Globalscape EFT Reviews

We use the EFT application for file transmission, and we also use Workspaces, which is within the same EFT environment. We use an unlimited license. On my side, I'm just administering it. 

We did a lot of architectural design work over the last couple of years in making it more secure. We have two DMZ servers for Globalscape that are passing the data or doing the file transmissions in a secure manner. We also have two EFT nodes for replication so that in case the primary node goes down, we have a secondary node that would pick it up.

We use Workspaces quite often, and we have got rave reviews for that. We have outside consultants. We have legal teams from the outside, and they need to send files securely. Workspaces has been an awesome tool for that.

It secures sensitive data inside our internal network so that only verified users have access. This is very important for us.

It allows us to use automated scripts. It is very important because as IT staff, we do function automation and data integration. It takes the burden away from business and IT support from having to manually do that. So, everything is pretty streamlined, but I don't know exactly how much time it saves. It depends on the user intervention required to do something. We manage 45 to 50 files a day, and for somebody to manually move these files, maybe by using Ipswitch or something like that, it could take about five minutes. It probably saves about four to five hours a day.

It connects to popular ICAP servers to perform antivirus and data loss prevention functions. We use Carbon Black for our servers, and it has been good for our security posture. Its connection to the servers helps in inspecting content for sensitive information. This is very important for us.

The Event Rules functionality is a key feature. It is very simple to understand and work with. If you have a support team that doesn't know anything about coding, they can really relate to the way event rules are designed. So, I try to make them as simplistic as possible when we create file transmissions. When I first started working in Globalscape, a lot of the file transmissions were handled through Advanced Workflow, which is a similar product. We had a lot of scripts in Advanced Workflow. I moved them to Event Viewer in Globalscape because of the simplicity of building scripts and understanding how they work. It literally takes 5 to 10 minutes to set one up, but if you're in an advanced workflow, it could take an hour to two hours to understand via code what it is actually doing. It has definitely been a plus.

I do like keyring for PGP and SSH. I've used other products where I had to have that outside of the application. It is a lot more centralized by having keyring within the application. If necessary, it is easy to export those keys out.

Its centralized platform for the management of file transfer operations is very good and important. The graphical user interface of the application is very good.

The folder monitoring services need improvement. Currently, with the folder monitoring services in Globalscape, if any changes are made to our firewalls, network, or something else that affects the directory services where the files are located, for some reason, the folder monitoring services get cut out, and the files are left there. They remain in the folder without being sent. I have over 50 file transmission processes that I would have to go to manually re-drop a file into the folder so that it processes the file transmission. There are times where even though I re-drop a file, it still doesn't work. In that case, I have to resynchronize the folder monitoring process, and it is a very big headache on my side that I have to deal with. It is not only related to Globalscape or their development team. It is on our side too. I just sent a support case where we found out yesterday that we had a file transmission that hasn't run in a whole year, and it was an important one. No one on the business side or the IT support side, as well as the vendor, had indicated that the file wasn't received or the data hadn't been updated. I found out that it was the folder monitoring service that was the problem when I initially had the problem last October, and this was the file that I just missed. So, I re-dropped the file in yesterday, and the monitor worked. It runs every week, so we sent a file to that folder, and it processed that out. 

There are a couple of things I'd like to do in the future. One would be that instead of getting emails sent to IT support when a file is successful, it should somehow trigger something if the folder monitoring service isn't working. There should be a way that we can get notified or I can get notified when a particular file hasn't been processed in a while. If a file is sitting there for more than 24 hours, they should have something to send me an indication that there is something wrong. The folder monitoring service should also be able to re-sync if there is an issue with our directory services. There was some kind of network change that caused the monitoring algorithms to not work for some reason.

I like the ability to connect to vendors and do some testing, but at times, I have to use FileZilla or WinSCP to actually make sure that the files got there. I know they have another product called CuteFTP, but it needs to be integrated into the EFT application. If I send a test file out there and I want to know that it actually got there, I can look at the logs for sure, but if I want to physically see that the file actually got sent there, it would be neat to just click on something that takes me right to the file. I know they are trying to make some money, and they have another product to do that, but it would be neat if it was in the application.

