Secure FTP

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Don't try to secure FTP; eliminate it! FTP is deeply entrenched in the world of B2B data movement but organizations increasingly recognize the protocol's limitations. In fact, many of the largest organizations in the world have banned FTP usage across their enterprise. FTP's principal failings are in the following key areas:

Security:

FTP is not secure and offers no encryption, it exposes the data at either end of the transfer, and it sends username and password in clear text (susceptible to intervention).

Reliability:

when an FTP transfer fails, it needs to be manually restarted. Unless someone is actively monitoring, failed transfers can sit indefinitely. Even worse, if a transfer fails in the middle, the receiving party may assume they received everything (there's no way to know they did not receive the entire transmission).

Automation:

FTP is an intensely manual process and does not lend itself to automation; for an enterprise, this has tremendously negative impact in terms of operating costs and efficiencies.

Control & Audit:

FTP offers no real control-functionality and lacks auditing capabilities (not good in today's harsh regulatory environment).

These limitations are unacceptable for the modern business – especially for what are frequently mission-critical business processes.

Secure FTP: Is Security Enough?

A small number of solutions have been able to partially address security concerns related to FTP. Some are secure shells that wrap around the basic FTP servers. Others achieve security through a number of sequential independent steps that encrypt, transfer, proxy through firewalls, and decrypt separately. While these 'Secure FTP' solutions may be adequate for a basic data exchange, they do not address FTP's considerable other failings.

Security, Automation, Control

CyberFusion Integration Suite (CFI), from Proginet, is an enterprise managed file transfer solution that enables your organization to secure existing file transfers and to achieve all of its business objectives in terms of file-transfer control, automation, efficiency, performance, and auditability.

Delivering infinitely more than mere FTP security, CFI gives your organization a secure automated way to programmatically handle large numbers of daily data exchanges. Advanced features like pre- and post-processing, checkpoint restart, guaranteed delivery, straight-through processing (automatic proxies through firewalls), audit, and e-mail notifications and alerts deliver the capabilities required for true business to business (B2B) secure communications.

Put CFI to work in your organization; the benefits are real and compelling.