Bandwidth Replaced FTP Servers, Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile With One Governed Files.com Platform

Bandwidth Inc. is the carrier behind other companies’ communications products. The NASDAQ-listed company sells APIs for voice calling, messaging, and emergency services, and delivers them over its owned-and-operated IP voice network, with global operations across 45 data centers.

Owning the network means owning its regulation. Bandwidth operates as a regulated telecommunications carrier, and compliance is a condition of the product itself. That reaches all the way down to something as unglamorous as file transfer. A carrier exchanges files with trading partners and between its own systems constantly, and every channel carrying that exchange is a channel Bandwidth’s information security organization has to stand behind.

B2B File Exchange Had Spread Across Four Tools

By 2018, business-to-business file exchange at Bandwidth ran on four things at once: on-premises FTP servers, plus Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile. Each carried a slice of the work, and none was a platform the security organization could put a guarantee on. The exchange estate had fragmented past the point where anyone could guarantee it.

The cost landed on the security and compliance teams. Four surfaces to secure. Four vendors to defend through review. At a company that re-reviews its vendors every year, one function was consuming four reviews. And there was no single answer to the question of how Bandwidth exchanged files with the businesses it worked with. The FTP servers that carried the automated transfer work carried none of the governance the compliance organization required.

Why No Single Tool Had Been Able to Take It Over

The patchwork persisted because the workloads were genuinely different. Scheduled processes pulled files machine-to-machine, authenticating and walking directories to decide what to download; that work needed SFTP and FTP endpoints and service accounts, which a file-sharing product did not offer. Trading partners brought their own requirements: PGP-encrypted payloads for some exchanges, AS2 for the partners who mandated it. And people inside the company needed ordinary governed sharing. The sharing products covered the people and none of the protocols. The FTP servers covered the machines and none of the governance. Neither class of tool could absorb the other’s work, so the estate stayed split.

What Bandwidth needed was stated plainly when it came looking: business-to-business file exchange the company could guarantee compliance on. In practice, that meant one platform speaking every protocol in the workload—SFTP, FTP, AS2, plus PGP on the payloads that needed it—driveable by service accounts for the automated jobs, fronted by the corporate identity system, and backed by the security documentation to clear a regulated carrier’s vendor risk process every single year. Bandwidth selected Files.com to be that platform.

Every Exchange Now Runs Through One Files.com Platform

Files.com became the single channel all three kinds of exchange run through: automated systems, trading partners, and Bandwidth’s own people.

The automated workload moved onto Files.com’s SFTP and FTP endpoints. The same pattern the in-house FTP servers used to carry continued through dedicated service accounts, now with every session recorded in Files.com’s logs. Partner exchange runs on the same site: PGP encryption wraps the payloads that require it, and AS2 handles the partners that mandate signed, receipted transmission. The Files.com Agent reaches systems inside Bandwidth’s own network over an outbound-only connection, so internal systems participate without an inbound firewall path.

Identity runs through Okta. Files.com accounts are fronted by Okta for authentication and user administration, so access to the exchange platform follows the corporate directory rather than a separate user list per tool, and accounts that go inactive are disabled automatically.

Eight Years, One Vendor, Five Consecutive Security Reviews

With the consolidation done, Bandwidth replaced four separately secured, separately reviewed file tools with one governed exchange platform. The operational payoff extends beyond the annual review: new partner connections and automated feeds can land on a platform the security organization has already cleared, so growth in the exchange does not reopen the vendor question.

What that looks like from 2026:

• Files.com has carried Bandwidth’s B2B file exchange continuously since 2018, through multiple changes in which internal team owned it.
• The annual vendor security review run by Bandwidth’s information security and compliance teams covers one file-exchange vendor instead of four tools, and Files.com has cleared it five years running, 2022 through 2026, on SOC 2 attestation and security documentation.
• The automated transfer workload runs on dedicated, governed service accounts with a full activity record, instead of on FTP servers that carried none of the governance the compliance team required.

One Channel the Security Team Can Guarantee

Today, the question Bandwidth’s security organization set out to answer in 2018 has a one-word answer. Where does B2B file exchange happen? Files.com. What used to be four tools’ worth of documentation and review is now one platform, one attestation, one audit trail, and one annual review, which Files.com cleared from 2022 through 2026. The compliance guarantee Bandwidth wanted was never going to be available on a patchwork. Consolidating every exchange onto Files.com is what made it a guarantee the company could actually give.