The reporting in Globalscape is just okay. It isn't great. Sometimes, I'd like to see more graphical reports. If I do a query on a particular file transmission over a course of six months, I basically get logs or records of data. If the data is put into a graphical or visual presentation to show what it looks like and how many times it ran, it would be nice.

I'm looking at getting a dashboard application that sits on top of Globalscape so that we can visually see all transmissions in a centralized way. An admin person can go in once a day and see this graphical dashboard that just shows which files have been successfully transferred and which ones failed. Right now, we're just sending email notifications out to the support team, and they're barraged with hundreds of emails all the time. They may not see that there was an issue with one of the files. Only when they tell me, I go in and look over the report or the logs to find out the problem. I am not sure if HelpSystems has a product like this, but if such a product was integrated within EFT, it would be awesome. 

Aqua has been using this application for about seven or eight years. So, there has been a good footprint here for using the application. I've been here only for two years, but because of all the stuff that was going on with COVID, I feel like it has been less than that. I'm still learning Globalscape to a point, but I have a good knowledge base on what the product is. I have many years of experience in IT applications.

The stability of the application is very good. We've had a couple of instances where we had a little bit of slowness, but the only big issue that I have at times is with the folder monitoring services. It could be because of our network team, but Globalscape should have a fail-safe or a notification. For example, the folder monitoring application should sense that a file is sitting in the folder for more than 10 minutes, and then an email should be sent out to inform that the file hasn't been released, and there could possibly be a folder monitoring problem. If I have to deal with 50 file transmissions along with all the meetings that I have to attend every day, having the transmission go one by one and making those changes to just get it to work is a pain.

We can definitely scale it. One of the things that I like about Globalscape is that it has the ability to scale. If we need to add on architecturally, we have the ability.

It is utilized every day 24/7, and I use it pretty much every day. Initially, when we were having a problem with the folder monitoring services, I thought that we probably were extending the folder monitoring services too much or maybe we had too many file transmissions. They did say that we were getting to a point, and they had me do a registry edit in the operating system. Since I did that, I haven't really experienced many problems with adding more file transmissions for the folder monitoring services. There are probably other companies that use it way more than I do. I'm talking about only 50 file transmissions a day. I've heard them say that they've had companies that have 300 to 1,000 file transmissions going on in a day, and their environment is a little more complex than ours.

For its maintenance, right now, it is just me. I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but I manage the application pretty much on my own. If anybody has any problems with their shares or registering them, I am helping them. We have a security rule that says that if you haven't logged in, your account will be disabled after 60 days. Sometimes, I get emails saying, "Can you re-enable my account?" That's the kind of work that I've been doing on Workspaces. They are just administrative types of tasks. On the EFT side, on file transmissions, I'm setting file transmissions up through Event Rules. We don't use Advanced Workflow that often, but we do have a couple of Advanced Workflow rules.

At times, I feel it is great, and at other times, I feel that it is not so great. I would rate them a seven out of 10. 

When I first started, their call center would have somebody who was knowledgeable and would answer my question within a matter of minutes, but because they moved to HelpSystems, they structurally changed some of the things around. Now, when I call HelpSystems, I'm in a queue, and they'll say, "All right, we got your info." I can submit a case online, but nobody is going to help me until somebody calls me back or emails me. I'm not really happy with that. I don't think it was relayed or communicated to me that this would happen, and because of that, they may go back and revert to what they had, but that's what I experienced over the last year and a half.

I've used other products in the past. When I got on board at Aqua, they'd been using Globalscape for a long period of time. They definitely decommissioned everything that they had prior to implementing Globalscape.

