Beyond Email Attachments and FTP: A New Approach to Secure, Cost-Effective File Delivery

Beyond Email Attachments and FTP: A
New Approach to Secure, Cost-
Effective File Delivery



About this white paper This white paper presents the research findings conducted by FactPoint regarding the benefits that users and IT have gained from a managed file transfer solution and provides a framework to help individuals and organizations assess how a managed file transfer service solution can benefit them. The research covers how using a managed service to deliver business-critical digital files to internal teams, customers and clients can enable increased productivity and can cut IT administrative effort and costs. 8 key criteria are provided at the end of this paper to help both users and IT administrators determine the usefulness of a managed file transfer solution in their environment.
Methodology For this paper, FactPoint conducted a web survey and in-depth telephone interviews with a broad range of individuals in different job functions across 15 industries. The questions covered their most important business workflows and the issues involved in sending and receiving digital files that were critical to getting work done. The survey took approximately 20 minutes to complete and received 3,486 responses. The in-depth interviews were conducted with 87 customers and non-customers in companies between 1 and 9,000 employees and lasted approximately 45 minutes. This methodology was designed so that FactPoint could capture a wide range of perspectives on this topic.
Executive summary The research conducted by FactPoint with both business users and IT administrators into the firm's most important workflows revealed that business-critical digital files must often be delivered on an urgent basis to keep the business running efficiently and projects moving forward.
FactPoint found a great deal of productivity lost to inefficiencies in current methods of business-critical file transfer using existing methods such as email, burning CDs or DVDs and sending them with overnight courier services such as UPST or FedExT, or by using older electronic methods such as FTP. Users identified problems in sending and receiving files as one of their top pains.
The primary business need for users was to find an effective solution to help them manage sending and receiving business-critical digital files as part of their work, regardless of the size of the digital file. These users needed a solution to be more responsive to clients, customers and other team members and wanted to keep their projects moving with the certainty that the intended recipient could receive the digital file regardless of that person's email gateway size limitations or firewall restrictions on email attachments.
2008 The FactPoint Group Page 2

Both users and IT stated that they valued the simplicity of a managed file transfer service so that recipients could use the solution to receive business-critical files with no training. Other highly valued user capabilities were the integration of managed file transfer into familiar environments such as Microsoft OutlookT, allowing users to send files to others from within their familiar email interface; and DropBox capabilities which allow users to "drop off" files using a simple web interface. FactPoint found these capabilities to be particularly important in environments where customers, vendors and suppliers needed to send or receive business-critical files but were resistant to learning more complex tools such as FTP, or enterprise-class collaboration environments.
The primary need for IT Administrators was to deploy a solution that is highly reliable, auditable, cross-platform, private and secure, and could be provided to users with little or no ongoing administration. IT Administrators spoke of the need to speed up email delivery times which were sometimes as slow as 15 minutes due to additional email server processing resources required by the ever increasing number of large file attachments. IT Administrators also discussed the problems and security concerns in using FTP, especially if the FTP site content and user accounts were "unmanaged." IT wanted to choose managed services that had centralized administrative capabilities and would minimize their time spent on routine provisioning and maintenance activ... [download for more]