Your business tools are an investment. As technology advances, previously reliable tools such as FTP are rapidly aging, creating more cost than benefit and becoming increasingly obsolete. If you've had trouble with any of the FTP issues we've listed below, check out our FTP Replacement Software features.
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Costly Hardware and Maintenance: Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of FTP is the illusion that it's free. In fact, costs related to FTP can often amount to much more than you'd pay for a premium file sharing tool, despite FTP clients being free to download. Worse yet, these costs are often hidden from view and usually don't get included in budgets. Expensive FTP servers, managed colocation and hardware maintenance costs are among the biggest offenders.
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Sacrificing Quality for Size: If you find yourself trying to break down huge drawings or other documents to reduce file size or otherwise squishing and squeezing your files into manageable pieces that won't choke your FTP, it's time to replace it altogether. You've worked too hard on every document you send, don't sacrifice the high quality you've produced just because it happens to be a a sizable file.
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Clumsy Collaboration:Missed deadlines, overwritten files, poor version control and communication breakdowns are all hallmarks of an inadequate program being clumsily employed as a collaboration tool. Countless hours have been devoured by missteps related to the shortcomings of FTP in this manner.
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Inconsistent Accountability: For document-intensive projects involving multiple team members, coordination is key. We've all heard the expression 'too many chefs will spoil the soup'. But in today's business realm, it's important to pinpoint who spoiled it and how it was spoiled. Holding a single individual accountable for problems discovered on a multi-user FTP site is nearly impossible.
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Poor Security & Privacy: All company assets are valuable and well worth protecting. It seems prudent that all of these assets, including digital documents and sensitive files would be well protected regulated. However, the vast majority of businesses still use FTP (low security & no privacy) to send, share and manage these assets. As a result, these companies pay a huge price in the long run, sacrificing security and privacy for the illusory draw of 'free' FTP.
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Tremendous Time Sink: While FTP may seem 'free' on the surface, one of the many hidden costs that saps away at the bottom line comes in the form of wasted man-hours. Time is typically drained through fumbling with folders on the server, setting up or managing permissions, searching for documents and waiting for other team members to advise or update status on a given document. Worse still is an exponentially greater number of hours wasted on fixing setbacks derived from other FTP flaws, such as those listed above.
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