Wick Hill release: Woking, Surrey: 8th April 09 - In the recession, resellers need to present solutions that are going to save money, particularly with enterprise customers who are cutting budgets.  There is one area, which most clients and many resellers are unaware of, which can save enterprises money, with minimum disruption, and assist them with compliance, while making decent margins for resellers.

Replacing insecure, low performance, non compliant FTP in enterprises is a high value, good margin, opportunity for the channel, overlooked by many.

Low TCO and high migration costs continue to drive the retention of enterprise legacy systems in the recession. However, compliance requirements are driving users away from the insecure FTP file transfer protocol, which doesn’t support strong authentication or strong encryption and lacks data integrity.

Security simply isn’t up to the standard required today and an incident resulting from poor security could prove costly.

Performance is poor, especially with ever-increasing file sizes and an ever-increasing number of files to be transferred, resulting in too much server time being taken up and too many valuable staff tied up with file transfer administration - crucial cost considerations in a recession.

Cutting costs
Replacing FTP with an efficient SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) solution will ensure enterprises are compliant with security requirements and will at the same provide much improved performance and scalability, together with good management and reporting.

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of leading security VAD Wick Hill, said: “In the absence of awareness of the hidden costs of FTP file transfer, many organisations overlook the fact that increasing their security can actually yield quick cost savings!”

Potential cost savings will come from the improved performance and improved security of SFTP. SFTP takes up less server capacity and frees valuable staff from administering file transfer, with consequent cost savings. Additionally, costly security incidents and compliance problems can be avoided with the improved security features. Where multiple legacy systems are present, these savings can be commensurately greater.

The huge differences in SFTP solutions
It’s crucial to pick the right SFTP system for clients because there are huge differences in performance, which can affect clients’ ability to get ROI on their investment.

Recent tests (December 2008) by Tolly1 showed that Open Text Connectivity Secure Server 1.0 had the highest performance and maximum scalability of three secure server products tested (Open Text Connectivity Secure Server 1.0; Attachmate Corp Reflection for Secure IT Server 6.1; and SSH Communications Tectia Server 6.0)

In tests, transferring a 36 Mb file from a server to a requesting client, Open Text completed the task 10x faster than SSH’s Tectia Server and 24 times faster than Attachmate’s Reflection for Secure IT Server.

And Open Text was the only product to scale successfully to 1024 sessions. This means it can be deployed on just a single server, saving on hardware costs, space, and associated deployment and ongoing support costs. The report found that users would spend 5,600$ to support 1000 sessions with Open Text, 14,000$ for SSH and 60,000$ for Attachmate. 

Open Text Connectivity Secure Server 1.0
Connectivity Secure Server 1.0 is a high performance secure shell 2 server for Windows. It offers SFTP for secure file transfer and Secure Shell 2 for secure terminal sessions as well as FIPS 140-2 validated encryption for securing network traffic. It is extremely scalable, can support a large number of simultaneous users, transfer files faster than comparable solutions, and has a light memory and processor footprint.

Availability, effort required, skill levels and reseller support
Open Text Connectivity Secure Server 1.0 is available to resellers through value added distributor Wick Hill The solution doesn’t require a high skill level and needs only minimum effort.  Once the reseller has identified an end user site, Wick Hill and Open Text will provide sales and technical support to help conclude the deal. The reseller will also have the benefit of being seen as a trusted adviser.

1. Link to the Tolly test
http://www.wickhill.co.uk/knowledge_library/hummingbird/09/Tolly209100OpenTextCSSJAN2009-FINAL[1].pdf