By Jim Morris

Today’s organizations are operating on a limited budget. No surprise there.

This year, IT departments across the world faced some of their biggest resource cuts ever. As a result, they are meticulously re-evaluated the viability of their existing investments.

Amid all this infrastructure inspection an alarming discovery came to light. Distracted perhaps in years past by investments in new, trendy techniques and products, many IT departments were overlooking one of the most fundamental components of information security: secure exchange of information.

This doesn’t just mean the movement of digital assets between internal and external players. It also encompasses the collaboration among employees in different locations through diverse, and often ad hoc, communication channels. Compound that with the rapid explosion of data as well as an increasing need to get things out the door quickly, and the task of ensuring digital assets are transferred securely has become a daunting challenge for IT.

Enter managed file transfer (MFT). This sometimes overlooked or misunderstood participant in the information security world garnered a lot of attention in the second half of 2009. MFT products aim to help organizations manage, secure, standardize and automate the way in which information moves inside and outside of their IT infrastructure.

In a July 2009 study on the evolution of file transfer, Aberdeen Group reported companies who adopted best-in-class policy and procedure for MFT saved approximately $6.4 million per year in costs avoided due to data loss or data exposure incidents. Aberdeen also reported a staggering $150 million in cost savings from help desk calls related to file transfer.

Alex Woodie, a reporter with IT Jungle, similarly summarized the merits of putting a “management layer” on top of the “transport layer” in his article earlier this summer on MFT. He discussed the utility of audit trails (who sent what to where and how or when they did it) in ensuring security, privacy, governance and compliance. He also talked about the automation capabilities in MFT products that can execute jobs when specific files arrive in specific folders and alert IT when something unexpected occurs.

Perhaps the Gartner Magic Quadrant on MFT published this fall says the most. Like information, the MFT market is on the move. The report – which Gartner only started issuing two years ago – added 14 new vendors to a total of 45 that specialize in this burgeoning area. Some of these newbies are startups with specific specialties and others, like industry giants IBM and Microsoft, were compelled to expand their existing product suites.

Gartner emphasized the growing role that MFT plays in ensuring governance policy and processes in today’s organizations. The report also talked about the integral role that MFT plays in the B2B gateway, or the transfer point for multiple data or application sources.

GlobalSCAPE was proud to be included among the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for MFT for the second year in a row. Our team is encouraged by the attention the field of MFT is receiving, invigorated by our growing pool of competitors (who continue to validate, through imitation, our business focus) and pleased that MFT products are proving to be a cost-effective solution for many of the obstacles faced by today’s IT community. From our vantage point, the future certainly looks bright for MFT. We look forward to ushering in the New Year and new successes.