Tumbleweed upgrades file transfer
Connecting state and local government leaders
Tumbleweed Communications recently added security, authentication and reliable delivery features to its SecureTransport product.
Tumbleweed Communications recently added security, authentication and reliable delivery features to its SecureTransport product, beefing up a solution that is already widely used in government agencies to securely transfer large data files.
The additions ' support for the Secure Shell (SSH) file transfer protocol, integration with Computer Associates' eTrust Siteminder single sign-on, and an updated AS2 engine to enable multi-gigabyte file transfers ' was driven by rapidly evolving business requirements, according to company officials.
"File transfer used to be just about FTP (File Transfer Protocol)," said John Thielens, Tumbleweed's chief technology officer. "It's now about using many more (protocols) that allow secure transfers between wider varieties of partners and applications, but that still need to be mapped into the same auditing and control infrastructure."
That latter requirement is proving to be the big attraction for products like SecureTransport. Thielens said. Many of the protocols can be had for free, but it's the ability to closely manage the file transfers, to tie identity through such things as Active Directory to the process and to closely track and audit the transfers, that's driving the market.
"Security policies are at the core of what organizations are doing today,"
Thielens said. "It's about how to map identities and other things to permissions, so you'll see an increasing integration of file transfer (products) into that."
In commercial organizations return-on-investment (ROI) considerations make it cheaper to displace older technologies with these newer products, Thielens said, and you are already seeing that happen. Recent events such as theft of credit-card data tapes that were being physically transported between sites should only serve to accelerate the trend, he said.
In government agencies, recurring costs tend to be funded out of different budgets than in commercial organizations so the pace of change will be different. There, he said, Tumbleweed is looking more to newer projects for sales of SecureTransport and other products.
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