JANUARY 16, 2007 Vol 4, Issue 7
	Are Large Attachment Files Clogging Your e-mail Infrastructure? You're not alone if the growing volume and size of e-mail attachment files are impacting the performance of your e-mail servers and clogging message stores. A new file transfer appliance that solves the problems associated with FTP and e-mail offers your users a simple, effective and secure solution for ad hoc file transfer. New File Transfer Appliance Solves FTP and E-Mail Problems by Jay Parkes Whether it's text, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, video or any other type of content, documents have become the lifeblood of virtually every organization, and the way most people collaborate and share information. As a result, the secure, quick and reliable transfer of documents and other types of files to both internal and external parties is now a critical function that can impact significantly on worker productivity and on an organization's ability to remain competitive. FTP Not Quite Up to the Task Although a number of technologies exist for transferring files, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the time-honoured, traditional approach that has been used by most organizations since the 1980s. With FTP technology, which is generally free and now built into most Web browsers and operating systems, information is uploaded to an FTP server and then downloaded elsewhere. FTP, which was designed primarily for machine-to-machine transfers, presents a number of problems however. First, it is not end-user friendly. One needs to understand Command Line codes to use FTP, for example, putting it the domain of programmers rather than every-day end users. When made available for use by end users, FTP also represents considerable management effort on the part of already-overburdened IT staff who need to create and manage end-user FTP accounts and passwords. Other shortcomings of FTP include its lack of document versioning and tracking – there's nothing to prevent an intended recipient from downloading the wrong version of a document – and non-compliance with government regulations for certain documents. In addition, users who upload files to FTP servers typically don't remove them, resulting in the unnecessary retention of large numbers of old files that waste valuable storage and are difficult to identify or dispose of in a managed fashion. Of potentially even greater importance, is the fact that FTP is not considered secure – critics calling FTP "Failure to Protect". With FTP, all transfers are out in the open and not encrypted, which could be a significant problem for organizations where information confidentiality is an issue – which, today, is pretty much every organization. Although there is a secure version of FTP, called SFTP, it requires extensive IT intervention in order to achieve necessary levels of security. SFTP uses Secure Shell (SSH), a secure replacement for telnet, to transfer files through encrypted channels. While suitable for technical people who have files to move around on a regular, predictable basis – say, transferring data from a branch office to headquarters every night – SFTP doesn't adequately meet the ad hoc file transfer and collaboration needs of regular information workers. Consumers Have It Licked In the consumer space, the challenge of file transfer appears to have been successfully overcome through the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as that used by Napster or using BitTorrent technology – today's hottest consumer technology that is sometimes referred to as the 'son of Napster'. The big problem with the P2P approach is that it is outside of IT control – you don't know who is sending what to whom – which is generally not acceptable in the enterprise space and presents a big liability issue. Another consumer-level approach to file transfer is through third-party Web portals such as RapidShare and YouSendIt, but they, too, are outside of IT control and thus typically not acceptable to enterprise customers. E-Mail to the Rescue? With necessity once again the mother of invention, or in this case 'extension', the world turned to the near-instantaneous communications capability of e-mail attachments to overcome the file transfer challenge. Today, as much as 80 per cent of e-mail traffic is generated through file attachments. Although sending files via e-mail is convenient and seamless to the end user, message servers and the e-mail infrastructure, designed originally to process short and text-based messages, are now choking, and sometimes even crashing as a result of the increasingly larger volumes and sizes of files that must be handled. In addition to the dramatic reduction in e-mail server performance, multiple copies of the same file attachments are driving up the storage capacity requirements of inboxes and message stores, often necessitating expensive infrastructure upgrades and adding to the workload burden on IT systems administrators. In response to the growing e-mail attachment problem, most organizations and Internet Service Providers are enforcing limits on attachment size – typically 5MB to 10MB. While relieving some of the stress on e-mail infrastructure, this approach impacts worker productivity, making it necessary for users to break large files down into smaller pieces that are sent as multiple e-mails, and forcing recipients to put all the pieces back together again. As a result, the sending of large files by e-mail is no longer convenient or seamless to end users. MFT Offers Enterprise-Class Solution With an eye once again to technologies specifically designed for transferring large files, the marketplace is seeing rapid growth in a category of file transfer solutions