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Friday, June 30, 2006

File transfer in the world of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) and Web 2.0

AJAX fashionista

Before people can pin down exactly what Web 2.0 is, the most tangible buzz for gearheads, like yours truly, in Silicon Valley and beyond has been the use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML). How it can be used. Who is using it. What people are saying about it.

Envision my glee when I learn that Accellion SFTA has been using AJAX as part of its implementation for a while.

AJAX is cool

References for AJAX background information abound; so, I would not belabor the issue except to say that it is très chic because Google is using it to make their UI slick. On the other hand, according to a Network World article on AJAX, enterprise users are weary of complex implementation and its potential impact on network performance.

AJAX inside Accellion Secure File Transfer Appliance SFTA

The key advantage of using AJAX is the streamlined UI via its ability to bring processing to the client side using browser native tools such as JavaScript, XML, HTML, and HTTP calls. AJAX was first implemented as part of the Accellion Courier SFTA 4.5 release to streamline the user UI. For example, instead of popping up another browser window to transfer a file (think how it works with Yahoo mail right now), the user would stay within the same browser window (think Gmail from Google).

Release 5.0 of Accellion Courier SFTA extended the product features to include folder transfer beyond 10GB. Here too, AJAX played a key role in implementations such as LDAP validation and dynamic table structure. So, not only that you can send and receive folders instead of just files with SFTA, all interaction will stay within the same browser window.

And, people thought file transfer solutions cannot possibly be sexy. ("Au contraire," say I while queueing up Right Said Fred's shirt song.)

AJAX Concerns for Enterprise IT

New technology, even if it is the re-combination of existing protocols, always comes with its own quirks and the first issue that Network World raised is the fact that it takes a good team to get the AJAX implementation right. In this respect, being an appliance maker, Accellion has the advantage of being able to focus the engineering resources on a self-contained form factor which improves the output quality while shortens the development time required for the AJAX implementation.

Drawback number two, according the same article, is the potential impact on network performance. In the context of Accellion SFTA, this issue is alleviated by a great team and Accellion's unique knowledge from the years of optimizing global file transfer performance since our CDN days. For example, sorting, LDAP validation, and dynamic table structures are all done on the browser side using AJAX to eliminate the associated server CPU load as well as to minimize the round trip communications with the server.

AJAX, Web 2.0, Accellion, and you

So, are you still struggling with technologies from Web 1.0 to let users send large files securely across the world?

Join Accellion. Implement a Courier SFTA. So you, too, can be a member of the AJAX toting Web 2.0 set - with or without Right Said Fred.


ACA Guy

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Friday, June 23, 2006

When it Absolutely, Positively Has To Get There and Back, Right Now

I was talking with the CTO of a global media company, a customer, and was impressed by the fact that his users are regularly trading more than one terabyte (1TB) worth of data using the Accellion Courier SFTA clusters per month. (Just to give a sense of scale, that is more than 1,400 CD's worth of data every 30 days!)

What is even more impressive beyond the sheer size of data exchanged is the fact that more than 50% of the users of the systems are outside of the company - clients, consultants, partners.

In other words, the ability to exchange files with external user is a critical capability.

While the unabated file size growth and nascent compliance requirements are driving the adoption of Accellion SFTA for file transfer needs, another key operational driver is the collaborative and rapidly iterative nature of most business processes today.

A mere five-ten years ago, depending on your industry, you would ask a partner to send you a document for review via FedEx when "it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." With each delivery taking one to two days, collaboration is at a somewhat leisurely pace.

Today. It is one hour away from a meeting with major investors. The CEO wants to have 15 minutes to go through the slides one last time. The trusted (and outside) graphic designer is just about ready with the 75MB killer presentation that you finally got everyone to agree to and sent over 20 minutes ago.

Problem. The designer has an email attachment limit of 5MB. You cannot get a straight answer from IT on who is in charge of the FTP server, let alone who can create a new ID/password for the designer to upload the file right now. You know that the security and compliance team would come down on you like a ton of rocks if you let the highly sensitive information travel through a hosted site whose infrastructure they know nothing about.

Solution. Accellion Courier SFTA lets you invite the designer to log into a web interface and send that 75MB hunk of a file to you right now. No IT intervention required and, if your designer knows how to use webmail like Yahoo (and who doesn't these days), she does not need training to know how to use the file transfer.

