Uploading Big Data for Employees While on the Road

Land surveyors, film production crews, power line and gas pipeline inspectors, news reporters, and accident investigators all have a few things in common. First, they are almost always on the road and second, they need to collect a lot of digital information that needs to be uploaded to the home office quickly and reliably.

Achieving big data transfers from the road doesn’t have to be laborious or unreliable, just because the data set is large. While public Wi-Fi, hotel Wi-Fi or mobile hotspots can help get data where it’s needed when files sizes are manageable, when the data is larger, simple cloud drive storage and hotel Wi-Fi might not get the job done.

Consider Faster Connectivity When Away from Home Office

The free Wi-Fi offered by lodging, coffee stops, and bookstores along with phone tethering via a mobile hotspot may be the top-of-mind choices, but workers sending bigger data need a better solution. Here’s a few:

• Premium Wi-Fi hotspots: Many off-site locations will offer premium Wi-Fi connections, which are usually much faster and more secure than the free option. Paid Wi-Fi also offers much better technical support and service should things not work as expected.
• Bonded mobile network modems: Bonded modems can combine multiple mobile connections into a single connection. In other words, it’s a bit like combining a hot spot from your cell phone with three other cell phones. Prices on Bonded LTE/4G/5G routers have recently substantially come down. And many vendors also offer bonded mobile routers in a backpack format so these devices can even be used while walking or on a work site and not necessary stationery – for true road warrior flexibility.
• Portable satellite terminals: These are highly portable satellite terminals that are truly capable of working from anywhere on earth. While these mobile satellite terminals can’t be used while walking, they do allow complete geographic independence. Starlink’s Roam package is a good example of this technology.

Read More: UDP Technology: Essential When Transferring Big Data Over Satellite

As for security, both bonded cellular modems and mobile satellite terminals offer much higher security than what can be found in the local coffee joint or hotel, because the network links for these options are dedicated and do not pass through the public Wi-Fi.

How Better Software Delivers Faster, More Reliable File Transfers

Using a cloud-based drive from any of the most popular technology giants, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and iCloud can technically work for employees away from the corporate office, but they do not offer the following features, which help streamline, secure, and guarantee big files arrive at their destination as intended:

• File transfer automation: With automation functionality in place, workers do not need to babysit their file exchanges. And transfers should automatically resume as soon as the worker’s laptop is turned on and a connection to the server can be established. No more time needs to be wasted sitting in a hotel room or other public Wi-Fi spot, watching the progress bar of a file upload.
• Guaranteed delivery: Every file transferred is verified by checksum and therefore guaranteed free of any errors. Corrupted files can be a thing of the past.
• Bandwidth optimization: A robust file transfer solution helps ensure that the entire bandwidth is used to transfer the file for substantially faster data uploads.
• Checkpoint restarting: Unlike standard resuming of a file transfer – checkpoint restarting verifies that the partially uploaded file is identical to the partial file at origin and will only resume the transfer if no errors are found. Again, no more corrupted files.
• Auditing and reporting: Every upload is tracked including details on checksum results and file transfer performance. This means no more “lost files,” less time is wasted, and if compliance requirements apply, the necessary audit trails are available.

Better connectivity for employees on the go is just one half of the answer to better file transfers; the other half is the software solution used to initiate those file transfers. Fortra’s accelerated file transfer solution, FileCatalyst, is an ideal tool for “on the road” situations.

Read More: How a Remote Workforce Impacts Your Data Security

Road Warriors Get More File Transfer Power with FileCatalyst

“With a high-speed, accelerated file transfer solutions such as FileCatalyst, employees that often work from the road report dramatically faster upload speeds and greatly improved reliability then over standard cloud drive tools,” said Neil Williams, Senior Solutions Engineer, Fortra. Williams details what this UDP-based accelerated transfer software offers to benefit on-the-go employees needing to send big files back to the office:

• Enhanced security: Files are secured in transit and at rest with strong encryption standards and IP filters add additional layers of security.
• Guaranteed file delivery: Files are guaranteed to be delivered with checkpoint restart and MD5 checksum verification.
• Compression: Transfer time is further reduced with lossless compression techniques that leverage GZIP and/or LZMA algorithms.
• Quick file revisions: An incremental transfer feature allows users to send only the portions of a file that have changed thereby reducing transfer sizes by up to 90%.
• Ability to transfer growing files: Film crews and other employees can quickly transfer files even while they are still growing, being encoded, or have long pauses in their growth.
• Cloud storage integration: Popular public clouds storage, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, Swiftstack, and Wasabi can all be integrated with FileCatalyst.

Efficiently transferring large files from remote locations doesn’t need to be a frustrating or unreliable task. By combining faster, dedicated mobile connectivity options—such as premium Wi-Fi, bonded cellular modems, or portable satellite terminals—with a purpose-built accelerated file transfer solution like FileCatalyst, organizations can ensure that their road warriors can upload massive datasets quickly, securely, and with guaranteed delivery.

This approach eliminates the delays, errors, and manual oversight often associated with traditional cloud drive uploads, giving mobile teams the power and flexibility to work seamlessly from any location.