Our server administrators have disabled FTP and now only provide support for SFTP connections for file transfer. Where can we find a graphical SFTP client for Mac OSX? Is there an SFTP client product that supports Windows and Macs?

There are a variety of SFTP client programs that support both Windows and Macs, and an even wider range of choices if you do not require that the same client program be used on Windows and Mac systems. The SFTP user experience is typically no different from what users are used to with FTP; the client program simply handles the SSH encryption for you. Places to start looking at SFTP client software include www.ssh.com, where you can find client and server solutions for Windows and Unix variants but no Mac versions. Filezilla is an open source SFTP client program with versions for Windows, Linux and Mac. The Rad SFTP client is a Java-based program that supports all three platforms and is available as an applet that can be hosted on your Web site. GSFTP is another cross-platform client. Fugu is a nice graphical front end for SFTP on Mac systems, and Fetch, a well-known Mac FTP program, also handles SFTP. In the Windows world, WinSCP is a popular SFTP client (SCP and SFTP are both SSH-encrypted file transfer protocols). In addition to these and other dedicated file transfer client programs you can find SFTP file transfer clients built into Web development tools like Dreamweaver. Using SFTP rather than FTP is a sound security decision since FTP transmits passwords over the Internet in plain text, while SFTP encrypts the connection using SSH, which provides a very significant security improvement over plain old FTP.