Product Strategy Series: Globalscape Adapts to Cloud Requirements

The following is a product strategy Q&A with Matt Goulet, President and CEO of Globalscape.

Q: How is the market embracing cloud technology?

Matt Goulet: The move to the cloud has been gaining momentum over recent years and according to analysts, that momentum will continue to build. We’ve collectively talked about the disruptive game-changing nature of cloud services since the mid-2000s. It’s hard to believe that the platforms that would become Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure got their start in 2006 and 2010, respectively.

Since then, enterprise adoption has become mainstream. From a product and security perspective, organizations are feeling more and more comfortable with moving data to these services. Middleware and managed file transfer (MFT) vendors are no exception as they adapt to the evolving requirements of their customers. Globalscape was on the forefront of this industry shift. In 2010, we first introduced the service that we now know today as EFT Cloud Services. Since then, we’ve been on the frontier of this shift, helping our customers make the transition to the cloud.

Related Reading: What is Cloud Integration

Q: What is driving customer demand for cloud-based MFT?

Matt Goulet: The shift to the cloud is driven by a number of factors.  Sometimes it’s driven by budget and ROI concerns.  Other times it may be a policy mandated by the CIO. The key underlying reason usually remains the same: companies want to focus on managing applications and IT workloads that are key to their business and want to shift the responsibility of standing up servers and managing infrastructure from their IT department to a third party.

Enterprises have the same expectations for a cloud-based MFT platform as they do for any other cloud-based solution. They want superior availability, including across different geographies.  They want near real-time automatic scalability. In an increasingly regulated business environment, they also need data governance, privacy, and security functionality. They want agility and high speed in getting applications they need up and running.  

Finally, more and more enterprises want to move from a traditional IT organization towards a more agile DevOps model—building, evolving and operating rapidly changing resilient systems at scale—which is fundamentally aligned with, and enabled by, the cloud.

Q: Does the cloud licensing model threaten the traditional MFT market?

Matt Goulet: It is clear that the MFT Cloud train has left the station—there is no arguing that. However, because of the high number of legacy systems involved, what we’ve seen is that, more often than not, companies will start new projects in the cloud and leave legacy systems where they are. What does this mean? Well, it means that most of MFT cloud deployments represent net new revenue streams for the MFT vendors, as customers are going to continue to rely on existing systems for many existing workloads and even expand those on-premises installation where appropriate. It also means that the need for a hybrid MFT solution that can support both cloud-based systems as well as on-premises deployments has never been stronger.

Another interesting trend that we have seen with our customers is that many of them tend to gravitate towards using MFT in one of the popular IaaS platforms like AWS by Amazon, Azure by Microsoft or Google Cloud Platform. It makes perfect sense because organizations can begin to leverage the benefits that the cloud provides while still maintaining the full control over the way the critical parts of the infrastructure are implemented and managed.

Q: What is Globalscape’s plan for the cloud moving forward?

Matt Goulet:  We started with a relatively straightforward hosted MFT approach years ago. Over time, this has evolved not just into a mature platform as a service (PaaS) offering operated by Globalscape, but also managed service on top of it so that if a customer doesn’t want to manage any aspect of the MFT operations, Globalscape and our partners will take care of it for them.

We’ve also been working on a solution targeted at the mid-market that will give small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) an opportunity to leverage our enterprise-grade MFT product in the cloud at a price point that is suited for their IT budgets. This initiative is also backed by our partnership with a leading vendor of high-end hardware for datacenters.

Globalscape’s presence in popular IaaS platforms, like AWS and Azure, allows us to leverage the services and offerings these leading vendors provide to deploy a highly available, automatically scalable platform.

In summary, Globalscape will continue to be on the leading edge of the MFT move to the cloud, a move that is customer and market driven. This has proven to be great strategy because most of the cloud based business comes in addition to an on-premises solution, not as a replacement. Of course security will continue to be a very important dimension of all Globalscape’s solutions, and cloud is not an exception.

We’ll continue to provide organizations with the security controls and compliance-enabling features that safeguard their protected data.  We’ll continue to grow and adapt our features to customer requirements and help customers implement the MFT solution they need, whether this is located fully in the cloud or as a hybrid deployment; whether it is hosted in a private cloud or in a popular IaaS platform; whether it’s available as PaaS or a fully managed service; or whether it’s geared towards sophisticated requirements of enterprises or mid-market affordability and ease of use. In any of these scenarios, Globalscape has a solution to meet your business needs.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The words "would," "exceed," "should," "anticipates," "believe," "steady," "dramatic," “expect,” and variations of such words and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that a statement is not a forward-looking statement. These forward-looking statements are based upon the Company’s current expectations and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Among the important factors that could cause actual results to differ significantly from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements are risks that are detailed in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the 2015 fiscal year, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 3, 2016.