An Apparel Brand Replaced Microsoft SharePoint With Files.com for Auditable Design Delivery to Factories With Limited IT Support

A US apparel brand designs its garments in-house. It makes almost none of them itself. Production runs through a network of contract manufacturers concentrated in Asia and Central America: factories the company does not own, run by vendors the company does not employ. Every garment in that network begins as a set of spec sheets, the plans that tell a factory exactly what to cut and sew. Those plans are the company's intellectual property. And for the brand to sell a single garment, they have to leave the company.

Spec Sheets for Factories With No IT Staff

A vendor producing a garment needs the spec sheets for that garment. Nothing about the exchange is exotic: files go out, a factory downloads them. What made it hard was who sits at the other end. The company's vendors are spread across the Asia-Pacific region. Many have no IT staff at all, and technical detail has to cross a language barrier. A channel that required specialized software or configuration walkthroughs in a second language was a non-starter.

The stakes ran the other way. The plans are the product before the product exists. The risk the company carried was a design traveling a path the business never chose, and a harder version of the same risk behind it: when a question arose about a specific plan, who accessed it, when, and from where, the company needed a forensic answer. That kind of answer only exists if the record was being kept before anyone thought to ask.

So the channel had to be two things at once: the simplest possible workflow for the least technical party in the chain, and the most controlled workflow the company could run. The company found that balance in read-only SFTP accounts on Files.com, with an always-on record of every file access.

SharePoint Couldn't Be Secured to the Level the Plans Demanded

On paper, a SharePoint library looks like the answer: put the documents in one place, give each vendor access, and let them download. The company tried it, and the senior engineer who runs the company's file exchange infrastructure moved the workload off it.

What the workload needed was the shape of a shared document library delivered on the security model of secure FTP: accounts that can do exactly what they were created to do, and a record of every access detailed enough to reconstruct a transfer after the fact. Files.com provided that channel.

Read-Only Access Over Standard SFTP

On Files.com, a vendor connects over plain SFTP, a protocol any standard transfer client already speaks, and downloads the spec sheets for the garments it is producing. The account it connects with is dedicated to exactly that job. Files.com folder permissions scope it to read-only access, so a vendor cannot upload, alter, or delete anything, and a plan cannot move any way the business did not decide it should move.

Underneath that simple workflow, the Files.com audit log records every action: which account pulled which file, at what time, from which address. There is nothing to enable per transfer and nothing to remember to switch on. The log runs before the question exists.

Who Pulled Which File, When, and From Where

With Files.com as the sanctioned channel, the company replaced a portal it could not govern with a workflow every vendor handles without help, and gained the record SharePoint could not produce.

• Distribution stays on the sanctioned path. A vendor's account can only read, so nothing happens to a plan outside how the business decided to transmit it.
• Access questions get forensic answers. When the company needs to know who pulled a plan, the log already holds the file, the time, and the source.
• Vendors with limited IT capability are served without technical back-and-forth. A vendor needs a credential and a standard SFTP client, and nothing more.

Simple for the Factory, Governed for the Brand

For a company whose product exists as a document before it exists as a garment, the governed channel had to come first.