SFTP as a Service — SFTPaaS

Traditional SFTP requires you to host your own servers, and whether these are local or in the cloud, the total cost of ownership isn’t limited to just monetary cost. You also have to take into account firewalls, security, performance, scalability, and disaster recovery and back up. Moving to SFTP as a Service (SFTPaaS) has many advantages compared to hosting it yourself.

Advantages of SFTP as a Service

Choosing SFTP as a Service over managing your own servers offers many advantages for organizations. Some of these advantages include:

• No hardware required
• Scalability
• Reduced business overhead
• Data security and accessibility
• Disaster Recovery

We'll delve into each of these advantages in more detail in this article. 

No hardware required

Companies on average replace their server infrastructure every five years. With this comes the cost of planning, implementing, and supporting it. The average cost to replace a server is $6500USD.

This is far more expensive than an SFTPaaS subscription if choosing Couchdrop which is significantly cheaper over  over the same five-year period when you account for your time spent maintaining, updating, and troubleshooting your hosted server whether this is cloud or local.

Scalability 

The joys of using a SFTPaaS solution is that the infrastructure is not your problem. Businesses that deal with high growth, large amounts of data, and external clients need a reliable, high-performance solution that ‘just works’ without you needing to provision servers, networking, or needing to educate users on complex changes.

You will find that SFTPaaS solutions such as Couchdrop let you add users as needed and you can bring your own cloud storage (S3, Dropbox, OneDrive, Local, etc.) enabling your SFTPaaS to scale as your business needs scale.

Reduced business overhead

Managing users, infrastructure, networks, security, governance and everything else on your plate isn’t fun, not to mention time isn’t an unlimited commodity. Not only does using an SFTPaaS reduce your business overhead financially (an example is mentioned above), it also removes the stress, the downtime, and the time invested in implementing, maintaining, and replacing SFTP servers and hardware.

When was the last time you conducted a security audit of your SFTP server? Does it have the latest patch? Is your governance up to date? These are all important questions you'll need to know the answers to when managing servers yourself. 

If you use an SFTPaaS solution, these are all taken care of. All you need to do is log in and create a user when you need to, or better yet, tap into the API and automate your file transfer and SFTP as a Service.

Data security and accessibility

Dealing with confidential, sensitive data that needs the utmost security in this day and age is a constant concern. Too often are businesses and individuals being targeted or their plain text transfers being picked up by man-in-the-middle attacks. Using a secure SFTPaaS solution removes this. Providers are backed by the largest players in the cloud game and provide you with the ability to add your own user keys to ensure you have full granularity of the end-to-end encryption.

As this is a critical service for some companies, part of the CIA security triangle is accessibility, and this isn’t only about accessing the data from anywhere globally, but also ensuring that user permissions and secure access are correct.

Providers such as Couchdrop enable you to isolate users to specific folders or directory locations, enable read/write access, restrict users to certain source IP addresses, disable traditional FTP, and more, all while having the ability to access the service globally. Another benefit with Couchdrop is it enables you to bring your own storage, where you can then have the peace of mind that your data is secure and safe with you controlling and having complete governance of your data.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) and backup are highly important, but also often forgotten or forgone due to the expense and the expectation that the risk is not there or so minimal that it isn’t worth the expense. With an SFTPaaS provider, look for one who is preferably using a global cloud provider who has versioning and complete redundancy.

Couchdrop enables you to bring your own storage with provides you the full granularity and ability to control your data, its backups, and complete recovery. Most cloud providers (S3, Azure, Dropbox, etc.) provide full redundancy and the ability to recover from data loss in less than an hour.

Try Couchdrop, a simple and straightforward SFTPaaS solution

SFTP as a service offers many benefits and advantages, removing costs and headaches from operations. Moving from a more traditional SFTP model to an SFTP as a Service model is one way to get quick wins both financially and performance-wise, all without having to worry about managing servers and security.

Couchdrop is the most feature-rich SFTPaaS provider and is the only provider to offer “bring your own storage” with all common storage endpoints supported from S3, to Dropbox and your local file server. And you can try it free for 14 days. Plus, you don't need a credit card for your trial, you can simply sign up and go in minutes.