This year, the stakes for regulatory compliance are higher than ever. Organizations face an increasingly complex landscape of data protection and privacy regulations, many of which impose strict requirements on how you move, process and store sensitive data during file transfers. Secure file transfers are no longer just a best practice — they are a compliance imperative. 

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) file transfers are two of the most user-friendly methods for carrying out user-initiated file uploads and downloads. Users only need a web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge or Safari to perform these actions. In a previous tutorial, we outlined the steps for setting up an HTTP file transfer. So, in this post, we’ll focus more on HTTPS.  

Increased IT complexity, regulatory compliance obligations and senior management demands for greater efficiency are rapidly rendering general-purpose file transfer solutions incapable of meeting current business needs. To address these challenges, proactive businesses have been shifting from traditional solutions to managed file transfer (MFT) servers. 

In today’s interconnected world, secure and reliable file transfers are vital to business processes. While enterprises have often turned to traditional solutions like File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) servers to handle their data transfers, these solutions are no longer capable of meeting current business needs on their own. 

Any organization that exchanges sensitive files with another party through the internet or any wide area network should carry out those exchanges through some form of secure file transfer software. At a minimum, secure file transfer software helps ensure that your data reaches its intended destination intact and unaltered. More advanced solutions offer additional benefits as well. 

When you’re troubleshooting connectivity issues between Secure Shell (SSH)/Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) clients and servers, it pays to inspect the error messages generated on both sides of a connection. Those messages often provide vital clues about the problem. If your error messages involve the Diffie-Hellman-Group1-SHA1 key exchange algorithm, you’ll want to stick around. In the succeeding sections, we’ll be discussing the underlying cause of this particular issue and how to fix it.  

In many industries, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is increasingly becoming the preferred method of conducting business-to-business (B2B) document exchanges between business partners. EDI enables you to carry out B2B exchanges in an efficient, secure and cost-effective manner. If you’re just getting started with EDI, you can use this comprehensive guide as a jump-off point for all the things you need to learn and put in place to properly implement electronic data interchange with your business partners. 

Despite the growing adoption of cloud-based alternatives, many organizations still use theWeb Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol for file sharing, versioning, transfer and management. Some companies support it for backward compatibility. Others, by virtue of company data privacy policies that prohibit the use of cloud-based solutions, turn to self-managed WebDAV servers instead. 

Managed file transfer is a category of solutions that enable secure, centrally managed, regulatory-compliant, automated, reliable and efficient data movement. An MFT solution can support a full range of file transfer needs — from user-initiated file transfers and multi-user file sharing to automated business-to-business (B2B) data exchanges. It’s essentially an all-in-one solution that caters to organizations looking to simplify increasingly complex data transfer workflows.

When your business processes involve large files that need to cross the internet in the fastest way possible, look beyond traditional methods like email or cloud-based file sharing services. These methods fall short of meeting certain business requirements for time-sensitive large file transfers. In many cases, your best option would be a managed file transfer (MFT) solution.