Moderate Market Growth Projection for Managed File Transfer (MFT) May Signal Its Technological Maturity, but It’s at Odds With Exponential Growth of Data

Many market research firms project that the market for Managed File Transfer (MFT) will grow between 7-10% in the next five years (expressed in compound annual growth rates (CAGR): see here, here and here). Is MFT is a mature technology? Maybe. Is MFT is a stable technology with low risk of disruption? Absolutely not.

It’s quite cliché to quote the amount of data generated each day – 2.5 exabytes, that’s 2.5 billion gigabytes. This figure has thus far grown exponentially: 90% of data generated throughout history was only generated in the past two years. Even if only a fraction of that data needs to be transferred as files, it’s hard to imagine that fraction decreasing exponentially in the future, and that MFT is likely to scale faster than just in a linear fashion. All this is to say that current-day MFT technology cannot scale sufficiently to meet the demand.

Our Take

As an analyst in big data, I am quite certain that we will see many disruptions in the MFT market going forward – both positively and negatively. Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing is an example of the latter: by managing access to the stored data on the cloud instead, they eliminated the need for transferring files.

Source: SoftwareReviews, Managed File Transfer, Accessed September 27, 2019