Taming the Transfer of Monster-Sized Files
Your files are bigger than ever, but good old FTP doesn't cut it. No wonder the market for software and services for managing the transfer of large data files between a company and its data center or partners should surpass $500 million this year.
Fri, January 08, 2010
CIO — Despite being insecure and outdated, the file transfer protocol (FTP) continues to be a popular method for sending large files between data centers, corporate divisions, branch offices or business partners. But watch out.
A study commissioned by Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T that focuses on business and collaboration software, found that nearly a third of companies do the majority—as much as 80 percent—of their large file transfers using FTP. Yet, the same study found that 93 percent of companies experienced failures in FTP transmission. Another survey of manufacturers conducted by Sterling found that about 8 percent of their file transfers fail.
"Companies can no longer rely on the solutions to manage batch file transmission that they had put in place for mainframes," says William McKinney, head of product marketing for the company's managed file transfer (MFT) group. While FTP is free, it's not appropriate for companies transferring medical data or retail-sales data to their data centers, he says. "The problem is that it was designed for interoperability, it wasn't designed for security or automation. If something goes wrong, there's no record of it—people just try it again."
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Large files moving back and forth between corporate groups and their data centers account for the greatest volume of transfers: Financial firms transfer checking account transactions or credit-card data; healthcare companies have to collate and synchronize data on specific procedures with the medical files; and retailers have to upload their latest sales data from their numerous stores.
Dumping FTP Has Compliance Benefits
Moving away from ad-hoc FTP data exchange can save companies money and headaches, not only during day-to-day operations but when being audited for compliance. For companies that want to—or for compliance reasons, have to—have assurance that large data files are transferred securely and reliably, adopting a managed file transfer solution makes sense, says Maureen Fleming, program director for IDC's business process automation and deployment group."If you have a system that is not all that reliable, and it has an unacceptably high exception rate—and anything less than 99 percent is unacceptable—people will be wondering what happened to that file," Fleming says. "If you cannot figure out what your exception rate is, then you are in trouble because it becomes a brand issue."
The demand has helped the managed file transfer market grow to more than $500 million in 2009, according to Fleming. Vendors playing in this space include Axway (which bought Tumbleweed,) Ipswitch, IBM (IBM), Accellion and CA.
