Getting Creative is Good, But Not When Sending Large Files

By Paul French -- VP Product & Solutions Marketing; Axway
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What daily event exposes the enterprise to as much risk as the sending of an email attachment? Can you think of one? Email used to be a medium for short messages. First it was an inter-company tool, then an intra-company tool, then a personal tool.

Today it’s the primary vehicle of collaboration, whether creating a T-ball schedule for the kids or a mission-critical order for customers. We’re treating it like a vehicle that carries a payload—an attachment—and takes that payload from Point A to Point B.

But email was never meant to deliver much of anything. We’ve stretched the boundaries of the protocol, the formats, and the technology to support attachments themselves, but as the size and volume of the attachments rise, the risk grows in many ways. First, it grows from a data loss prevention perspective because, generally speaking, attachments are often not subject to any sort of data security policies.

Second, size policies also create risk. Since email was never meant to move large attachments, IT infrastructures and administrators have ratcheted down the size limits. They say, “If it’s more than five megabytes, we won’t allow the attachment.” But files do get that big. A PowerPoint template can easily grow to that size. A large Excel spreadsheet that had any sort of macro or analysis can easily grow to that size. This is to say nothing of application-specific information that comes from ERPs. And so, with humans being humans, we find a way to achieve our goals. If the existing infrastructure doesn’t support us, we use third-party file-sharing applications in order to move large files from Point A to Point B.

Third, there’s cost. With email solutions, there’s a proportional relationship between quality and cost. High-quality service means high-quantity storage, and it’s expensive. It’s expensive to put up an infrastructure that will allow someone to send 20-megabyte files between individuals, whether inter- or intra-company.

Storage may not be expensive on a per-gigabyte basis, but when you think about the volume of humans, the volume of files they move, and the sizes of attachments, your numbers get big in a hurry. How do you back it all up? With that question, your numbers get big in a hurry times-two. How do you address document retention? With that question, your numbers get even bigger: times-two-plus-whatever-the-document-archive-might-look-like. And it just grows from there.

Fourth, there are communities.

One of the things that customers do to provide some level of security is to send their payloads encrypted. This creates a whole other set of issues. If it’s encrypted, can you give somebody the ability to apply some level of policy to it? If someone encrypts it, they may have limited the ability of the existing solution to provide some sort of governance.

What daily event exposes the enterprise to as much risk as sending email attachments? How about the forcing of employees to not use email and get creative when moving files from Point A to Point B?

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Paul French — VP, Product & Solutions Marketing; Axway

With 16 years of industry experience at Sterling Commerce, INGINIX Systems and Yahoo!, Paul French now serves as vice president, product and solutions marketing at Axway. He is responsible for the secure communications portfolio, including managed file transfer, secure email and identity validation.

Published November 13, 2009