We also have Automate, which is now bought by HelpSystems. We got Automate from the merger of Peoples Gas. Aqua and Peoples Gas merged into one company called Essential Utilities. I support not only Globalscape but also Automate. I just started to learn Automate, and it is pretty much Advanced Workflow. When comparing these two solutions, I like Globalscape over Automate, but I know Automate has similar features as Globalscape. As I understand, Automate has a dashboard integrated in there. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, and we still haven't made a decision about whether or not we're going to fully transition to Automate or Globalscape. That decision is probably going to be made in the next one to two years.

I would think its ROI is good.

It is a very good product in terms of purchase. It didn't cost that much, even with the way we had scaled and architecturally put things in place. It is definitely comparable to other products.

Looking at the product and being trained on it, I find Globalscape to be a great file transmission application. I have been here only for two years, and we've upgraded the application only one time. A lot of the security has been improved, but the general functionality is pretty much the same.

In our company, we have different types of operating systems. We have Linux, and we have Windows. We don't seem to have Macs here. The majority of our application servers are on Windows, so it is very important for us that Globalscape is designed specifically for Windows, but we do have some application servers that are on Linux.

It provides advanced controls, alerting, and reporting for security and compliance to a certain extent. Reporting is more in terms of when files are getting sent back and forth, and it could be better. In Event Rules in Globalscape, you can set conditional statements for encryptions not working and other things for security and compliance.

It hasn't enabled us to reassign resources who were writing custom file transfer scripts or compiling file transfer audit reports to other tasks because that's not applicable to what we do. We don't have anybody creating custom scripts outside of what we do in Globalscape.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

I work for a local government, which is a pretty big organization as there are a lot of cities within the county. We do the file transfers for the county. It started off with SFTP only and then we managed to integrate our internal file transfers and everything else. From there, it has grown a lot more. We had one site originally, and now we're up to seven FTP sites.

We mostly use the software to interact with the outside world. Anything that comes in or goes out of our organization goes through our servers. Internally, because we have a lot of different systems, including mainframe, AIX, et cetera, and some systems don't speak to each other. For example, the mainframe doesn't have SFTP capabilities to communicate with AIX. We are the system in the middle that is involved in those transactions. For example, the mainframe will push out a file to us and then we will use or create a Globalscape script to push out that file to whichever server or file share it needs to go to.

The solution helps us a lot. If we didn't have it, and instead had a plain FTP solution, that would require a lot of other people to do extra tasks, including programming, to get files from point A to point B in a certain way. It results in huge time savings for our organization because a lot of the work is done by Globalscape, making it seamless to everybody else. If we didn't have the software, it would definitely require a lot of programmers to do a lot of work to create programs to get things done. Having a programmer write a program takes a long time. With Globalscape, all of that is managed in the background.

It also automates the submission of regulatory documentation. We have dozens of jobs that send out information on a weekly and monthly basis. It definitely makes it easy to send that data out to the people who require it at a specific time. It's really a set-it-and-forget-it, which is great. You set up a timed event or an ad hoc event that depends on when a file is uploaded. We set up a schedule and that was it. We don't have to tinker with it unless there's a change in a remote server or a server path.

It has reduced our workload. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the quantity of data transfers has increased enormously mostly because we had to shift from in-office, paper delivery to an almost 100 percent online presence. Initially, there was a lot of work creating accounts and setting up a lot of new processes, but thankfully the software allowed us to do that. And it has been robust enough to handle the amount of data that we have needed to transfer on a daily basis. It does save us a lot of time.

Globalscape has a lot of good features. It's pretty easy to manage, once you understand the product and how it works.

The ability to map users to a virtual folder is excellent because server storage space is expensive compared to NAS or other types of storage solutions. Being able to map a user's home folder to a network location that is not in the home folder is a major advantage. There is a lot of data that we are not able to store on our servers because our servers are only transitory. The files do get deleted, as part of our rules, because otherwise we would run out of space.

The other thing is that the Advanced Workflow Engine it comes with is brilliant because it allows us to create scripts and perform behind-the-scenes jobs that would otherwise require a third-party solution. For example, somebody wanted a list of the emails of users who work for our organization. Using that tool, we were able to grab the information from Active Directory, process it, create a ZIP file, and then push it out to the person who needed it. That type of function generally does not exist in a plain FTP solution. You would have to create a special code on the outside to get all that other stuff done in the background. With Globalscape, we can get all of that done in one package.

