File Transfer all the rage but cost, FTP overuse and security gap issues
Posted by Margaret Dawson on August 9, 2011
Today, Hubspan released the results of its latest market research, this one on managed file transfer usage and challenges. In many ways, this research validated what we have seen and heard from our community base: increased use of MFT, multiple file transfer solutions across a company, some managed by IT and some not, continued wide use of FTP, and security issues.
However, I was surprised at how many companies in the survey are still using FTP – 70%, even when they want to move off it. As one respondent said when asked his biggest challenge: “getting completely off FTP”! Reminds me of the EDI conversation – it’s legacy, people don’t love it, but it’s ‘what we know’ and it ain’t broke!
Also, I didn’t expect cost to easily rank first in terms of solution criteria, which partially explains the FTP and why even enterprises are using basic, yet cost-effective, Web-based file transfer solutions, even if the solutions don’t have the controls, visibility or auditing capability.
You can read more in the press release we issued today, or check out the full results here. I’ll just go through the key highlights:
- 77% of survey respondents use a file transfer solution to exchange information with both internal and external communities, with 66% of companies conducting file transfer transactions every day.
- Of those who do not currently use a MFT product, nearly 40% plan to implement one.
- IT controls or approves file transfer in over 70% of organizations. In certain industries, like financial services, this number is even higher. (this is interesting, because I constantly hear complaints from IT managers about “rogue” file transfer usage by employees)
- When asked what protocol companies would prefer to use, FTP preference falls to 20% with SFTP, FTPS and HTTPS scoring top choices.
- File sizes are still mostly small, with most companies transferring files under 100 megabytes (43%), and just 2% of respondents transferring files over 50 gigabytes. However, in our own community we are seeing a clear and fairly fast climb of file size and volume, and when you slice this by company size (larger enterprises) or industry, you start to see the higher numbers increase in ratio.
- The top three greatest file transfer challenges cited are: security (49%), file size (30%) and management (24%).
- When it comes to top criteria for selecting file transfer solutions, security is in the top three but not first, with cost (58%) reigning supreme, followed by security (46%) and ease of use (45%).
Over 250 organizations completed the file transfer survey, ranging in size from under 100 employees to more than 10,000 employees. Respondents represented a range of industries, with high-tech, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and healthcare accounting for over 50 percent of the polls. And the purist in me (or former journalist) wants to note that while we conducted the research, the questions and results were vendor agnostic, and we did not promote our product in the research.
Tags: FTP, managed file transfer, Market Research, MFT
Margaret, I have been using FTP (Maytech.net) for quite some time now with no issues. Can you please also go over what the potential risks/issues are for web-based transfers?
Comment by Sarah Hill — August 12, 2011 @ 12:02 pm
Hi Sarah, I think a lot of companies find FTP easy to manage and use and have not had any issues to date, which is why we see so much continued use of FTP. However, there are multiple issues. One, there is no encryption with FTP, so your data while sitting in an FTP server is in the “clear” so to speak. Just by moving to SFTP or FTP/s, you would be leverage SSH or SSL encryption for your data. Other risks are around how you control access via FTP of the files. Do you have strong authentication, so you know who is accessing the files, are sure they can prove who they are with a strong authentication scheme, and that they have authorization to access those files. Finally, can you audit that access? Finally, with overall Web-based transfers, do you know what files or data is being transferred and is it putting your company at risk? This goes to the issue of IT control of a file transfer solution and the ability of IT to run reports on what has been sent via file transfer internally and externally. Thanks for your note, Margaret
Comment by Margaret Dawson — August 15, 2011 @ 12:57 pm