10 reasons to choose commercial secure file transfer (SFTP) over Open Source

First of all, don't get all riled up because of the blog title...

We actually love Open Source products like PuTTY - World's Most Popular Free SSH Client,or other free clients like WinSCP. otherwise we would not let you download them from our site.  

But we think there are many situations in which a top-tier commercial product cannot be beat.

When Open Source is right

No less of an authority, many people consider PuTTY one of the essential open source tools for Windows admins.

If you are a solo user or work in an environment where extremely low cost is very important, Open Source can be a great choice. The solution is free, and it works well. 'Nuff said.

When to choose a great commercial product

We're not going to mince our words here: our company, SSH.COM is the inventor of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, and our SSH Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) product Tectia Client/Server has been around the business block a few times.

There are several reasons why you should consider a commerical product likeTectia, especially if your SSH usage is mission-critical. Some key reasons include:

1. Tectia is a very fast SSH implementation. If you need to transfer large files routinely, Tectia is your only choice with up to 2X faster SFTP transfers than any open source solution
2. The product offers you a global 24/7 support for business continuity. If and when the IT hits the fan, our support is there for you. Help is just one phone call away.
3. Tectia is truly multi-platform with strong backwards compatibility. Cloudification is still a big buzzword, but IT is not all about cloud: a lot of the IT infrastructures in large enterprises still need to support a a farm of legacy IT servers for a long time to come.
   
   We cover the gamut of various flavors of Unix, Linux, Windows, macOS, and even IBM z/OS. If you need to unify your SSH architecture and protect you Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Tectia is the only game in town.
4. We offer quality assurance tested installation packages for all the supported operating systems. Save yourself the trouble of "seeing if it works". It does.
5. Compliance and regulations. 4/5 largest banks in the world use Tectia. A lot of the U.S government agencies as well. Some of the reasons might be that Tectia supports X.509 PKI authentication, uses FIPS 140-2 certified cryptography, and supports smartcards, including U.S. Federal Government Personal Identity Verification (PIV) and Common Access Cards (CAC).
6. With Tectia, you can easily automate secure processes for remote commands and file transfer, saving time and admin resources.
7. Out-of-the box single sign-on (SSO) via the very popular Kerberos authorization technology. 
8. Tectia's multi-threaded processes offer superior scalability for your environment. When your secure remote access needs change, Tectia will accommodate to your needs.
9. No extra steps (like staging) required when accessing IBM mainframe files. Tectia SSH Client supports direct IBM mainframe dataset and generation data group (GDG) access when used together with Tectia Server for IBM zOS.
10. We at SSH.COM are one of the world's premier experts in encrypted traffic. Choose the battle-tested solution from the originators of the SSH protocol.

For all the power it packs, Tectia is actually also surprisingly inexpensive. In most cases, the ROI (return on investment) of the solution is extremely good and the payback time can be as little as a few days.

You don't have to just take our word for the power of Tectia: you can download a completely free 45-day trial version of the client/server solution and see it in action for yourself.

Try Tectia. You want to.