SolarWinds Serv-U Secure FTP & MFT Alternative
SolarWinds Serv-U has been a ‘go to’ when it comes to a reliable FTP and Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution. It encompasses sharing, automated file management and support for large file transfers. Depending on your requirements the solution’s licensing can become expensive and that is without accounting for hosting costs, management and the time that goes into managing such a solution. Additionally, Serv-U can be overkill and have too many features when it comes to requiring an SFTP or MFT solution.
When looking at alternatives there are a lot of solutions in the market, most are still built in a similar manner and require you to host and manage the hardware as well as the software. A modern solution to consider is Couchdrop. Couchdrop offers a fully functional Cloud SFTP and MFT solution in a single pane that is fully managed and hosted.
Couchdrop MFT provides multiple methods to access and interact with data such as; SFTP, FTP/S, S3, API, Web Upload Portal. A highly valuable feature that Couchdrop MFT offers is your ability to bring your own storage. This enables you to mount your array of cloud storage solutions; SharePoint, S3, Dropbox, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage and anything in between. Couchdrop MFT acts as a conduit and will push data to your cloud backend in real-time which means it does not store or sync your data. Having data in your own storage removes vendor lock-in and also provides you with the ability to have full visibility and control of your data at rest.
Couchdrop MFT offers a file automation and workflow component. This enables you based on certain conditions (upload, download, directory, user, filename, etc.) to perform automatic actions on files. These actions range from duplicating the file to another backend storage, renaming the file, compressing and encrypting with PGP. See our other post on routing files to different directories or storage platforms automatically.
Due to Couchdrop MFT’s architecture, it is scalable and offers enterprise-grade security out of the box. All data uploaded/downloaded from the platform is encrypted using HTTPS or SSH (unless you opt to use plain FTP). Unless you choose Couchdrop’s hosted storage (which is encrypted with AES256), you have full control of your data at rest and can add security functionality to protect your data from encryption, anti-virus and you can choose your own backup and retention policies. Within the product Couchdrop MFT offers the ability to lock down users to directories and specific file operations, as well as 2FA, disable insecure protocols and IP whitelisting.
Couchdrop MFT is global in nature and has public points of presence across the world. However, it can provide fully redundant private instances in any region in the world for its customers to meet further compliance and security requirements.
Finally, Couchdrop offers detailed audit logs based on file operations and login in events. Within the audit logs detail, you can find checksums, file size, IP addresses, etc. Often the logging here is used in addition to cloud storage and provides traceability and full reporting on file transfers and operations.
To find out more or to start with a free 14-day trial (no credit card or provisioning required) go to https://couchdrop.io
