Whether it’s for collaboration on large projects, sharing high-resolution media files, or transmitting sensitive data, securely transferring large files is a common workflow across many industries. From multinational business firms to the media and entertainment industry and even individual content creators, transferring files securely is a necessity in today’s digital world.
But many organizations face a file transfer process fraught with potential security and performance issues. These challenges range from a lack of network bandwidth to cybersecurity threats, to compliance with stringent data protection regulations and the risk of file corruption.
Understanding the obstacles associated with large file transfers is crucial to overcoming them. Below, we’ll identify best practices, tools, and technologies that ensure secure and efficient file transfers.
Large file transfers (LFT) present many challenges, not the least of which is their size, which can impact network bandwidth, introduce potential delays, and ultimately grind project progress to a halt. Large file transfers of several terabytes require significant internet bandwidth and often enterprise-grade networking infrastructure, such as fiber lines, to ensure other network activities are not negatively affected.
If your issue isn’t bandwidth, yet slowdowns still exist, there’s a good chance you have latency problems. Latency—or the time it takes for data packets to travel from start to finish—is often driven by network congestion, which can be overcome with the right tools and processes.
Security and compliance is also a huge issue for file transfers that can contain valuable intellectual property (IP), making them a prime target for hackers and cybercriminals. While your organization may comply with data protection regulations related to your industry, ensuring your file transfer platform also adheres to security and compliance best practices can help you avoid a potential disaster.
Unfortunately, traditional file transfer methods such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) aren’t very fast, user-friendly, or secure and don’t use encryption when sending data (SFTP, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, requires encryption).
And self-hosted file transfer solutions using on-prem servers only provide the illusion of security, since the use of third-party applications automatically invites other people’s code into your infrastructure (rendering you vulnerable to supply chain and other attacks).
Lastly, a lack of reliability—due to network outages, device interruptions, or even a lack of bandwidth when sending files from a remote location—can negatively impact file transfers. Beyond the productivity impacts of starting a long transfer over again, failed transfers can reflect poorly on your team.
There are plenty of steps organizations can take to ensure secure and performant file transfers to any recipient, anywhere in the world.
On the security front, when sending sensitive or confidential data, it’s imperative that transfers are appropriately encrypted. A file transfer platform that uses AES or TLS encryption on both in-flight and at-rest data can keep your large files safe through the transfer process.
It’s also important to manage access to your transferred IP. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires both a username and password as well as a code sent to a pre-set email, phone number, or authenticator app (or a biometric scan) to access data. Role-based access controls based on the principle of least privilege should be implemented to restrict data only to users who need that data to do their job.
Using a secure, cloud-based file transfer platform can help. Cloud-based file transfer is typically more secure than self-hosted file transfer because it doesn’t depend on overworked, in-house IT staff to keep software and servers patched and updated.
Cloud-based file transfer is also built on premium cloud infrastructure that’s much harder to breach than a random on-prem server. Public clouds host data for some of the most sensitive organizations in the world, including the U.S. Department of Defence, and are incentivized to make massive security investments to protect their customers.
A centralized admin console to track who has access to (and has transferred) files is also important for managing user permissions and monitoring activity. This can help minimize security risks, as can regularly auditing your organization’s file transfer activities.
If your team deals with frequent large transfers, leveraging the right technology is your best bet to ensure they’re always secure, on time, and reliable.
While it may be tempting to use easily accessible consumer-grade file transfer services such as Google Drive or Dropbox, you may quickly find you run into scalability issues. Files uploaded to Dropbox.com, for example, must be a relatively small 50GB or lighter; Google Drive users are limited to 750GB of uploaded data per day.
Performance
Using the fastest possible network connection with a file transfer platform that saturates your network bandwidth by sending large files in chunks over multiple connections is ideal for optimizing turnaround times. Also consider upgrading your bandwidth capacity to help avoid network slowdowns; options include having a fiber line installed and using smart routers that include quality of service (QoS) protocols that prioritize important traffic.
For latency issues try using newer devices, reducing the number of devices on the network, using a hardwired connection, and keeping cables short. Additionally, make sure to keep your signal interference at a minimum: Microwave ovens, for example, can interfere with WiFi signals because they both operate at the same frequency (2.4 GHz).
Your large file transfer services should also bypass the slow public internet and use a private, high-speed content delivery network with a global network of data centres. That way, your transferred files ride a dedicated expressway (instead of a one-lane back road)—and the “last mile” of any file transfer, which is often the slowest, is minimized.
Lastly, LFT should be as easy as sending an email. Complicated, complex setups add friction for both users and IT teams and can lengthen turnaround times.
Security
Choose a cloud-based file transfer service with strong identity and access management (IAM) tools, including MFA and single sign-on (SSO) with SAML authentication, to ensure only the right people can access and transfer files. To keep data secure, your file transfer provider should also use encryption, secure transfer protocols, password protected transfers, download controls to track who has downloaded files, and the ability to restrict file types (.exe files, for example, can contain malware).
Also ensure your file transfer service is compliant with information security and management regulatory standards such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.
Reliability
You can improve the reliability of your file transfers by ensuring your solution automatically recovers from the point of failure through relentless retries in case of network outages. Checksum verification is also useful to ensure the integrity of each file package when it’s reassembled at its destination (a checksum is a bit like a fingerprint of a file’s contents).
File transfer solutions should also allow users to pause and resume transfers and preserve their file and folder structure, so everything arrives in the same order in which it was sent.
When dealing with any type of large file transfer, it’s essential to recognize the importance of security, compliance, and efficiency. You can protect sensitive data and ensure smooth operations by understanding the challenges and implementing best practices such as encryption, secure transfer protocols, and robust authentication systems. Utilizing trusted tools compliant with relevant data protection regulations will further safeguard your transfers.
By taking these practical steps, you can confidently manage large file transfers and support your organization’s data integrity and productivity.
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About the Author
Majed Alhajry is the CTO at MASV, a cloud-based large file transfer service that works with hundreds of M&E companies and studios. Majed’s passion lies in discovering novel solutions for complex technical problems. He is an expert in the transfer of large files, local and global, as well as in networking acceleration technology and application layer protocols.
