ITBusiness Edge: Old Reliable - FTP Still Relevant in an SOA, Cloud World

Loraine Lawson covers "Old Reliable" FTP and its relevance to SOA and Cloud Computing.  FTP is "reliable" as in "a reliable friend that you can always call," however, the protocol itself is not reliable for content delivery unless Managed File Transfer (MFT) type products are used to enable reliability using FTP.  The article is well written and covers an important trend that brings SOA, Cloud Computing, and Managed File Transfer under a single, manageable umbrella.  Excerpts from the article are below:

You would think that all this movement toward cloud and services and SOA would mean the end of things like managed file transfer and FTP. Instead, companies that offer these approaches are reinventing themselves and claiming new relevance. 

Complete article: Old Reliable - FTP Still Relevant in an SOA, Cloud World

Updated XML gateway brings FTP under the SOA governance umbrella

Jack Vaughan's recent article covers an important emerging trend: convergence between SOA and MFT technologies. Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a baseline mechanism for information movement within and across corporations using legacy protocols such as FTP. However, with the emergence of modern SOA-related protocols, companies are now migrating away from less secure and less reliable MFT transport protocols. This trend is also driven by regulatory requirements including PCI, HIPPA, and GLB

Link to Jack's article: Updated XML gateway brings FTP under SOA Governance umbrella.

Excerpt from the article:

Despite SOAP and SOA inroads, the vaunted File Transfer Protocol (FTP) continues to flourish in organizations that - not surprisingly – need to transfer files. Finance and banking both represent FTP bastions – although both sectors are also on their way to becoming SOA strongholds of sorts.

Bringing FTP - originated in the 1970s - under the general umbrella of governance is an eventual goal for many of these companies. Forum Systems, a Crosscheck Networks' subsidiary, seeks to support such efforts with a recent update to the Forum Sentry Gateway.

The latest version of the gateway offers content-level security for structured and unstructured data for documents of unlimited size using the OpenPGP standard, while also enabling message transfers over a variety of secured and unsecured transport protocols. Moreover, the software allows organizations to plan migrations from batch FTP processing to SOAP with Attachments (SwA)(MIME, DIME, MTOM), while using existing centralized governance policies across both legacy and modern message formats.