eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
19 Reasons Video File Transfers Can Be Nightmares
2Your Company Struggles With 40-Plus-Year-Old FTP Technology
The original protocol still used to transfer files across most enterprises today was written in the 1970s when everyday people didn’t use computers, so there was no user-experience design built in. While FTP has been updated over the years to include new features and functions, it’s still legacy technology that is difficult to use and requires a lot of IT maintenance and management.
3Your File Transfer Was Interrupted Due to a Lost Connection
4Victim of a Cyber-Villain: Your Valuable Video Asset Was Stolen
5Uncertainty of FTP: Did My File Make It?
6You Miss an Important Deadline Due to Slow File Transfer
If you work in media in any capacity, you live by deadlines, whether you’re sending a video marketing file to your regional offices or delivering an asset to a client. If you miss a deadline, it may damage your reputation and frustrate your clients. And most media professionals want to spend all the time they have perfecting their work, not waiting for a file to transfer.
7You Broke the Bank on Bandwidth, but It Didn’t Help
It’s commonly assumed that purchasing more bandwidth will automatically make large files move faster without slowing the whole network. But if you’re still using FTP, more bandwidth will not help with large file transfers. FTP can only utilize a limited amount of bandwidth to begin with, while other large file transfer solutions will steal all the bandwidth and not play nicely with other network traffic.
8Burning the Midnight Oil: You Lose Sleep Waiting for an Important File
With FTP, you often have to babysit file transfers to make sure they go through without being interrupted, even if it’s in the middle of the night. And this makes it especially difficult to collaborate across time zones. With FTP, you can’t just send a file at the end of your workday to a colleague across the ocean and know that it will be ready when they arrive in the office.
9FTP Overload: You’ve Added Too Many Features to Your FTP
To upgrade basic FTP, many companies hire software designers to write custom scripts or purchase additional applications for things like email notifications, security, automation, visibility, and user and storage management. They end up with a heavy, clunky, pieced-together solution that is difficult to use and manage.
10Are You Still Using Courier Services to Ship Hard Drives?
If you can believe it, most companies today are still shipping hard drives to colleagues and clients for collaboration, which takes days and breaks an otherwise fully digital workflow. And to meet tighter timelines, they race to catch the “do or die” 7 p.m. overnight shipping deadline. Either way, it’s like sending your file into an abyss, and keeping your fingers crossed that it will get there in time and not get lost.