In today's collaborative and rapid iterative processes with compressed time frame, overnight is an eternity.

Maybe the new business mantra is "Accellion Courier SFTA: when it absolutely, positively has to get there and get back, right now."

ACA Guy

Friday, June 16, 2006

Much Ado About Tumbleweed and FTP Security

Neighborly is my motto. I talk regularly with other companies in the file transfer space and I believe that everyone, end users and Accellion, benefits from having a wide spectrum of solutions.

With that bit of personal philosophy in mind, I am much amused by Tumbleweed's announcement on their latest FTP tool, a sniffer to track FTP traffic designed to monitor unsecured and unauthorized FTP activities. Then, there were comment from L. Frank Kenney of Gartner on the importance of securing file transmissions for security and compliance.

(Note to self: call Frank, it has been a while.)

The irony is that FTP is one of the pillar protocols of Tumbleweed's Secure Transport.

To quote Tumbleweed's own press release on the peril of FTP: "The use of unmanaged FTP to share sensitive data continues to put organizations at risk. Internet FTP usage is widespread, often insecure, and leaves company data exposed and vulnerable. In many instances, organizations are unaware of the FTP traffic taking place within their IT environments. Without a monitoring system in place, organizations have no visibility into the volume and type of FTP traffic traversing their networks. Over time, many organizations find that they have fostered an environment with a large number of "rogue" FTP servers."

On one hand, I admire people who try harder when it does not work the first time. On the other, I think the ability to step back and declare that more patches and analyzers would not address the root causes of "rogue" FTP servers is the true sign of a strategic (IT and business) thinker.

Enterprise users need to send large files and folders securely to users in other parts of the world and outside of the organization. Technology is but an enabler.

Or, to paraphrase a famous political slogan, "It's the results, stupid."

Despite being the obvious technical solution since the 1971's RFC114 document, FTP is not cutting it for most enterprise users in today's collaborative environment.

The strategic insight is that secure file transfer is a core business process - a critical part of the day-to-day transactions that must be robust enough in the face of the myriad of unimaginable yet inevitable human glitches and operator errors. It is not about making FTP transmissions secure. It is not about monitoring "rogue" FTP traffic.

It is about giving the end users the ability for secure file transfer that fits into existing processes without adding to IT management burden. It is about finding solutions like Accellion Courier SFTA.

Give a straight answer when the CEO wants to know your strategies to remove company assets from a protocol known for "unsecured" and "rogue" traffic according to Tumbleweed, without crossing fingers behind your back.

Now, imagine that!

ACA-Guy
Postscript

TechWorld fumed that the Tumbleweed announcement was a sales-get ploy to get your contact information.

Chill, I say.

In solidarity with my file transfer brethren in Tumbleweed, I would like to offer our whitepaper, with no 30 day limitation, on Secure File Transfer as a Core Business Process.

Better yet, click here so we can tell you how Courier SFTA works for you.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Putting the Machine in Deus ex Machina - Sending folders and 10GB files without IT Help

I regularly have tête-à-tête sessions with IT users and prospects. Okay, they are more like griping fests on the latest end user faux pas. The point is, however you describe these discussions, the ability to send folders and ability to send really large files are easily amongst the top five IT obsessions I hear about.

Why are folders and really large files big headaches?

Folder Headache 1: There are times when the ability to preserve specific directory hierarchy and file relationships is the whole raison d'etre for the transfer. This usually happens with complex projects in industries like advertising/media production and engineering.

Folder Headache 2: Another oft-cited reason for wanting folders is because there are many files to send. So, instead of attaching or downloading 100 files individually from an email, the world would be a better place if there is just one folder (containing 100 files) to process on both ends. This happens a lot with professional services industries such as law firms.

Really really (two times) large files: we all have different definitions of what constitutes large file. The typical IT threshold is about 10-20MB, same as the email attachment size limit. For me, I consider files north of 1GB as decent size. For most web-based file transfer solutions, 2GB is the maximum limit due to a number of browser technical constraints. Beyond 2GB, FTP is the most common choice for file transfer, but the trouble is that most end users and some IT folks detest FTP with passion.

So, what are the conventional coping strategies since these problems are, surely, not new? Well, the old strategies on how to deal with folders and large files generally involves the use of some kind of data compression technology with a variant of the zip utility.

