Accellion Green EX
http://www.accellion.com/news/09-17-2008.html
If you work in a small office and have needs to transfer large (or small) files securely over the Internet, then you might find that this isn’t a problem that is easily solved – especially if the sensitive or private data is involved.
The problem:
John from Finance wants to send out critical financial data through email to an auditor off-site. No problem, you say…”we can zip that up with AES-256 bit encryption and a password.” However, you find out that the file is just a smidge over your accepted attachment threshold of 20Mb.
Solution(s):
You could do one of (but not limited to) the following:
- Set up a higher threshold for your local email user to allow the attachment to go through – however, you still might be limited on the other side by acceptable incoming sizes…Not to mention how much they will despise you for hanging their email client while the message is downloaded.
- Use a publicly available file transfer service and hope that there aren’t any nefarious hacker types that control that server and do what they will with your data (encrypted or no, I’m not willing to take the chance).
- Set up a secure file attachment server on your network that will house your files for you and remote users would log into the server to download – all the while, upload and download statistics are logged for your administrator to keep handy in case of an audit.
The Accellion Green EX Virtual Appliance is a Linux-based server appliance which runs in VMWare (either ESX/i or Server flavors) and requires hardly any configuration whatsoever to get running…basically, you need to log into the Linux console and set the IP, subnet, gateway, local hostname and mail server IP. There are some other options to configure, but this will get you going.
The process works like this:
You or an admin logs into the administration console for Accellion and configure users through the ‘Manage’ option which sends out invitation emails to your users (limited to one domain name). The user logs in, changes their default password, configures some optional settings and then they are ready to go!
Sending an email from Accellion is as simple as clicking on the ‘Send File’ link. The rest of the interface is pretty much the same as any web-based email program. One major downside here, though – there is no facility for saving frequently used addresses, although you can use the file manager to resend attachments again.
Note: When you attach a file to send, it doesn’t actually upload to the Accellion appliance until you click the ‘Send’ button.
When you receive a secure email via Accellion, the content looks like this:
Notice that you have a limited time (this feature is configurable) to download the file.
Your recipient will receive an email like above, and if they have never downloaded a file from you, they will need to create an account on the server and generate a verification code to log in.
Once the attachment is downloaded, you will receive a notice. Nice!
The server console has some additional options that will enable you to tweak it a bit, but there’s nothing that will allow you to brand it with your own logo. Also, you cannot have people on the outside create logons to send files to you internally (they will have to get their own Accellion Green appliance!).
If you do host this for users on the outside, you are going to need an external IP and DNS entry so remote users can easily get to the system. Also, you will want to purchase a secure SSL certificate and apply it to the box – this is easily done through the admin console. Otherwise, users will get an unverified certificate message when attaching (they can still download attachments).
Requirements:
- VMWare ESX/i 3.0 or Server 2.0 (both ESXi and Server are freely available)
- 50-70Gb (expanding volume) on VMWare host
- 1Gb virtual memory allocated
- 600Mb space for Accellion Appliance download
Caveats:
- Limited to 25 email accounts
- No AD integration
- No company branding
- Outside users cannot utilize Accellion to send you files
Overall, this is a very useful tool for any network administrator that needs to supply a large file securely (and to lessen the burden on your mail server!).
Accellion does provide a more advanced and robust version of it’s appliance (both in hardware and software forms hosted remotely or locally) which allows you to integrate Accellion into your LDAP environment, provide custom branding, remote login account creations for unsolicited file transfers to your domain, and much more.
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