As a business owner, your company's most valuable asset isn't the product that you sell or the service you provide. It's the trust that your customers give you on a daily basis. This is especially true when it comes to how you share files between other employees, other businesses and even customers. The importance of secure file sharing cannot be overstated enough and FTP solutions are one of the single best ways that you have to enjoy all of the reward and none of the risk of this technology.
Poor File Sharing
A healthcare facility in Massachusetts was recently fined over $200,000 in HIPPA violations alone due to insecure e-mail file sharing practices regarding patient information. The movie studio Sony Pictures publicly ran into similar trouble in 2014 after terabytes of confidential e-mails were leaked online, embarrassing the studio and creating a problem that cost millions upon millions of dollars to fix in the process. Both organizations ran into the same problem: they weren't being as safe as possible regarding the transfer of mission-critical e-mail information. Both organizations could have fixed these issues (and saved huge amounts of money) through the same basic solution: FTP.
Encryption
One of the many benefits that FTP brings to the table is encryption. Information is essentially "scrambled" while in transit, guaranteeing that even if an actual file is intercepted, its contents cannot be accessed without the appropriate authorization key. This strong SSL encryption is the same that is used by online shopping carts when you enter your credit card information. Such encryption has never been cracked in the history of its use. SSL's strength is constantly improved to stay one step ahead of the computing power that could be used to crack it. The current standard is a 2048-bit key and encryption
cipher strength of 256 bits or better.
Permissions
FTP also allows you to create permissions based on the employee hierarchy of your company. If a particular employee needs to access your FTP server but doesn't need access to a specific set of files, you can deny them permission based on rules that you create - increasing security across the board as a result. Permissions can not only be limited by access, but it can also be limited by action. For example, you can assign one person permission to upload or delete files, while other users may only be able to download those files. FTP permissions are very granular.
IP Blacklists
The Sony Pictures hack in particular is said to have come from not only outside of the company, but outside of the country. This could have been completely avoided by using FTP solutions like FTP Today, as you can create "IP Blacklists" and deny permissions based on things like country of origin.
Even if you're putting out a high-quality product, without customer trust you ultimately have nothing. Customers need to not only be able to trust you to solve their problems, but also to safeguard the personal information, financial data and other types of information that they're providing you with during a transaction. FTP solutions like Sharetru are one of the single best ways to accomplish this in today's modern environment without interrupting the way that you like to do business.
If your employees are bringing their own devices to work you need to be on the lookout for the 5 threats we highlight in our free eBook.
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