Teksouth Unveils New Secure File Transfer Technology

The Birmingham, Ala.-based company unveiled IQ Swift, which was originally designed to let the U.S. Air Force move files quickly and securely from Guam to Utah, said David Reeves, director of marketing.

IQ Swift fills a void in the market currently served by unmanaged file transfer tools, or by using FTP-based tools that do not offer security and can require the entire transfer process be restarted if there is a problem, Reeves said.

Other problems with FTP include the common tendency to tie FTP tools to a particular application, and to require writing of scripts, he said.

IQ Swift offers a centralized management system that allows users to transfer files without learning new tools and allows system administrators to propagate rules across a company, Reeves said. It operating system-agnostic, and runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

The software sends data across commodity IP networks in encrypted packets asynchronously so that if a router or switch goes down, the send process can restart, Reeves said. It knows when a problem occurs and from where to restart automatically, he said. For compliance purposes, customers also get an audit trail of when a file was sent, who sent it and who had access to it.

Teksouth plans to go to market almost exclusively through the channel, and is currently looking to recruit solution providers in the healthcare, oil/gas and manufacturing verticals, Reeves said. Eventually, he said, the company plans to take the solution to other verticals as well.

Randy Premont, president of SpaceCycles.Net, a Houston-based solution provider that has been helping Teksouth develop the software, said that IQ Swift is already a good solution for such verticals as the medical market because it can be used as part of a compliance solution.

"If you can't prove that data is protected, and prove who transported it, and when, and where it is stored now, you are not HIPAA-compliant," Premont said. "IQ Swift is HIPAA-compliant. From the start, I told them they need to be."

As an example of a possible medical application of IQ Swift, Premont said to look at radiology files in the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format, which can be 300 Mbytes per file. "They all need to be protected," he said. "But you can't do it using standard FTP. The files are too large, so transfers often fail, even over broadband."