Despite the Risks, FTP Use on the Rise in the Enterprise

Global businesses require the free-flowing movement of information-from sensitive customer data to logistical process information-to thrive. No one piece of technology takes more heat for creating catastrophic business process crashes than File Transfer Protocol, or FTP.

Hilty Moore & Associates conducted a survey of IT managers and CIOs at 100 companies spanning the financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and governmental business sectors to determine usage and requirements for FTP. Empirical and anecdotal information garnered from the survey revealed:

• FTP unreliability is impacting the bottom line via transmission problems that result in missed SLAs, brand integrity impacts and customer confidence erosion due to breaches.
• Participant comments reflect an incorrect, and potentially painful, belief that encrypting data transfers via FTP is a viable data security solution.

This survey report:

• Highlights broad industry-level challenges with and current usage volume of FTP.
• Suggests a shift in approach on the issue of organizational risk away from solely a data lockdown initiative to one that provides complete data security and actual, bottom-line financial value to a business.
• Offers a way to address knowledge management more holistically with complete transfer visibility, business process and partner scalability, and a managed solution that secures data completely.