The ever-present threat of cybercrime is expected to come with an eye-watering price tag of $10.5 trillion in 2025 for enterprises.
This isn’t for want of trying from organizations, leaders and CTOs. Cyber defense strategies are a priority, however the target surface area that needs protection is constantly growing and changing. It’s especially difficult to secure the perimeters when cloud and off-prem technologies are involved.
Further, new research shows that these sprawling infrastructures can be breached without detection. In fact, the average breach takes 212 days to detect and another 75 to contain.
It goes without saying that these types of delays pose a grave security risk, with almost a year of free reign to sensitive data and ample time to infect computers, servers and networks. For banks and companies in the financial sector, they remain a prime target for cybercriminals due to the goldmine of valuable data and confidential information they interact with.
It’s also a growing challenge for the financial sector where customers and partners expect immediate, real-time services. Keeping pace with innovation makes the task of protecting company defenses an ever-moving target.
This weakness is being exploited by cybercrime syndicates. In Europe, 78% of the 240 biggest banks got hacked in the past calendar year alone. In Australia, the breach of a financial services provider this past year exposed the IDs and passport numbers of 8 million people. In India, where cybercriminals run rampant, banking data breaches are up 50% since 2023.
What’s more, securing the perimeter is just part of the challenge. Organizations also need to interact with partners, suppliers and customers to deliver their services and keep operations running. However, these cybercriminals look to intercept these messages and file transfers.
Here, managed file transfer (MFT) systems help to move data safely and securely between organizations. The increasing demand for secure and efficient data-sharing solutions means the MFT market is set to reach $5.4 billion by 2033.
Yet the rapidly evolving digital landscape presents both changing threats and new opportunities. Here’s how MFTs are among the technologies that are supporting cloud interactions while keeping data secure.
MFTs keep data flowing
The ongoing shift to digital means that data is an intangible asset and business resource. Organizations rely on this data to run their operations, and part of this involves keeping data in motion.
MFTs brings reliable, automated governance to the movement of files inside and outside the business and can accelerate big data movements around the globe.
“Imagine a financial services company that needs to securely exchange transaction data with partner banks, update customer records across cloud-based CRM systems, and report real-time trading activity to regulatory bodies,” said Oded Nahum, Global Head of Cloud Practice at Ness Digital Engineering, which provides solutions in this space.
“In such an environment, uninterrupted, secure, and accurate data flow is not just important, but it’s mission critical,” the executive continued.
MFT is a more reliable and efficient means for secure data and file transfer, outpacing and outperforming applications such as file transfer protocol (FTP), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) and other methods.
Intelligent data infrastructure
While MFTs offer a more secure option for file transfers, Nahum is keen to point out that the journey doesn’t end there. MFTs are just part of the picture, and their benefits begin to multiply when combined with cloud solutions.
Here, Nahum believes that a cloud-native MFT foundation isn’t just a better way to transfer files, but also is a launchpad for an innovative new way of managing data movement across the business.
“The shift from on-premises MFT to cloud-native platforms solves a critical set of challenges: reducing operational burden, ensuring compliance, improving resilience, and speeding up onboarding. But cloud-native MFT also opens the door to a broader set of capabilities that address how businesses want to use data—not just move it,” he explains.
“By adding smart triggers, APIs, and cloud tools to file transfers, we can make data flow faster and more intelligently. In this new setup, when a file arrives on a server, that’s not the end—it kicks off an automated process that cleans up the data, adds useful information, and sends it exactly where it needs to go, right when it’s needed.”
Using serverless technology
Cloud-native MFT platforms designed on secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud architectures offer all the benefits of traditional MFT and are enhanced by the agility, automation, and efficiency that today’s businesses require.
Organizations spend billions on data analytic initiatives that aim to unlock the value held up in company data. Yet the benefits of building an intelligent information exchange system with MFTs as the backbone are often overlooked in favor of other innovations.
Here, Nahum highlighted the game-changing benefits of leveraging AWS serverless technologies.
“A solution built on this foundation ensures secure file transfers, high availability, robust policy enforcement, and deep observability without the burden of managing legacy infrastructure,” he explained.
“We can layer in services like EventBridge to trigger workflows, Lambda to process data serverlessly, API Gateway to expose and consume data programmatically, and Glue or Redshift to transform and analyze data. Together, these extend MFT from a secure file transfer system into a broader platform for automated, intelligent, and policy-driven data exchange.”
The strategic importance of MFTs
MFTs might not be the newest digital innovation on the block, but the benefits they offer are significant.
“Cloud-native MFT is not just an endpoint solution but a strategic capability. And its full value is unlocked when treated as part of a broader data exchange strategy,” Nahum confirms.
This evolution doesn’t require a rip-and-replace. It’s an additive, intentional strategy that builds on the cloud-native foundations already in place—turning operational efficiency into business agility.
By extending what you already have, you can break down silos, enable faster decision-making, reduce integration friction, and create a more responsive, data-driven organization.
