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Banking institutions, including commercial, retail and investment banks, frequently exchange files with various trading partners, which typically include customers, clearinghouses, corporate clients, other financial institutions, regulatory authorities and other organizations. Many of these files are crucial to time-sensitive business processes. Most also contain sensitive information, making them subject to governance and data privacy/protection laws and regulations, such as:

Banks store, process and transfer vast amounts of sensitive consumer data. This may include financial information, credit card data, personally identifiable information (PII), loan details and transaction data. Since these types of sensitive data are critical to business processes or subject to regulatory compliance mandates, they need to be protected. 

This year, the stakes for regulatory compliance are higher than ever. Organizations face an increasingly complex landscape of data protection and privacy regulations, many of which impose strict requirements on how you move, process and store sensitive data during file transfers. Secure file transfers are no longer just a best practice — they are a compliance imperative. 

Zero-day exploits are currently one of the most prevalent cyber attacks impacting file transfer solutions. We won’t go into specifics, but a recent file-transfer-related data breach that impacted almost a million individual records was caused by a zero-day exploit. 

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) file transfers are two of the most user-friendly methods for carrying out user-initiated file uploads and downloads. Users only need a web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge or Safari to perform these actions. In a previous tutorial, we outlined the steps for setting up an HTTP file transfer. So, in this post, we’ll focus more on HTTPS.  

Increased IT complexity, regulatory compliance obligations and senior management demands for greater efficiency are rapidly rendering general-purpose file transfer solutions incapable of meeting current business needs. To address these challenges, proactive businesses have been shifting from traditional solutions to managed file transfer (MFT) servers. 

For several decades, SFTP, which stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol or SSH File Transfer Protocol, has been arguably the most widely used solution for transferring sensitive data across the internet. In the past few years, however, we’ve seen increased adoption of what’s known as SFTP cloud. 

Managed file transfer is a category of solutions that enable secure, centrally managed, regulatory-compliant, automated, reliable and efficient data movement. An MFT solution can support a full range of file transfer needs — from user-initiated file transfers and multi-user file sharing to automated business-to-business (B2B) data exchanges. It’s essentially an all-in-one solution that caters to organizations looking to simplify increasingly complex data transfer workflows.

When your business processes involve large files that need to cross the internet in the fastest way possible, look beyond traditional methods like email or cloud-based file sharing services. These methods fall short of meeting certain business requirements for time-sensitive large file transfers. In many cases, your best option would be a managed file transfer (MFT) solution.