Businesses face a real threat – their employees. That’s right, increasingly tech-savvy employees have turned to a diverse range of file transfer tools that are beyond the sight of IT management.

Employees see webmail, file sharing services, cloud storage, USB sticks and smart devices as easier to use than traditional corporate tools to transfer files. But this trend ignores the security risks and regulatory implications of using file transfer methods entirely outside of corporate control.

Here’s five things you should know about your employees’ habits and the need for secure file transfer technology:

1. Insecure means are used to send confidential files.  Recent surveys we have run to monitor user behaviour found that a vast majority (84%) of respondents send classified or confidential information through corporate email attachments. Of those, 72% do this at least weekly and 52% daily. That means employees are using unsanctioned tools in record numbers, resulting in a lack of visibility and control.

2. Many employees use personal email to send company documents and data.  Users may think they can’t afford delays or slowdowns associated with jumping through perceived hoops to send out information and files that keep business humming. And if the business doesn’t provide the tools they need to send large and confidential attachments, or if the processes and technologies are too difficult to use, then users will take matters into their own hands – and their own email.

3. Employees are using consumer-grade file transfer services for business purposes.  If the corporate email system limits the size of file attachments or if IT vetoes service requests, resourceful employees don’t throw up their hands in resignation: they look for workarounds. And the growing popularity of file transfer sites and cloud services aimed at consumers is making it easier for business users to sidestep IT. More than half of the users we surveyed admitted they use these services.

4. Risk of data theft is high.  When business users aren’t turning to personal email accounts or free file-sharing services, they may be putting files on USB thumb drives, smartphones or other external devices. Unfortunately, our market research shows that almost one-third of users had lost a USB device, smartphone or other external device containing business or personal information – a tremendous risk for any organisation.

5. IT Management Visibility into Data Management is Low, Putting Businesses at Risk.  Most companies create and maintain policies that mandate the use of approved tools for moving and sharing information. However, our research shows fewer than 32% strictly enforce these policies, making these mandates largely meaningless. No visibility means no compliance with internal policies or external regulations and laws.

The file sharing habits of employees can be risky but is driven by their desire to get work done. The business need and IT desire to control file sharing is equally important. Fortunately, companies don’t have to choose between risky behaviour and productivity. Using secure file transfer technology, employees can get the convenience, ease-of-use, and speed they need while IT and the business get the control, visibility, security and compliance they need.

Click here to download a free report, published by Ipswitch File Transfer that provides insights into causes and trends in risky data and file sharing, ways in which IT has fallen behind in safeguarding information, plus the associated dangers and proven means to safeguard corporate data without impeding user productivity.

Pro2col are a certified Ipswitch File Transfer Elite Reseller and have been working with Ipswitch since 2010 to supply, deploy and support their range of managed file transfer solutions to UK businesses.  If you like more information on secure managed file transfer, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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On a similar note, this is the ideal moment to publically release our lastest e-book: The Council’s Guide to Secure Managed File Transfer, which is now available for download.  It covers a range of issues surrounding the secure movement within councils including:

If you’re at the conference and would like to speak to one of our managed file transfer experts, drop by stand 8 (piccy attached) – we’re always happy to help.  If you’ve not been able to make it this year and you’d like to talk to us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the office on 0333 123 1240.

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Whats the problem with disabling Java you may ask?  Well its well known that Java is really the undisputed champion when it comes to carrying larger data sets through a web browser and most managed file transfer software products use Java, almost without exception!  Why Java, well thats another discussion which has been very well documented over on the FileCatalyst web site and whilst Mac’s in general don’t account for the largest desktop market share, around 6.5% the lack of Java in OSX is a real problem for Mac users of managed file transfer solutions.

The resolution?  Well Apple aren’t stopping users from running Java on their Mac’s rather ensuring that they take the decision to enable it, this however is likely to further strain relationships between Mac users and the predominately Windows based IT departments.  I suspect that we’ll hear more about this over the coming weeks and months and given our focus on the creative marketplace we’ll keep you informed.

