I work for a construction company and it looks like the various builders, architects and other involved parties have finally took a giant leap into the present and want to have the ability to share various documents with each other electronically. In the past, everyone just e-mailed the documents to each other, someone would change something, e-mail to everyone again, someone else would change something, e-mail to everyone again and on and on and on. As you can see, there ended up being various versions of the same document scattered amongst many people. Someone told someone that ftp would be a great way to store and share documents, so I reluctantly set up an FTP site on our IIS 6 web server and they were tickled pink. Word has gotten out that this is a pretty cool thing, so now we are getting more and more requests to set up FTP sites for each job. I have my ftp site configured to use user isolation, but I do understand that ftp is inherently unsecure since all communication is sent over the wire in plain text. I can now see ftp catching on like crazy here and I'm worried that I've started out down a long path that will ultimately lead to data compromisation. I have the following questions for the Experts:
1. Even using user isolation in IIS/ftp, am I still vulnerable? At the worst, if someone intercepts the communication between a client and my server, they'll only be able to access that one folder correct?
2. Are there other options for accomplishing what were trying to do here? I have messed with SharePoint a little bit, but I honestly dont know how that would work for non-employees that want to access the data. If I have to create user accounts for non-employees, doesnt that open us up to a whole new bunch of possible vulnerabilities?
3. What do you all think of going with some sort of online document storage service for this? We were kicking around this idea since we are not really set up to handle lots of data transfers. Currently, there isnt much but with the possibility of eventually having 30 or 40 sites using this service, we could run into problems later.
I welcome any ideas, suggestions or other input anyone can provide.
Thanks much
-Chris
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