In addition, the reporting is excellent. They keep on augmenting the software with more features for security and compliance when it comes to integration with third-party products, of course, but it also has the ability to scan files for viruses as they come in and go out, which is a great feature.

Globalscape also secures sensitive data inside our network so that only verified users have access. Whenever somebody asks for an account, we always find out what the data is for. Based on that, it's either stored locally on our servers or in a secure network location that is behind firewalls. Unless you have access, there's no way you can get access to those files. Because we are a local government, we also have to deal with police files and Corrections Department data. And of course, a lot of employee data goes through our servers, including Social Security numbers. That's very sensitive information and we make sure that data is delivered securely or kept in a secure location. Having the data secured inside our network is definitely important to us. That is why we host it internally. Although we're migrating stuff to the cloud, having this set up locally allows us to maintain security compliance.

Our security office is satisfied with the work that we do and the capabilities that we have for ensuring that all the data that gets transferred to us is clean. We cannot afford to have a virus come in and hit us randomly over the network.

Another nice feature is the centralized platform for the management of file transfer operations. It's very simple to use and everything is in one place. As long as you know what you're doing, it's pretty straightforward. Creating user accounts, virtual folders, and jobs are all very straightforward.

There is only one thing that they need to figure out, as of my last conversation with their engineers. There are two ways to install Globalscape: as a standalone server or as a high-availability server, either Active-Active or Active-Standby. We are currently using standalone servers. That means if we want to upgrade the software, I shut down one of the two back-end servers, upgrade the software, make sure everything is correct, and then turn traffic back on to that one. I then proceed to upgrade the second server. With their high-availability solution, that is not a possibility. Both servers have to be shut down to perform the upgrade. We're a 24/7 shop. We don't have a window where we can have downtime. If we have to shut down both servers, that shuts down FTP, period, and we're down. We cannot be down, at all.

Our solution is to have two primary active nodes and two nodes in standby. Our upgrade path is going to be going from two standalone to two high-availability servers, with two additional servers on the back end just sitting there doing nothing, so when the time comes that we have to upgrade, we will be able to shut down the main high-availability cluster, perform the upgrade, and then switch back. That's a pain. And that's the only thing that could be improved, because once we set up the high-availability version, it's going to be a little more tedious to do a software upgrade.

As time goes on, it's very important to keep the software as up-to-date as possible because there are enhancements for security protocols that they've included. The lack of ability to upgrade would be a showstopper for us if we were running in the minimal high-availability mode.

Having high availability is also important because it's cheaper for licenses and it's easier to manage those servers, versus two standalone servers. But that makes our upgrade path the only downside.

As an organization, we've been using Globalscape Managed File Transfer for longer than I've been managing it, and I've been managing it for over five years. 

It's very stable. We rarely have any issues with the software. We've had minor bumps only when performing upgrades. And those weren't the fault of Globalscape. They were the result of poor programming on our end. 

It's pretty self-sufficient and there isn't much we need to do to it, and that saves us a lot of time. We don't have to go in there every day and make sure everything is running or run reports to see if there are any jobs that have failed. That rarely happens.

We could scale it a lot more than we have. It is easy to add more servers. If our load were to increase, it would be pretty simple to add an additional server to the environment and have it handle the additional traffic. Scaling it is probably one of the easiest things to do. You just spin up another server, install the software, and have everything synchronized and you're up and running.

We have just about all of the modules that Globalscape offers and have used all of their features to their full potential.

We don't have any bottlenecks currently. If that did become an issue, we could easily add an additional server and be done.

Their technical support has been great. I've contacted them during business hours as well as after business hours when we have had a problem after-hours. They have been able to resolve the problems very quickly, for the most part.

Sometimes, there are problems that level-one support is not able to resolve and they will move it up quickly to the next level, without us having to wait for a long time. I can't complain about the support that they've provided to us.

