We use cRIO's in industrial deployments all the time.
While a lot can be done to work around the lack of security offered by the built in FTP server, it would be much preferred if NI would add FTPS (and possibly SFTP) support, or at the very least, modify the existing FTP server solution to expose/support the following functionality:
* define users (currently, only the "password" field is used by the cRIO FTP server, the user name is ignored (or limited to the "admin" name only).
* define folder access rules on a "by user" level
Ideally, the current FTP server would be expanded further to include:
* secured file transfers via built in FTPS support, (or by adding FTPS VI's to the existing FTP toolkit)
* (secure binary transfers via built in SFTP server)
* open up and/or document how the current web configuration tool does the HTTPS file transfer interface
Currently, there are no easy way to allow our end customers to securely pull data log files remotely, and no way to prevent end customer from accidentally accessing or modifying sensitive parts of the application.
It would be possible to build a custom HTTPS file server on the cRIO, but I have several issues with this approach: it adds development and maintenance of another module to our code, it would most likely require another client side application for the customer to use, and most importantly: a lot of our customers have data collection servers set up to pull data over standard FTPS directly into their historians and their database systems.