The primary differences between FTP/SFTP and shayre are ease of use and enhanced security with minimal impact on network management. The ease of use is accomplished by providing a mechanism to auto resume transport after interrupted connectivity and simplicity of installation and configuration. Since shayre can be run from behind corporate firewalls, security is enhanced by reducing the attack surface and by only communicating using secure protocols. Due to the fact that shayre will negotiate the network exchange, there is minimal to no requirements for network administrators to fulfill. Administration resources are far less with shayre than with FTP. Additionally, since shayre utilizes TCP connections, if the network administrators want to provide throttling they can perform this task far more easily than protocols that use UDP.

Traditional FTP

One endpoint will need a server installed in the DMZ of the network and a static IP address configured for this machine

The firewall will need to permit FTP traffic in and out on this machine

Usernames and passwords are transported in plain text, which can be intercepted in transit

Transfer is slow

Transfer is unreliable, often requiring restarts and do overs

Administration requires IT resources

Lack of visibility and notifications, requiring IT resources to parse through records of data transfer activity

Intimidating, archaic end-user interface

Automation is not standard and requires customized scripts to accomplish automated transfers

Difficult to update and scale

SFTP

Same as traditional FTP except all data is encrypted for both authentication and data transmission

Security is not standard and requires customized scripts or security software

Based off of SSH which usually indicates a level of shell access to the machine, a common attack vector for various networks