For folders, a few clicks with a compression utility creates one single file that contains all the files with the directory hierarchy information intact.

For large files, usually zipping makes them smaller. This does not always work, however, because some file formats are already compressed or they start as really really really (three times) large files. For example, legal deposition and discovery that involves emails can easily run into 5-10GB per transaction these days.

The unspoken assumption with the traditional strategy is the fact that end users are comfortable packaging these folders and files with a compression utility. The trouble is, as intuitively obvious as Zipping may be to the tech-savvy, it is not obvious enough for a vast number of end users. In other words, IT intervention is still often required and nobody is happy about the process.

The unpleasant truth is, as complex projects with intricate directory structures become mundane, as the file quantity to be exchanged per transaction continues to increase, and as file size growth keeps up its cancerous pace unabated, these issues are not going away.

If anything, folders and large files have become a part of today's core business processes and IT can no longer afford to address them in a case-by-case fashion.

In the face of this classic and seemingly intractable end users vs. IT drama, a deus ex machina is needed to restore the cosmic balance. This sanity-saving solution needs to:

  • Transfer folders as easily as files

  • Transfer 10GB or even 20GB in one go (as a reality check, 10GB is more than 2 DVDs or 14 CDs worth of data).

  • Be as easy to use as webmail.
Ahem... Send folders and Send 20GB files with one click using a familiar webmail interface - putting the Machine in Deus ex Machina - please meet Accellion Courier 5.0 Secure File Transfer Appliance.

Or, click here to get more information.

P.S.
* You can click here to see a picture of the appliance and the note from Computer World's Mark Hall.
* Or, click here on what Linda Musthaler of Network World has to say about SFTA.

ACA Guy

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Friday, June 02, 2006

Four features to let you have the large file transfer / large email attachment cake and eat it too

In this file transfer business, the need to seamlessly receive and send large files is usually mentioned in the same breath as security concerns. The trouble is that IT and end users have very different views on the same issue.

IT's typical refrain

End users are always trying to sneak huge files through email. One time, an user tried to send 1GB in attachments through email. Big sigh. Then, we had to deal with crashed email servers and got yelled at for poor email performance.

End users don't understand what emailing large files does to the network, especially when they send to a long list of CC and BCC. We have massive files replicated all over the place, taking up bandwidth as they go across the network, and taking up storage space on our email system.

We try to limit the file sizes in email, but all users do is complain and get their managers to approve exceptions which adds to our workload.

We recognize that end users want ability to exchange large files with external users. The trouble is that we have no control over the external user's IT infrastructure and there is not a lot we can do when something, inevitably, goes wrong.

We have tried setting up FTP servers for exchanging big files. But, end users complain that FTP is too hard to use. And, truth be told, administering an FTP server is painful because we are always running behind in cleaning up files in the directories and setting up new accounts for users.

End Users' familiar tune

IT just don't get it. Sending large attachments via email is the most straight forward method. We do not have time to master a new set of technology to conduct everyday business. The last thing we need is to learn some complicated system to send email attachments somewhere and have to talk the recipients through the process on how to retrieve these attachments.

And, heaven forbid that we have to call up IT for support!

The attachments are large. But, that is just the reality in today's enterprise environment and we all know that they will only get bigger.

We have tried sending documents via overnight services, but that added days to our schedule when we had to make lots of changes. Besides, I don't want the bean counters breathing down my neck to contain delivery service expenses.

Same issue but different interpretations - Sometimes it feels like I am watching Kurosawa Akira's adaptation of Rashomon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa all over again.

Half of the battle in finding a solution to this he says, she says problem is to get all parties involved to think beyond whether it is a large file transfer issue or large email attachments concern.

Fortunately, unlike the renowned Japanese story, there is a simple way to address this Gordian Knot.

Just get a solution that does the following:
  1. Easy to use through email client integration or webmail interface

  2. Offload traffic from the email infrastructure

  3. Automate administration tasks such as file life cycle management and account creation

  4. Allow external users to send and receive files using the same platform

By the way, yes, Accellion makes a secure file transfer appliance (SFTA) that does all that and more. And, no, it is not called a pain reliever.

You may say "It is all well and good, but would it handle really large files and how about folders?"

(Trouble maker, you!)

Let's talk about strategies, new and old, on how to send folders and really large files next week.

ACA-Guy