Secure Exchange of Large and Sensitive Files with MFT

By Stephanie Jordan
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This week GlobalSCAPE, Inc. announced plans to release significant enhancements to its managed file transfer (MFT) solution, Mail Express. Mail Express enables Microsoft Outlook email users to send and receive large files (up to 25GB) on demand. MFT solutions address the temptation of users to resort to less secure methods of transporting data — such as private email accounts, social media sites, CDs, and USB drives.

“Many organizations use email as their primary collaboration tool with internal and external partners,” says Thomas Skybakmoen, senior research analyst with Gartner, Inc. “However, companies often place restrictions on file sharing for security and performance reasons. Leading managed file transfer vendors are responding by providing organizations with secure file exchange mechanisms directly within their email infrastructure, providing full governance of email attachments.”

An advantage of using MFT is the visibility of file movement it affords, including tracking and auditing, while still being easy to use. “Mail Express is part of an ad hoc managed file transfer, which blends MFT and an electronic mail system,” explains GlobalSCAPE COO Craig Robinson. “Typically, people think about MFT as a system to system transfer, but this is really people to people, which is important, because everyone knows how to use email and everyone recognizes the limits and the challenges of sending large files, especially with today’s multi-media, or videos.”

Designed for a wide-range customer base from SMB to the enterprise, the company notes that Mail Express allows for centralized policy management so that IT can enforce policies on each user’s email account. In addition, Mail Express reduces costs by offloading expensive email attachments to less expensive storage. “We actually have 95 of the Fortune 100 as MFT clients,” reveals Robinson, “So we deal with large companies, but our product scales down. With this release we have greatly improved and streamlined the workflow so that the email administrator can cleanly and easily configure the Mail Express product. For example, they can configure Mail Express to offload from Outlook, or files that exceed a certain size or that have a certain extension and the admin can implement policy with minimal training. It is a very flexible and easy to use product.”

Available within the next 30 days, the upgraded Mail Express solution will be priced upon product configuration and number of end users.  

Published August 13, 2010