scp is the standard command to copy a folder or files. You can also compress the files before sending it as shown below. In this test I am using a folder with 4 files of 3.5 MB size. The time is reduced to 5 seconds from 40 seconds.

# time scp /root/shantanu/* root@172.29.0.131:/root/
root@172.29.0.131's password:
iostat0111.log 100% 46KB 46.3KB/s 00:00
mystats.txt 100% 201KB 201.5KB/s 00:00
top0111.log 100% 3219KB 100.6KB/s 00:32
vmstat0111.log 100% 21KB 20.7KB/s 00:00

real 0m39.844s
user 0m0.053s
sys 0m0.021s

# time tar zcf - shantanu | ssh 172.29.0.131 "cd /root/shantanu/; tar zpxvf -"
root@172.29.0.131's password:
shantanu/
shantanu/top0111.log
shantanu/mystats.txt
shantanu/vmstat0111.log
shantanu/iostat0111.log

real 0m5.326s
user 0m0.068s
sys 0m0.015s

If you type the full path to the folder /root/shantanu/ then a new folder in the destination folder will be created with the same path.