that industry analyst Gartner calls Managed File Transfer suites. MFT technologies, which are typically installed as software, but can also appear in the form of dedicated file transfer appliances, provide: Secure communications, securing either the transmission channels or the data itself Integration with the rest of an organization's e-mail and IT infrastructure Management, monitoring and scheduling capabilities Assurance that data is properly sent and received Assurance that data is secured at the termination point, including authentication of trading partners Auditability required for regulatory compliance Accellion Appliance Solves Ad Hoc File Transfer Problems The Courier Secure File Transfer Appliance (SFTA, see image below) from Palo Alto-based Accellion, Inc. is a new MFT solution that offers an exciting paradigm shift in file transfer technology. Based on a standalone appliance, the Courier SFTA is a simple, yet elegant solution that overcomes the shortcomings of other file transfer technologies, especially FTP and e-mail. Instead of sending files as e-mail attachments, users simply upload files to the SFTA appliance, which automatically sends a notification e-mail to the intended recipient(s), including a secure link back to the SFTA, where the file can be accessed/downloaded. IT has two options for implementing the SFTA. For the basic, out-of-the-box SFTA implementation, users access the SFTA through a standard Web browser interface. Optional plug-ins are available for integration with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes so that users can access the SFTA directly from their e-mail clients – by simply clicking a toolbar icon – rather than exiting e-mail to use the browser access method. Once users access the SFTA and sign in using a password, they are presented with an e-mail-like interface that allows them to enter the e-mail address for the recipient(s) (or search and click on an entry in their address book), browse their file/folder directory to click on the file they wish to attach, type in text for the notification e-mail message (if desired), and specify whether they want to receive a "file successfully transferred" acknowledgement and which of four levels of security they wish to assign to the file transfer. For the highest level, only the intended recipient(s) can access the file, while in the lowest, fully open security level, the link can be forwarded by the initial recipient(s) to anyone, with no need for secondary recipients to register with the SFTA in order to download the file. In addition to the access authentication, the file download from appliance to recipient is secured with encryption and compressed for optimum download performance. The SFTA currently supports file sizes up to 10GB. A first-time receiver of an SFTA notification message must first register with the SFTA and specify a password before being able to access the secure file transfer link. On subsequent occasions, the receiver's e-mail address and password allow the receiver to access the file directly. Those who have registered with the SFTA become "restricted senders", which enables them to send files back to anyone within the sending organization via the secure SFTA at any time – a true bi-directional, secure file transfer paradigm. According to Y.F. Juan, Accellion's director of product marketing, the SFTA does two things exceedingly well. First, the SFTA makes it easy for IT to control the file transfer process. Unlike FTP, which requires the creation and ongoing management of user accounts, the SFTA has a self-provisioning capability so that authorized users create their own accounts, making it unnecessary for IT to get involved. Second, the SFTA has a sophisticated and flexible set of file retention policies that govern how long files are stored in the appliance (e.g., "delete all files after 30 days"). IT can assign retention rules globally, to groups or even to individual users, or allow users to set the retention period themselves on a file-by-file basis. SFTA Unclogs E-Mail Infrastructure By moving the transfer of large files off your e-mail servers and onto a complementary, parallel infrastructure, the Accellion SFTA "can improve e-mail server performance and significantly reduce the amount of memory required for your inboxes and message stores by as much as 80 per cent," claims Juan. The SFTA appliance is available in a range of storage capacity configurations up to 1.2TB, including a fibre card for integration with SAN storage for even greater capacity. The right capacity for your organization will be a function of the number of concurrent users, typical file size and the length of retention time that will typically be specified. In addition to the single-appliance configuration, which is best suited for single-site and small to medium size organizations, Accellion offers an enterprise solution (see schematic below) for multi-site and high-volume organizations. The enterprise solution consists of multiple SFTAs – as many as required to meet your capacity, performance and geographical needs – daisy-chained into a network. The result is a robust file transfer environment with all the back-up, file replication, redundancy and failover capabilities that today's large organizations typically require. For complete information on the Accellion SFTA, see www.accellion.com. Compugen & Accellion Form Partnership Compugen is now a reseller partner for Accellion in Canada. Click here or give us a call if you'd like to find out how Compugen can combine best-of-breed processes and technologies from strategic partners such as Accellion and Microsoft to create effective file transfer, messaging and collaboration solutions for your company.