Auctane Replaces AWS File Transfer, Dropbox, Egnyte, ShareFile, and More Across Ten Brands With Files.com

Auctane is the shipping and mailing software company behind Stamps.com, ShipStation, ShipEngine, MetaPack, Packlink, and several other brands. Its software powers billions of shipments a year, spanning online postage, order fulfillment, multi-carrier shipping APIs, and enterprise delivery management.

The portfolio was assembled over more than 25 years, and each brand in it kept its own name, its own domain, and its own customer relationships. That is the point of the portfolio. A Stamps.com customer buys postage from Stamps.com, and a ShipStation customer manages orders in ShipStation, whether or not either has ever heard of Auctane. Behind all of those brands sits one central IT organization, accountable for security and governance across every one of them.

Many customer-facing identities in front, one governing IT team behind: that combination is what made Auctane's file transfer problem inevitable. Auctane needed to replace six kinds of file-transfer tooling with common governance without collapsing ten customer-facing brands into a generic portal or moving their files out of Auctane's AWS S3 storage.

Auctane selected Files.com to provide that layer: one account underneath ten brand front doors.

File Exchange Had Accumulated One Brand at a Time

By 2022, file exchange across the portfolio looked the way the portfolio had grown. One brand at a time. Customer uploads and outbound file delivery ran on in-house custom SFTP servers in one place, AWS File Transfer in another, Google Cloud file services in a third, and Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile elsewhere. Six kinds of tooling, six security models, six places an audit would have to look.

The cost landed on central IT. Auctane's file exchange is customer-facing in both directions: consumers and business customers upload files into brand workflows, and brands deliver large files back out. Those flows carried customer data on whichever tool a brand happened to have, including consumer sharing products that were never built for governed business exchange. IT was accountable for all of it, and could not put one identity model, one permission model, or one audit trail across any of it. Every brand meant another tool to secure, another set of accounts to administer by hand, and another gap between what IT governed and what actually ran.

One Platform Normally Means One Domain

The obvious fix had an obvious problem. Consolidating file transfer onto one platform normally means one site: one domain, one login page, one sender address on every notification email. A multi-brand portfolio cannot accept that. A Stamps.com customer uploading a file needs to land on a Stamps.com page, not on a generic transfer portal, and certainly not on a page carrying some vendor's name. Brand identity was not a preference Auctane could trade away for cleaner governance. It is what the portfolio is.

So the requirements Auctane's IT leadership set out in 2022 read as a contradiction by the standards of most platforms. Ten to twelve branded tenants, each with its own custom domain, its own SSL certificate, its own branding, its own email identity, and its own Okta SAML federation. All of it rolling up to one account and one set of controls. The same employee identity valid across every tenant, without being administered ten separate times. And the files themselves staying in Auctane's own AWS S3 buckets, spread across multiple AWS accounts, rather than moving onto a vendor's storage.

A Child Site for Every Brand, One Account Underneath

Files.com carried the structure directly, using child sites: fully separate Files.com sites nested under one parent account. Each Auctane brand received a child site with its own custom domain, its own branding, and its own custom SMTP configuration, so every page a customer sees and every email a customer receives reads as that brand and nothing else. Each site federated to Okta with its own SAML metadata, and by late 2022 ten tenants ran their own federation. Because every site links under one parent, an Auctane employee carries a single identity across all of them, and IT administers users, permissions, and policy from one place instead of ten.

The storage never moved. Using Files.com remote server mounts, Auctane pointed each site's folders at its own S3 buckets, across multiple AWS accounts, so a file uploaded through any branded portal lands in storage Auctane owns. Files.com became the transfer, identity, and audit layer on top. The buckets stayed the buckets.

The day-to-day workflows then moved onto that structure. External customers upload into branded sites, and the staff who handle those files can see from Files.com file history the client IP each upload came from, without needing administrator rights to look. Outbound delivery of large files runs on share links with expiration policies. The sharing that once ran through Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile now runs as branded, expiring links recorded in the same Files.com audit trail.

The rollout ran in parallel with the old estate rather than as a cutover. The first brand's site went to production in early 2022 while subdomains for the remaining brands were reserved in advance, and the estate grew from three sites to ten within roughly three months.

Six Tools Became One Platform

With the child-site estate in production, Auctane retired six categories of file-transfer tooling accumulated one brand at a time: custom SFTP servers, AWS File Transfer, Google Cloud file services, Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile.

One identity model now covers the portfolio. An employee federated through Okta carries the same identity into any brand's site, and IT no longer administers the same person ten times.

Adding a brand also became a pattern rather than a project. Auctane added seven sites in roughly three months, each stamped from the same design: a child site, a custom domain, a SAML federation, and a set of S3 mounts.

Many Brands in Front, One Company Behind

Today, Auctane runs file exchange the way it runs the portfolio itself: many brands in front, one company behind. A customer uploading to a brand's portal sees only that brand. The IT team behind the page sees one Files.com account, one identity model, and one audit trail across those branded sites.