Easy and Secure File Transfer with AWS Transfer Family

Overview:

The file transfer service from multiple services plays a vital role in today’s information world. As more and more organizations are moving into the cloud, they will have many sub-systems with standard practices in place for safely transferring files.

SFTP stands for Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) and is one of the most popular ways to transfer files.

SFTP is popularly used by many to send files from one vendor to another, or different teams have been using SFTP to transfer files which is a standard in the industry.

AWS has developed a seamless file transfer service that is easy to use. Let us have a look into it.

Introduction to AWS Transfer File Service

Let us take a typical on-premises example. Suppose you have multiple SFTP servers, and people who want to upload or download some files will use different types of clients like WinSCP, FileZilla, etc, and they will be able to connect to this SFTP server and can upload and download the files. Now maintaining these SFTP servers becomes another challenge altogether. You need to have admins worry about its OS updates, security, also how to keep data highly available. And if the organization is big, there will be another level of challenges.

As a solution to the whole SFTP issue, AWS came up with a managed service called AWS Transfer for SFTP. Now collectively, it is called AWS Transfer Family because it supports all three protocols of SFTP, FTPS, and FTP. SFTP is preferable because it is pretty secure.

Top Benefits of using the AWS Transfer Service:

1. Data get stored in the S3 bucket or EFS, so it is reliable as multiple copies get maintained and secure
2. AWS Transfer Service has been completely managed, so there is no need to worry about managing any servers, updating the SFTP server’s operating system, or applying any patches.
3. Simple to use. Within a few clicks, this transfer service will be up and running
4. High availability
5. It is scalable
6. It is cost-effective

Architectural Flow Diagram

AWS Services Leveraged:

• Configure: Customer chooses protocols, and server endpoint, including specifying their domain, selecting an Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EFS file system, and configuring user authentication and access modes. Existing users and applications continue to use their SFTP, FTPS, or FTP client software with the customer’s new SFTP, FTPS, or FTP server in AWS, with no changes
• Amazon Route 53: Optional DNS routing so apps & users can continue to use existing hostnames and domains
• AWS Transfer for FTP: Only supported within the VPC and not over the public internet
• Amazon S3: Transferred files stored natively as objects
• Amazon EFS: Transferred files stored natively as an object

Top Features:

a) Time saved from managing SFTP servers

b) Automatically scales to meet your needs in real-time

c) Redundant across Availability zones in the region

d) Store data in Amazon S3 buckets for archiving, processing, or analyzing

e) Automate post-upload processing with Amazon S3 events

f) Control end-user access to resources by using IAM

g) Encrypt your data using server-side encryption using Amazon S3 or AWS KMS

Conclusion:

AWS Transfer Family Service makes uploading, downloading, and sharing easy and secure. AWS Transfer Family Service is a pay-as-you-go service and charges $0.30 per hour for all three protocols.

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If you have any queries about AWS Transfer Family, SFTP server, or any other file transfer options drop them in the comment section and I will get back to you quickly. Stay tuned for my next blog on a step-by-step guide for streamlining data in real-time.

FAQs

Q1: What is SFTP?

It is a protocol for securely transferring data over the internet based on Secure Shell (SSH). Security and authentication are supported through this protocol, which is widely used to exchange data between businesses in industries such as financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail, advertising, and more.

Q2: What is FTP?

FTP is an extension of File Transfer Protocol over SSL, which is an extension of FTP. Encryption is accomplished using Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL). In FTPS, both the control and data channels can be encrypted simultaneously or independently.

Q3: What are the benefits of using the AWS Transfer Family?

With AWS Transfer, you can easily manage file transfer infrastructure as it is a fully managed, highly available, and auto-scaling service. Also, your chosen protocols remain unchanged when uploading and downloading data from Amazon S3 buckets or Amazon EFS file systems.

Thank you for reading!

WRITTEN BY Vaishali Bhawsar

Vaishali is working as a Research Associate in CloudThat Technologies. She has good knowledge of Networking, Linux systems & C language, and currently working on various AWS projects along with, Terraform, Docker, and Ansible. She enjoys painting and cooking during her free time.