Secure File Transfer for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Users

Summary: Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms are increasing looking to Accellion SFTA as a solution that allows end users to easily and securely send large files and folders without requiring IT intervention.

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To state the obvious, enterprise users need to send and receive large files to and from people both inside and outside the organization. As transferring large files among work colleagues become de rigueur for many business processes, proactive IT teams have abandoned their FTP servers and added a secure file transfer appliance to make sure their users have the right tools to get those critical business files to the right person, at the right time, securely.

Since this is a Horizontal Business Process Improvement Opportunity, at Accellion, we have found that many industries have a clearly articulated need for solutions like SFTA. The legal industry, as well as healthcare, are two industries I have previously highlighted in this blog.

Architecture, Engineering and Construction, otherwise known as AEC, is another industry where we are seeing a surging demand for a solution that lets end users easily and securely transfer large files and folders. Given the nature of AEC, most of the works are collaborative across organizational and geographic boundaries and they have some pretty hefty files to send around.

For instance, take a civil engineering firm that is designing a freeway overpass. This firm would produce a series of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings for the construction firm that is going to build the bridge. Because industrial CAD files can easily get to the range of hundreds of megabytes in size, this isn’t something you can simply email from one person to another. (Not without getting the evil eye from the email administrator and your fellow co-workers because you just completely choked the email system, anyway.) So, traditionally, this transfer is done either by an FTP server, which usually requires IT intervention, or by overnight delivery service of a CD/DVD, which is costly in transit time.

So, when AEC companies like Bigge Crane & Rigging Company find a solution like Accellion SFTA that allows end users to operate within the familiar email interface while sending large files and folders of any size without impacting the email server, it is a Eureka moment.

Or, as somebody has not so delicately put it, size matters. (When it comes to large files, that is.)

ACA Guy