two very good options offered that I looked into. First was the SecureTransport solution by Tumbleweed Communications. This product was robust and offered numerous ways to allow connection to the appliance. It could be done via a client from Tumbleweed or SFTP, HTTPS or SSH. These were all great features but the manageability of the software was not as simple as the second option that we looked at and eventually settled on.
Accellion creates an all-in-one appliance that could provide everything that we needed and provided it with a web interface that was as close to sending an email as we could get. The users can authenticate via the web or directly in their Lotus Notes or Exchange clients and then write an email, attach files and send them on their way. The appliance would upload, virus scan, encrypt and deliver without any intervention from the user at our end or the receiving end. It automatically creates accounts for new users who need them and we got away from running just another server with a Microsoft OS loaded on them. This helped out IT department manage the things that we needed to manage. The box automatically updates itself, and keeps itself clean by automatically removing accounts and files when they are not in use and provides reports to myself and other administrators on its use. For Southco, this was the direction to go.
That’s all for now. I’ve been ill the past few days so I haven’t been writing much but hopefully this week, I’ll get back into the swing of things.
ALSO SEE: Southco Selects Accellion for Secure Transfer of Large Files