There is a learning curve when it comes to using Globalscape Managed File Transfer, but when we have run into issues, their support team has been great in getting us the answers that we need. When we get a strange request that we are not sure how to do, they're able to fill in the gaps. They have all that knowledge and have worked with other companies that have had those issues before.

We had people logging in using a domain/username, but Globalscape doesn't require that. We had an issue with that and I contacted their support. They looked at the issue and they were able to provide a fix for it immediately.

Positive

I wasn't here for the initial setup of the solution, but I was here when we went from one server on one box to having two load-balanced servers. I did all that migration, moving that SFTP server to the new environment and collapsing our internal FTP.

Moving the first server, the SFTP, was easy, because it was a matter of moving one backup configuration and restoring it on a new box. We did hire them for consulting on the setup to make sure that we were able to do high-availability. 

Collapsing our internal FTP was interesting because that was running on Microsoft FTP. It was a "landfill." People dropped files and forgot that they were there and cleaning up that mess was a little bit of work, but that was just because of the way it was set up. I was able to manage the migration of all of that stuff over to the Globalscape infrastructure. Cleaning the data and making sure we kept the accounts we needed to keep was a task we had to do. Once we had it all set up, we were able to set up the site for our internal FTP, which is now both internal and external, and move everything over to the new server. It took a little while to clean up, but on the Globalscape side it was pretty straightforward.

As far as maintaining the solution goes, we currently have two people involved.

Globalscape is not cheap, but you get what you pay for. The cost is worth the value of the product. What you're getting is a good, stable solution that does a lot. We don't run the basic version, we run the full enterprise version of the software that has all the bells and whistles. It has all the features that we need and the pricing is fair, given what offers. I think it's a pretty good deal.

We could go with something cheaper, but then we might not get all the updates that we need or all the additional stuff that they're constantly innovating into the product. That's a lot of value added. The analogy would be if Windows stayed with Windows NT, for instance. That would not be good. Windows keeps on moving, progressing, and making things better, and so does Globalscape. Globalscape looks at what customers need and, based on that, they keep on adding features and functions that are useful and that make our jobs a lot easier and provide a lot more automation.

I believe our organization did evaluate other options. I think they chose Globalscape because of the automated features it has available. A lot of the other solutions are just plain FTP servers. Back then, they didn't do a lot of automation. A lot of them are now trying to add those features because they see them as necessary for a lot of businesses. Back then, Globalscape was one of the very few companies that had that type of integration.

On my own, I've demoed a few of them and they're not as straightforward as Globalscape. Of course, I'm used to Globalscape, but they don't have a lot of the bells and whistles that Globalscape has.

It's not that important that it's designed for Windows because we work with different systems. But it is nice that it is designed for Windows because it's easier to manage than using the command line or relying on different versions of Linux. Windows is a more standardized platform and we know it will operate in a certain fashion. With other OSs, it would be a lot more expensive or a lot more challenging. With Linux, there are so many variants out there that it's impossible to say they're all standard. It might work perfectly on one but not work on another one. Having Globalscape on Windows is great because it's used everywhere and easily manageable. It's a good pairing.

If it weren't for Globalscape's automations, it would be a lot more difficult to use. It has been a blessing to have those features available to us to make our jobs a lot easier.

It is easy to set up, stable, and secure. They have good customer support.

Previously, we had multiple tools for file transfer. With GlobalSCAPE, we can meet all the business requirements. It has multiple options like folder monitoring and scheduled jobs that make it a real time file transfer solution.

It is great tool. GlobalSCAPE needs to provide training or seminars to show its capability to customers.

We have not had any stability problems until now. It is very stable.

We had no issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10. They are very knowledgeable.

We have used many solutions, mostly scripts, which are hard to edit and debug.

The setup was very straightforward. Setting up basic file transfers is very easy. Customizing advanced workflows is complex and requires more experience.

They offer fair pricing with all the capabilities.

We did look at alternatives, but I cannot name them.

It is wonderful application which can take care of your file transfer load. There is no need to monitor it daily. It is very stable.