Alight Replaced Progress MOVEit’s Person-to-Person Transfer With Self-Service Client Exchange on Files.com

Alight administers health, wealth and leave benefits for many of the world's largest employers, including a majority of the Fortune 100, covering more than 30 million people across operations in over 100 countries. Its product is administration itself: an employer hands Alight the running of its benefits programs, and from that moment the two organizations exchange data constantly. Much of that data is participant health and retirement information, which Alight handles under a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement. Alongside the automated feeds between systems runs a human layer of exchange, with HR teams at client companies, outside partners, and Alight's own staff sending and receiving files with people beyond the company's walls. Every new client brings a new population of external users who need a secure way in.

Every New Client Ran Through One Team

Before Files.com, that human exchange ran on Progress MOVEit, and everything around it ran through Alight's central Managed File Transfer team, by hand. Onboarding a new client meant the MFT team creating each user, building the folder structure, and assigning permissions, one request at a time. The controls were hand-built too: the blacklist that kept files from being shared out to free personal email domains was a list Alight compiled and maintained itself inside MOVEit.

The cost was structural. A team whose job was governing file transfer spent its time executing file transfers, and every new client made the queue longer. Onboarding could not scale without adding central headcount.

There was no pressure valve, either. Alight's corporate proxy blocks every generic file-transfer URL as a matter of policy, including Files.com's own generic address, precisely to keep shadow IT out of a business built on PHI. That policy is the right one for a company in Alight's position. It also meant the slow, central channel was the only channel.

A Model Designed From the Ground Up

The manual model had survived because it delivered the one thing Alight could not compromise: confidence in the security, control and auditing around regulated data. As the client base grew, that confidence was being bought with a bottleneck. Sean Kane, Alight's Managed File Transfer lead, set the goal at the outset of the project: design the whole model from the ground up, keeping the security, control and auditing intact while removing the MFT team from the middle of every transaction.

That goal translated into a specification. The replacement had to run on Alight's own domains, so the proxy would treat it as first-party infrastructure rather than a blocked sharing site. It had to take identity from Alight's existing directory instead of relying on manually created accounts. It had to let business users stand up per-client spaces themselves, inside boundaries set centrally. Its recipient controls had to be at least as strict as the blacklist Alight was keeping by hand. It had to feed Alight's SIEM, and it had to carry a HIPAA BAA.

Alight selected Files.com to be that sanctioned exchange layer.

Three Governed Tenants, All Under Alight's Name

Alight deployed three Files.com tenants as child sites: a production site for general use, a second production site locked down for a team with stricter requirements, and a dev/sandbox site where changes are proven before they touch production. Each tenant runs on its own Alight-branded custom domain.

The branding is not cosmetic. Because each tenant presents as Alight infrastructure on an Alight domain, it passes the proxy policy that blocks every generic sharing URL. Employees and clients reach a sanctioned channel that carries Alight's name, and the shadow-IT block stays intact for everything else.

The rollout was deliberately parallel. MOVEit kept the system-to-system automated transfers it was already running, and Files.com took over the external human exchange.

Identity followed the same design. With SSO through Ping Identity, a user is provisioned automatically the first time they sign in, with group membership deciding their permissions. Folders and permissions come into existence with the user, and business users create per-client subfolders with scoped sharing themselves. Nobody files a request with the MFT team to onboard a client.

Share Links Out, Inboxes In, Policy Underneath

Day to day, the exchange runs on Files.com Share Links and Inboxes: links send files out to client contacts, inboxes collect files coming in, and both expire on the schedules Alight sets. Recipient email domain restrictions decide where a share can go at all. When Alight's security review called for the same domain controls it had run in MOVEit, Files.com shipped recipient whitelist and blacklist controls in response, including a pre-built blacklist of thousands of known scam and free email domains. The list Alight had been maintaining by hand became a platform control it extends with entries of its own.

The same holds for account hygiene. Files.com user lifecycle rules disable dormant external accounts automatically, sending warning emails to the user beforehand, which is what lets Alight enforce its internal policy of notifying external users before access is removed. And every login, upload, download and permission change streams to Microsoft Sentinel through the Files.com SIEM integration, landing alongside the rest of Alight's security telemetry.

Onboarding Without the Queue

With the Files.com model in production, Alight replaced a central manual workflow with self-service that is governed from above rather than executed from the center.

• Onboarding a new client no longer runs through the MFT team by hand. Users are provisioned on first sign-in, permissions follow their groups, and per-client folders and scoped sharing are created by the business users who need them.
• Controls that were maintained by hand are now enforced by the platform. The recipient blacklist, share expiration, and dormant-account cleanup with advance warning to the user all run without anyone remembering to run them.

The Human Side First

Alight never had to treat replacing its legacy MFT platform as all-or-nothing. It peeled the person-to-person work off MOVEit and rebuilt it on Files.com as governed self-service, leaving the system-to-system automation in place. A legacy platform does not have to be replaced whole. Alight started with the side people touch, and that turned out to be the side where the bottleneck lived.