As data has become more abundant, and data resources become more heterogeneous, accessing, sharing, and disseminating these data sets become a bigger challenge. Using simple tools to remotely logon to computers and manually transfer data sets between sites is no longer feasible. Managed file transfer (MFT) services have allowed users to do more, but these services still rely on the users providing specific details to control this process, and they suffer from shortcomings, including low transfer throughput, inflexibility, limited protocol support, and poor scalability. OneDataShare is a universal data sharing building block for data-intensive applications, with three primary goals: (1) optimization of end-to-end data transfers and reduction of the time to delivery of the data; (2) interoperation across heterogeneous data resources and on-the-fly inter-protocol translation; and (3) prediction of the data delivery time to decrease the uncertainty in real-time decision-making processes. These capabilities are being developed as a cloud-hosted service.