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The mounting costs generated by work duplication and management overheads, accompanied by the risk associated with the absence of failover was becoming a genuine concern.  Bearing in mind that these systems were executing business critical processes such as billing, debt management, banking and delivering mission dependent data to employees in the field – recreating these undocumented workflows in the event of a disaster would be costly.  Considering the sensitive nature of certain pieces of data moving through these workflows, securing data was also a priority.

Pro2col worked alongside the customer to develop an understanding of their processes and document their key requirements.  Armed with this information, we were able to identify the technologies that would meet these requirements, and help them through the selection and evaluation process.  Specifically, the company were looking to:

1. Secure the sending and receipt of confidential business and customer data
2. To further automate the retrieval of time sensitive data from remote systems to provide realtime updates of vital information to their workforce at regular intervals throughout the day.

In terms of features, the company were looking for:

Based upon the information we gathered through the consultancy process, we were able to recommend the most suitable solution to meet their objectives – in this case, a combination of Ipswitch MOVEit Central and MOVEit DMZ with the Ad Hoc Module.  MOVEit Central was specifically designed to automate a wide range of mission critical file transfers, enabling the company to automatically “pull, process, and push” all files to any platform, including network architectures, operating systems, and protocols.  It would integrate directly into their existing data workflows, consolidating their automated file transfer tasks and allowing IT staff to create/administer them via a user friendly GUI interface.  For the ad hoc aspect of their file transfer requirements, MOVEit DMZ with the ad hoc module provided a secure, end to end solution for employees to send and receive mission critical files.

This just gives you an idea of the potential of these solutions and the levels of automation that can be achieved.  Within an enterprise environment such as a large utility company, an managed file transfer solution can save hours of manual processing and ensure that all the information is where they need it, when they need it.  As with all of our customers, we’ll be working with this organisation in the months and years to come, and look forward to helping them achieve their maximum ROI.

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The question is; why are SMB’s being targeted?  It would appear that the modest budgets available to small companies make them easier targets, giventhe lower level of expenditure on information security technologies.  Especially since SMB’s frequently work as suppliers for larger organisations, making them a more attractive proposition to hackers than the more conventional direct attack on the corporate target.

What does this have to do with managed file transfer I hear you ask?  MFT has generally been considered a technology more appropriate to corporate organisation’s – with its big price tag and grand title.  Times are changing for the MFT marketplace and there are now some very comprehensive solutions available at really competitive prices.  For those SMB’s considering how they should secure data transfers with their larger corporate customers, technologies exist at around the £4,000 mark which provide an equal amount of functionality as many corporate companies have.

To discuss your file transfer requirements, whether you’re an SMB or multi-national organisation, get in touch with Pro2col or give us a call on 0333 123 1240.

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This is great in most instances but imagine a situation where you’ve sent an email using the plugin within your email client of choice, only to later find that you’ve attached the wrong document.  Worse than that, it contains sensitive customer or financial data – what then?  You make a frantic call to your IT Help Desk asking them to delete the file or remove access to it.  You then get confirmation from the kind Support Desk person to say that they’ve action your request.  Great, you’re in the clear…. but upon returning to your email you see that your customer has already downloaded the file and you have the email notification to prove it.  Where you usually greet the notification with a shrug of the shoulders in the knowledge that the managed file transfer solution has once again done its job, this time it leaves you cold!

Fortunately not all managed file transfer solutions are built the same.  Some have DLP capabilities ensuring that sensitive data is quarantined whilst one vendor we work with provides a very unique capability, remote file termination.  How is this done I hear you ask, well give us a call and we’ll tell you!  Suffice to say, this type of technology provides the highest levels of security available therefore isn’t pitched at your general ad hoc file transfer users.  It’s more appropriate for those companies dealing with extremely sensitive data, e.g. data needing to be exchanged between board members, patent information, IPO, MBO, acquisitions and mergers information and so on.

If your business has a requirement to move data in a more secure manner than your existing file transfer technology allows, speak to Pro2col as we’ve got technologies that can handle the most sensitive of data.

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Dropbox announced yesterday on their blog that after hiring some “outside experts” to investigate why certain Dropbox users were getting spam to their non-public Dropbox email addresses, the experts concluded that a Dropbox employee’s account was hacked and the details were lifted from a project document.  No details were provided on the numbers of users affected, what other information was compromised or why account details were stored in an unencrypted document.

