The Death of Scripted FTP
What is scripted FTP?
FTP is often used to automate media file transfers between systems or computers without people needing to be involved. Automation is especially helpful for regularly occurring transfers between business locations or with partners.
However, as a basic Internet protocol, standard FTP doesn’t include automation. In order to automate FTP, an IT professional must write a script to set-up unattended transfers. Thus, scripted FTP generally refers to FTP that has custom scripts written to enable automation.
In reality, automation is just one of the many reasons to write an FTP script, so ‘scripted FTP’ meaning just automated FTP is a bit of a misnomer. Most FTP systems operating in businesses today include numerous ad hoc scripts or software add-ons to enable basic business functions such as reliability mechanisms (check point restart), email notifications, storage management, and security.
Why is scripted FTP dying out?
Scripted FTP is expensive in terms of the IT resources needed to create, manage, update and scale the system. FTP is also notoriously insecure and vulnerable to cyber attacks. And, even though FTP has been in use for years to do large file transfers, it struggles moving today’s increasingly large media files and cannot take advantage of higher bandwidth networks.
FTP is slow, even for relatively short distance transfers. Add some distance, and FTP slows way down. Anyone who’s tried to move an hour of HD content to another city over FTP knows that pain.
For these reasons, scripted FTP is in rapid decline in companies that regularly send and share large media files in favor of far superior technology, such as Signiant Jet.
Jet is Signiant’s SaaS solution for automated system-to-system transfers. It was developed specifically for small to medium-sized media companies (and other data-intensive industries) with multiple locations or that regularly exchange files with partners, customers and suppliers.
Intelligent acceleration technology
Jet includes Signiant’s unique advanced acceleration technology, a combination of our proprietary UDP-based acceleration and new patent-pending machine learning transport that adjusts to network conditions to achieve the fastest possible performance. Additionally, as a cloud-native SaaS solution, Jet is easy to deploy, use and manage, and scales the workflow and budget of every size company.
If your company needs a better way to automated media file transfers than scripted FTP, take some time to learn about Signiant Jet.
“FTP physically pains me, now that I’m used to Signiant. If we have to pull an episode off a client’s FTP, it takes at least a day or two of just waiting to get the footage.” ~ Dylan Yastremski, Founder of Allegiance Studios
