How an Audiobook Streaming Service Consolidated Departmental FTP Servers Into One Company-Wide Files.com Service

An audiobook and e-book streaming service serves millions of subscribers across a catalogue of more than a million titles in dozens of languages, under several brands. Behind the streaming service sits a publishing group. The group operates across the whole life of a story, from publishing through audio production to distribution to the listener.

A business shaped like that moves files constantly. Media and metadata arrive from publishers. Reports and feeds pass between internal systems. Documents come in from suppliers, consultants, and other outside parties. At the company, that movement had grown up piecemeal: each department that needed to exchange files had built its own way to do it.

A Transfer Server for Every Department

When IT Operations took stock of file transfer across the company, it found a sprawl of disparate on-premises FTP systems, accumulated department by department. Every one of those servers was a separate system to patch and keep secure. Every one carried its own local accounts, outside the company's identity provider, so there was no single place to administer access or see what was moving. And when a new exchange came along, the answer was more infrastructure, because there was no standing service to provision it on.

The sprawl had a reason. The company's transfer needs were genuinely unalike. A consultant project needs access for the length of the engagement and no longer. A system-to-system exchange moves a file between two systems every day, for years. Finance distributes reports and receives documents from multiple external parties. No single departmental server fit all of that, so each need had spawned its own, and the estate kept growing. IT Operations set out to roll every one of them into a single SaaS platform.

A single replacement had to do everything the sprawl did. It had to speak the protocols the other end of each exchange already used, SFTP above all. It had to authenticate employees through the corporate directory instead of adding yet another set of local accounts. It had to present fixed network addresses, because some counterparties only accept traffic from IP addresses they have already whitelisted. And it had to move files onward to other systems on its own, so daily feeds could run without a person in the loop. IT Operations selected Files.com to be that platform.

One Files.com Service, Run by IT Operations

Files.com became the company's internal file-transfer service: one managed service where any team with an SFTP need is given an integration instead of a server.

Identity comes from the directory the company already runs. Users sign in through SAML single sign-on against Google Workspace, with two-factor authentication on top, so access to file transfer uses the same corporate account as everything else.

Each integration is scoped to its own folder and account, whether it provides time-boxed access for a consultant project or a standing connection for a long-running system exchange. The other end connects over SFTP, FTP, FTPS, or WebDAV. Files.com Remote Server connections and Automations move files onward to systems including Google Cloud Storage, while custom domains with dedicated static IPs give counterparties a fixed address to whitelist.

The consolidation did not flatten everything into one shape. The company runs a parent site and a dedicated child site: the general-purpose service on one, and the pipeline that ingests media and metadata from the group's largest publishers on the other. The heaviest production workload keeps its own boundary, and both sites sit under one parent for administration.

New Integrations Instead of New Servers

With the move complete, the company retired its departmental FTP servers, and file transfer stopped being infrastructure that each team owned. Daily transfer volume across the company's Files.com deployment has grown into the terabytes.

• IT Operations administers one platform in place of a fleet of on-premises FTP systems, and the hosting, patching, and per-server account management went away with them.
• Access follows the company's identity. Users sign in through Google Workspace, and when a subsidiary's users needed the service, they were onboarded onto the same platform under a second email domain rather than given another system.

File Transfer as a Service, Not as Infrastructure

Today, when anyone at the company needs to move a file between two parties, the answer is an integration on Files.com. What used to begin with standing up another FTP server, and continue with patching and administering it for years, now begins and ends with an account and a folder on a service IT Operations already runs. One platform proved able to hold work as unalike as a time-boxed consultant engagement and the ingestion pipeline behind the group's audiobook catalogue. The company replaced a habit along with the servers: file transfer is no longer infrastructure each department owns. It is a service one team provides to the whole company.