Cybersecurity Awareness

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.  The website StaySafeOnline.org encourages you to make cybersecurity a priority and provides some “top tips” on how you can protect your business. While some of these tips are seemingly common sense (for example, “Know who you’re dealing with online.”), other tips speak directly to the capabilities of the software that you choose:

This tip immediately made me think of our secure FTP server solution, Titan MFT Server. Titan MFT Server is a managed file transfer solution, which, along with many other features that address cybersecurity (such as highly granular security settings that can restrict IP access and help to prevent DoS and FXP attacks) also provides strong authentication options and the ability to force complex password rules.

Titan MFT Server supports a variety of user authentication options, including native Titan Authentication, Windows NT/SAM authentication (for Windows 2000 Servers), Windows Active Directory authentication, LDAP authentication, and ODBC authentication.

Titan also provides S/Key password encryption and the ability to force the user to create passwords that are strong, which helps to prevent brute force password cracking. When this feature is enabled, passwords must be at least eight characters long with no spaces and must contain:

• one or more Latin uppercase letters (A through Z)
• one or more Latin lowercase letters (a through z)
• one or more digits (zero through nine)
• one or more non-alpha characters, such as ! # $^& , -+=

To learn more about how you can protect your business from cyberthreat by using Titan MFT Server, contact our sales team at sales@SouthRiverTech.com.

Going Viral with Scalability

About 18 months ago, I joined Facebook. I befriended a handful of colleagues and then began using the Find Friends feature to see which adventurous souls from my high school had made the jump. To my surprise, there were only two. Over the months, friends would trickle in and I’d get an occasional friend request, then two, then three. The trickle quickly became a stream and now it’s a flood. Each friend has their own space, some info, and the inevitable portfolio of 20 year old photos that have been scanned in at 300dpi, 24-bit color, and uploaded to yield petabyte after petabyte of data.

The viral phenomenon of Facebook, and its ability to stay responsive, is a classic case study in scalability and architecture. To build such a system, you need to start with components that have the ability to scale and expand in capacity as the needs of the end users increase. One web server must become two, two database servers must replicate and become four, and disk after disk must accommodate the growing amount of information.

Social Networking aside, this same logic is critical in your organization. Your IT group has been given the task of deploying a new Managed File Transfer solution. Initially it will service one or two departments as a pilot. Over the coming months, just as more friends joined Facebook, so too will more departments be brought online with your new offering. Finally, you will reach a point where your entire organization is managing files and collaborating with a scalable, secure, and manageable solution.

To be successful, choose a Managed File Transfer vendor that not only provides an entry level solution capable of handling your pilot without breaking the bank, but also has the ability to scale exponentially with your organization. One server must seamlessly become two, then four, databases must replicate, and data storage must expand. With 64-bit architecture being standard issue today, this all must be done in a true 64-bit multithreaded environment because you may not need to handle a million users today, but it sure is nice to know that you could.

Yep, I Facebook, do you?