by Greg Shields

Features notwithstanding, one major decision you’ll need to make is in how you plan to realize your need for a managed file transfer solution. On the market today are solutions that fulfill that need in one of two major ways. The first arrives as a shrink-wrapped solution that you install to hardware in your own data center. These on-premise solutions enable you to bring the entire service in-house, but with the added administrative costs of managing that solution.

Slowly growing in popularity is an alternate approach that leverages “the cloud” as a kind of “file transfer-as-a-service” architecture. With these hosted solutions, your business will typically pay a monthly fee for usage. Rather than being installed as a part of your data center infrastructure, these services are instead available pervasively on the Internet.

As you’ll see, both architectures have their pros and cons.

On-Premise Solutions

An on-premise solution is essentially a set of software. Just like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, going down the road of a software purchase adds its own set of costs to the environment. Best practices suggest that each network service is given its own hardware server for installation. This service isolation reduces the chance of conflict, which in turn reduces the change for service failure.

Complicating the use of software installations can be the requirements for multiple servers. For example, if a managed file transfer solution comes equipped with a multiple-hop architecture, it is likely that multiple servers will be required to support the “inside” and “outside” components. Organizations that require high-availability throughout the solution can expect to double (or more) this requirement to implement the necessary clustering features.

Today’s software gets around some of these limitations by being now able to install properly to virtual servers. Virtual servers can be much more easily provisioned, sp they tend to have a lower per-server cost than physical servers. Further, the added benefits of virtualization-backups, snapshots, failover, and so on-can improve the availability of the solution even further.

Another cost associated with on-premise solutions relates to the need for regular updates. Above all, a managed file transfer solution is a security solution. This primary focus means that updates to its codebase can be more regularly required than for other types of software. When exploits are found that impact the solution’s codebase, updates to fix the problem must be implemented rapidly to prevent data loss or compromise.

A final consideration is the administrative cost associated with actually managing the solution. As a security-oriented solution, creating an architecture that assures that security is primarily important. If your IT organization purchases a piece of software with great features but implements it in a way that doesn’t follow good security practices, it is possible to reduce your security posture rather than enhance it. Prior to selecting the on-premise option for your needs, ensure that your IT organization has the knowledge and experience that is necessary to implement the solution correctly.

With all these risks, there are a number of benefits that an organization gets by choosing the on-premise approach. Most importantly is the knowledge and assurance of data ownership throughout the life cycle of a transfer. With cloud-based services being relative newcomers to IT, compliance regulations today remain vague about data ownership.

In essence, by selecting a cloud-based solution, you are also trusting that solution provider to handle your data properly. The proper handling of your data includes encrypted storage, isolation between your data and the service’s other customers, and the assured deletion of that data as necessary. When selecting a cloud-based solution for managed file transfer, look carefully at that company’s policies and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for these types of data ownership issues. In essence, you don’t want your “company-approved” file transfer solution to be no better than the “potentially shady” free Internet services it is attempting to replace.

Another important area where on-premise solutions tend to excel is in the more complex data transfer arrangements that are created through automation and workflow. In situations where your organization needs to automate the delivery and later transfer of data, it may be preferable to select an on-premise solution. On-premise solutions tend to have the necessary scripting interfaces that are required by developers to create run book automation.

Hosted Solutions / Cloud Solutions / as-a-Service Solutions

The benefits and detractors of hosted or cloud-based solutions are in many ways the logical inverse of those mentioned previously. Cloud-based solutions enable you to convert what may likely be a capital expenditure (after considering planning, hardware, and integration costs) into a monthly operational expenditure. Businesses that prefer known and rarely-changing costs tend to find Internet services to be preferable to on-premise. By choosing a cloud-based solution, your business effectively locks itself into a known recurring cost that isn’t likely to change. With on-premise solutions, in contrast, unexpected costs for things like added hardware, additional planning and administration, and unexpected downtime can appear at virtually any time.

A potential downside to cloud-based solution is obviously the recognition that your data is no longer yours once it is uploaded to the hosted solution. Although this concern can be mitigated somewhat through legal recourse and the assurance of good SLAs, these solutions always exist with the underlying assumption that someone else can make a mistake with your data (as opposed to you making the mistake with your own).

Further, as mentioned earlier, today’s compliance regulations tend not to provide guidance on data ownership issues to the level that many companies are willing to accept. As a grey area in the law today, taking a conservative approach to selecting a provider is a smart move until the guidance is more fully understood.

The huge benefit, however, in selecting a cloud-based solution is in the complete offloading of administration to a third party. When that party’s costs are in-line with your expectations, the transfer of administrative responsibility to the third party frees your internal resources for more useful projects. With the administration of managed file transfer solutions being an important but likely not mission-critical part of your IT’s mission, this freedom can pay dividends elsewhere within your computing infrastructure.

A final benefit of such a system is the capacity to simply turn it off should you no longer need its services, or if you later want to bring those services in-house. By selecting a cloud-based solution, your monthly OPEX relates to consuming just its services and no more. If you later decide that an on-premise solution is a better fit for your needs, transferring those responsibilities is a trivial activity.

Ultimately, the decision about which approach to take lies in your requirements. Take another look through the set of potential features mentioned in an earlier part of this series. Map those potential features to those that are available in cloud-based solutions as well as those that you need to solve your own problems. If you find a match, starting with a cloud-based solution might be a smart first step.

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.