Managed FTP

After your people, your business information is probably your most valuable resource. But in your organisation, how much critical and valuable business information is being exchanged internally and between you and your trading partners in an unreliable, virtually untraceable, and vulnerable way?

Many enterprises and analysts estimate that as much as 80% of business information is shared within and between organisations using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) technology. You may be surprised by how much of your valuable business information is exposed to risk that it could be lost or unknowingly corrupted. This can cause applications and data to become un-reconciled, business processes to cease or work less effectively, and financial reports to be inaccurate. Perhaps worst of all - because the transfers are far from transparent - you may not even know when this has happened.

Analyst Software Strategies indicated how widespread this behaviour might be:
"Our staggering and somewhat shocking research finding is that custom-built, in-house, hard-coded integration solutions (the majority using free FTP software) are much the most widely-used approach. These often take 2 to 4 times the time and effort to build as Enterprise Integration middleware-supported integration projects, require a similar multiple of ongoing maintenance and support effort, and are insecure, fragile and vulnerable to several serious risks."

• Read the full report by Software Strategies (650KB)

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) technologies proliferate because of their simple appeal. There are an abundance of free FTP packages, the notion of file transfer is very intuitive and it usually only requires a basic level of skill to get going. There may not be any review or analysis of either the initial cost of the ongoing cost of deployment and maintenance of this solution. However, as dependency on these approaches increases, IT departments invest more time and skills to engineer additional function to try and address deficiencies in the reliably or security of these solutions. As more senders and receivers of files participate the complexity of the environment rapidly increases and the business finds it is now trapped into maintaining and patching these solutions which inhibits it from investing these resources in other IT projects such as to advance its progress to becoming more flexible or service-oriented.

Typically without realising it, such an IT department has unwittingly now entered the middleware business. Even organisations that have made great strides in adopting integration middleware may still have a great dependency on File Transfers, although they may not be aware of this. This dependency not only reduces the flexibility of your business and impacts responsiveness but can rack up hours of your staff's time in diagnosing errors or reworking supposedly simple solutions. Is this really the best use of your precious IT resources?