File transfer systems adapting to today's cloudy conditions

Managing large file transfers is a growing problem given the amount of data enterprises handle

Email is still the dominant way to send information from one person to another. But when lots of big files are being sent, email servers can quickly start feeling the pressure, leading to degraded performance and network bandwidth strain.

This is what the managed file transfer (MFT) business addresses. Bypassing email servers, these systems are dedicated to transferring large files within organizations, between businesses and customers, or in business-to-business or application-to-application transactions. Email newsletters many times use MFTs to blast users about the latest news or promotions from their company. Financial institutions that send large numbers of documents to customers and other business partners may use MFT, too.

Managing all these file transfers is a sizeable market: Gartner analyst Ben Huang estimates it to be at between $700 million to $800 million per year, but that only takes into account recorded revenues. Other researchers estimate the market could be more than $2 billion.

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Yates, the Forrester researcher, says IT shops have a variety of tools at their disposal, including MFT, traditional email and next-generation collaboration tools, like Salesforce's Chatter, Jive or Microsoft's Yammer. The key, he says, is for CIOs to study what users are already doing, and then either try to create policies for managing that, or give workers an alternative. "It's the CIO's job to put the right solution in place," Yates says. "It's about finding the right infrastructure to all workers to be the mobile and connected users they need to be."

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

Read more about cloud computing in Network World's Cloud Computing section.