If you don't need to use password authentication (and you really shouldn't!), you can use Net::SFTP::Foreign that uses the native ssh client instead of Net::SSH::Perl to connect to the remote server and so doesn't require any extra modules.

The development version offers a very improved API with support for high level functions as find, rget, rput... though some serious bugs could still exist (bug reports are very welcome!).

Another good alternative is Net::SSH2.