If an auditor showed up to your office tomorrow and wanted to examine your file transfer security policies and procedures for compliance, how confident are you that your organization would pass with flying colors? If there’s any doubt that your file exchange process can meet stringent compliance requirements, a secure managed file transfer solution could ease your mind. Compliance Audit of File...

As organizations and their trading partners become more and more integrated, it's critical that file transfers perform without delays or disruptions. For instance, a document containing a batch of transactions could traditionally be delivered within a window of several hours without causing any issues. But today, in the effort to make business processes as efficient as possible, that same document...

Keep Your Files Secure In the battle to secure information, it helps to know a little bit about how it can be compromised. Using FTP is one way to expose critical vulnerabilities and can allow credentials to be hacked. However, these holes in security can also be easily closed if you know how. How Hackers Discover Vulnerabilities Here's how hackers could access sensitive data sent via FTP. With...

What is FIPS 140-2? FIPS 140-2 is a standard with which cryptographic-based ( encryption ) security systems must comply when protecting sensitive data in U.S. government agencies and departments. This FIPS 140-2 standard also extends to other entities that may exchange sensitive data with the federal government, including defense contractors, state agencies, county, and city government. Why FIPS...

HIPAA, established in 1996, was signed into law to outline the appropriate ways to use and disclose patient health information. Read on to learn how to develop a HIPAA- and HITECH-compliant IT framework for your organization. Why Does HITECH Exist? HITECH laws were enacted to up the ante on healthcare organizations to meet HIPAA legal compliance for data security and privacy , which, of course...

HIPAA and HITECH regulations were designed and enacted to increase the security surrounding personal health information from those who should not have access to it. Next to finance, the healthcare industry is one of the most regulated industries around. While debates on the cost, structure, and delivery of healthcare continues, most people agree that keeping personal healthcare information out of...

Insurance companies are the experts at analyzing and managing risk. They identify, quantify , and set pricing based on the calculated costs of risk. Naturally, the higher the perceived risk, the higher the cost to mitigate the potential losses. Yet , here is the irony. While those in the insurance industry excel at evaluating risk management for their clients, they often neglect risk mitigation...

Many Americans have spent the last few days frantically searching for receipts and other documentation to finish their taxes before April 15th — only to realize they get a one-month reprieve this year. Despite that sigh of relief, there's no doubt that some of those people thought they knew exactly where to find what they needed, and were dismayed to discover that their confidence — and their data...

When you send someone a file using FTP, how do you know (and later prove) that it was successfully sent? Consider the Complexities It might be possible to save a screenshot as long as the process was simple and you can see all the commands on a single screen. But what if your commands start getting complex? And if you start sending quite a few files every day, how do you organize all these...

What is Secure FTP? SFTP vs. FTPS: Secure FTP Authentication SFTP vs. FTPS: Secure FTP Implementation SFTP vs. FTPS: Speed SFTP vs. FTPS: Security Watch a Demo An increasing number of organizations are looking to move away from transferring data with FTP (a standard file transfer protocol). In the beginning stages of research, questions often arise around which secure transfer protocols are...

Cloud computing is not for everything and not for everyone, but it has made a permanent mark in the lexicon of technology services. And there is a lot of hype around cloud computing and what it can do for organizations. To be fair, it is a very powerful tool. But it’s important to work out how you can use it most effectively and securely. The best way to start is by uncovering what cloud computing...

A Data Breach is Closer Than You Think As the percentage of data breaches increase, the risk of organizations losing your sensitive data also increases. No one wants to receive the news that some or all of their personally identifiable information (PII) was stolen. Sure, there are people who are victims of various phishing scams, but it's more likely that the information in your organization will...

Here at Fortra, we hear a lot of buzz about protecting both customer and company data, but it's alarming how many IT departments and enterprise users are still not protecting their data correctly. According to the Ponemon Institute , fewer than 50 percent of organizations have comprehensive encryption protection in place. Prevention vs. Remediation Data and network security should be the basis for...

Why is FTP an Outdated Protocol? FTP was designed as an easy mechanism for exchanging files between computers at a time when networks were new and information security was an immature science. In the 1970s, if you wanted to secure a server from unwanted access, you simply locked the computer room door. User access to data was controlled by the basic User ID and password scenario. At this time, the...