Lets face it file transfer isn’t the most interesting subject in the world, but its a necessity for many businesses to move data from one location to another in order for individuals or teams to carry out certain tasks.

For many businesses however file transfer is a tedious process requiring manual intervention.  Regularly staff are expected to manually create a job to send and watch the file being delivered to the remote site to ensure that its gone, a good example being the user of an FTP client.  Clearly there are instances where this scenario works and is the most economic way, e.g. the one off or infrequent transferring of files, but for companies that regularly need to send large files to the same location this approach is nothing short of a criminal waste of resources.

As businesses strive to succeed in these challenging times many more are looking towards automation of their internal processes, this is the case irrespective of industry sector and to some extent business size.  A small part of many businesses workflow process is the delivery of files/data to another location – whether its on the same LAN, across a WAN or via the Internet whatever route the premise is the same even if the conditions are not.

File transfer should in my opinion wherever possible be an embedded process, effectively seamless, with the user not even aware that its taking place.  There are many ways of achieving this result (which in itself is another blog post entirely), whether hot-folder initiated or integrated with existing applications using various SDK’s.  Then there are the considerations of which delivery protocol is most appropriate, e.g. TCP/IP (FTP) or UDP (MTP/IP) and whether encryption of the data should be included.

The bottom line is in fact the bottom line (of your P&L statement).  Businesses need to wake up to the fact that manually sending files is not a good use of resources and where automation is possible processes are streamlined, files are delivered faster and human error is eradicated.

If you or your company could benefit from embedded file transfer or file transfer automation Pro2col would be pleased to assist you.

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Right now there is a very clear shift towards Could Computing but are we all buying into the concept without considering the implications for our businesses?  Wikipedia describes Cloud Computing very simply as, “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.”  It goes on to explain that it can also be described as, “technologies that rely on the Internet to satisfy the computing needs of users. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.”

The key points to pick up from the above description is that ‘business applications‘ are provided online and that the ‘software and data‘ are stored remotely.  With security of data uppermost in the minds of many an IT professional its worth pointing out that there has been a rise in the number of companies using online file transfer applications to send mission critical information to trading partners.  Whilst many of these systems encrypt the data in transit using a variety of options which invariably result in SSL or 3DES usage many don’t consider the implications of this data then residing on remote servers waiting for the secure collection by the intended recipient.

An interesting, yet worrying article by Eric M. Fiterman about called Cloud Danger: Drag and Drop Theft highlights the inadequacies in the audit tools for the virtual cloud space.  He points out that anyone with access to the servers providing your business with a service could very easily walk away with confidential information;

“If your service provider has physical access to your environment, any person with access to the virtual servers can perform activity on your server. Think that some malicious activity involving your virtual memory would be logged or monitored? It’s not likely; audit tools for much of the virtual-cloud space appear to be non-existent. This means I could easily perform some malicious activity on your server – such as copying a file containing personally identifiable information off your server – then rollback the state of the server to hide my activity. You’ll never even know it was taken.”

When chosing a file transfer solution its imperitive that you know not only that your data is going to be secure whilst traversing  the Internet, but also secure on the servers which host the data.  Whilst its almost impossible to guarantee the security of your data at any time doesn’t it make more sense to have an in-house securely managed file transfer solution?

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