Ftp – Is FTP and SFTP connection same

Your third idea seems most promising: consider an FTP Proxy Server. Your users connect to the proxy with the connection requirements you set, such as encryption, and the proxy server connects to destination server with the parameters you configure.

Unless you can either enforce or audit a policy, you can not get users to follow it. And a security framework is only as strong as its weakest link.

The scenario seems strange to me - you have a requirement for confidentiality, to be met by encrypting the data traffic, but you are working with a third party that won't meet this requirement. There may be a need to run the problem up the management flag pole, as well.

I think you might be coming at this with a misconception that SFTP is somehow derived from FTP and that an SFTP client might "fall back" to plain ol' FTP in the event that SFTP isn't being offered by a server computer.

SFTP is the SSH File Transfer Protocol, and it is transported over SSH (TCP port 22 on the server, by default). If the remote server isn't listening on TCP port 22 (which you can verify w/ TELNET) then, odds are, you're not going to be doing SFTP (unless they're running their SSH daemon on some non-standard port).

On *nix OS's and, presumably MacOS X (since it's all Unix-ey), you can use the command-line sftp client from the OpenSSH project.

On Windows, the WinSCP client is a very nice graphical SFTP client.

The SFTP page on Wikipedia provides some links to various SFTP clients.

Securing an SFTP server is, mostly, just securing an SSH server. Not using password authentication, not allowing remote root logons, limiting the IPs that can make connections, etc.