When choosing an FTP server solution, one of the first criteria most system administrators will face is hosting. And while on-premises file sharing isn’t going away any time soon, cloud-hosted FTP solutions can provide a lot of flexibility. In this post, we’ll review the use cases where online FTP solutions make sense and how to choose your options.
Common online FTP use cases
Hosted FTP solutions generally make sense in the following situations:
- Low-security data: Cloud FTP transfer is suitable for data that would not cause harm if it fell into the wrong hands. Videos, high-resolution images, design files and other content. that doesn’t contain personally identifiable information or privileged business information are all suitable for cloud transfer because if the cloud storage was compromised or an unknown actor was able to access the system, they wouldn’t find anything that could put your organization at risk with customers or regulators.
- Small IT teams: The smaller your tech team, the less time you’ll have to set up and maintain various services and applications like an FTP server. It can be more efficient for small teams to work completely in the cloud for file transfer requirements. However, the type of transfer and data you’re handling may make your security and compliance configurations just as time-consuming as an on-premises solution.
- Tight technology budgets: Online FTP services are ideal if you lack the funds to purchase an FTP server, don’t maintain your own servers or are concerned about bandwidth costs and network load. While hosted FTP services do carry a recurring cost that can spike with heavy traffic, they are often considerably more affordable to stand up than purchasing new equipment and taking the time to configure those machines. Additionally, they can provide a distributed architecture to speed up your transfers which would be much more expensive to implement on your own.
- Reliability and scale concerns: If you’re uncertain about your current infrastructure’s ability to handle outages or higher traffic volumes, online FTP services can provide peace of mind due to uptime guarantees and the flexibility to scale with traffic as needed.
- Low transfer volumes: If your organization handles infrequent or very low file transfer volumes, a cloud-hosted FTP service may make sense, as the incremental fees involved in these services would likely still be lower than the equipment and software required to self-host your FTP server.
- Client/end-user management challenges: Going hand-in-hand with a small IT team’s concerns, if your organization doesn’t want to provide hands-on support for file transfer users with technical challenges or handle account management for users accessing your files, an online FTP solution will likely work just fine for you.
How to evaluate online FTP services
If your use cases fit an online FTP server model, the guide below should help you evaluate which provider to select.
Pricing
Pricing for online FTP solutions is generally quite affordable on the surface, but quickly adds up to figures that can be more expensive than a self-hosted file transfer application. Be sure to evaluate all the costs your potential service will charge in the following areas:
- Base service price
- Bandwidth
- Storage
- Connections
- Protocols and features (some online FTP services charge different fees for the type of
- Transaction (some hosted FTP solutions charge per upload, per download, and for other types of transfer-related transactions)
- API connections and limits
Speed
Most online FTP services provide different packages with varying configurations that might affect transfer speed, such as more powerful servers or a broader array of geographies. If client transfer speed matters to you, you may want to spend more time evaluating and testing your options here.
Reliability
Online FTP solutions tend to offer different uptime, backup and redundancy packages at different pricing tiers. However, it’s important to note that many providers are built on top of Azure, AWS or another cloud computing provider. So, as you do your research, it will be helpful to evaluate how a service’s uptime is evaluated.
Integration
Every hosted FTP solution will have slightly different requirements for integration within your network and applications. These integrations would include tools for IP address management, user account provisioning, SSO support, automation and storage sharing.
While cloud FTP services often claim to be flexible, their actual integration support can be more challenging in many ways because they start from outside your existing network and may be limited in the types of services they support. The more time you spend investigating compatibility and integrations of your potential online FTP service, the better you’ll understand how close of a fit it will be.
User Friendliness
Cloud FTP users are generally less technical and perform most of their transfer activity in a browser. Because of this, the user-friendliness of your online FTP option can make a big difference in user acceptance and utility.
You may also want the option to customize your users’ experience with your own branding, workflows, etc., which is not available in all cloud FTP providers.
Security
Cloud FTP provider security tools vary widely, and it’s important to understand how they secure your data. While file transfer protocols themselves provide encryption during transfer, different providers will have different support for encryption at rest, key creation algorithms and more.
Additionally, cloud providers may not be able to support your organization’s security policies. If you are responsible for enacting data minimization, retention policies, loss prevention or other compliance actions, you will need to investigate how your potential provider can support these requirements.
Support
Finally, support can be of paramount importance. Will you have someone to contact in the event of an issue? How much does support cost, and what is the response time for tiered requests?
Cloud FTP Options
Can you set up Cerberus FTP Server by Redwood in the cloud? You sure can! Here’s our detailed guide for online FTP via Azure or AWS.
Also, our MFT server partner JSCAPE by Redwood offers a number of cloud compatibility options for larger organizations.