Ordinarily we’re singing the praise of managed file transfer solutions as an alternative to custom built, cumbersome, unsupported, legacy FTP servers. However, a quick search on Google this morning showed me that perhaps more people are now searching the internet for a secure alternative to Dropbox, likely due to the broadcast of recent security issues.

A business’ decision to select Dropbox or any other cloud based technology for storing and sharing company data, should be taken with caution.  Cloud based solutions in general offer significantly more advanced features than your average in house managed file transfer solution, which end users have grown accustomed to.  Why?  Because they’re developing for a single, controlled environment over which the vendor has complete control whereas a managed file transfer vendor has to develop for multiple server based operating systems and the QA process can be lengthy, thus inhibiting progress of a product.

There are however a number of reasons why a greater degree of security can be achieved by deploying an in house managed file transfer solution, here are four of them:

1. It’s not a big Cloud brand target with hundreds and thousands of users
2. Data is stored local to you and you have complete control over the security policies
3. Access is securely controlled by AD/LDAP and other user group contained within corporate authentication tools
4. Reporting and blacklisting tools mean that hackers can be monitored and banned very quickly

If you are concerned about the lack security, control, auditing and governance of your business data then speak to Pro2col.  We can help to analyse your requirements, select the most appropriate vendors and assist right through the evaluation process and beyond.  Managed File Transfer is fast becoming a necessary business tool and is certainly a more than adequate alternative to Dropbox.

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Whilst cloud solutions certainly offer users with a raft of features currently not offered by other proprietary software vendors, they tend to lend themselves to being targets for hackers due to their high profile and wide adoption.  It begs the question, “Should consumer grade cloud based technologies be allowed within the enterprise at all?”

Managed file transfer vendors are fast catching up with the cloud based solutions, adding Dropbox like features to provide users with the simple way of working to which they’ve become accustomed.   Whilst also adding new features such as mobile file sharing capabilities to cover off the BYOD angle, never before have MFT vendors being trying so hard to keep up with the contemporary features that users are demanding.

There are many benefits associated with implementing an in-house managed file transfer solution.  Possibly one of the most important in terms of security (taking into consideration the above) is the fact that they don’t become a high profile, data centre target.  Taking the understated, in-house deployment may well help you to slip under the radar whilst also providing a range of security features.

If your company is using Dropbox to share data then Pro2col can help.  We’ve worked with various companies across a range of industry sectors to replace consumer grade file sharing technologies.  Call one of our sales consultants on 0333 123 1240.

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Given that our business focuses on selling file transfer technologies and ‘free’ doesn’t quite pay the bills, I was somewhat surprised to be asked this question. However, as I’m a bit of a file transfer geek I had in fact researched this in the past I knew that there were not – the best I could find was a couple of Sourceforge FTP server projects.

I completely understand a company wanting to keep the cost of their technologies down, preferring to deploy on a Linux platform.  We’re no different and

run a number of our mission critical systems on various flavours of Linux and have been deploying Linux solutions for about 8 years now. There are several vendors with great technologies which can be deployed on Linux – Linoma and Axway and a quick look at the price tag would confirm that these solutions certainly aren’t open source.

It got me thinking whether the open source route was something which could be explored in the same way other technologies have, but I concluded that we’ve got enough on our plate at the moment servicing the needs of our existing clients and those willing to pay for software.  Whilst open source works in some aspects of business, companies needing to move mission critical data want a structured development roadmap and enterprise level support too.

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We’re helping out on the GlobalSCAPE stand this year (check out their stylish booth), as they’re showcasing their latest products for the first time here in the UK – Hosted Enhanced File Transfer Server™ (EFT Server™) and Secure Mobile Access™. As GlobalSCAPE’s primary reseller’s in the UK, it’s been a great opportunity for us to spend some more face-to-face time with the GlobalSCAPE team.

There’s been a lot of interest from businesses spanning all sectors, looking secure their data transfers and comply with regulations such as PCI DSS and The Data Protection Act.  We’re looking forward to being kept busy for the remainder of the exhibition, so if you’re heading down to Earls Court come see us at stand F82.

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