CIIS Bypasses Its Reporting System’s SFTP Cap with a Files.com Fan-Out Hub

The California Institute of Integral Studies is a private, nonprofit university in San Francisco. Founded in 1968, it offers graduate and undergraduate programs in psychology, counseling, integral health, and the humanities across four schools, serving more than 1,500 students. It created the first university-affiliated training program for psychedelic-assisted therapy, which has trained more than 1,700 licensed care professionals, and its seven community counseling centers have provided low-fee mental health services to the Bay Area for over 30 years.

Behind that work sits the administrative stack of a much larger institution. CIIS runs a financial system, a reporting utility, payroll, a library, a campus bookstore, a learning platform, and expense tools, and nearly every one of them has an outside counterparty: a bank expecting daily positive-pay files, a payroll processor, a library services cooperative, and SaaS platforms that need student lists on time. Each counterparty expects its files delivered on its own schedule, over its own protocol. But the reporting application that generated most of those files capped how many outbound SFTP endpoints it could define. CIIS needed to land every file once in Files.com and fan it out from there, bypassing the cap without replacing the reporting system.

Positive-Pay by Hand and a Copy Job Every 15 Minutes

Before Files.com, each of those exchanges was its own piece of manual work. Positive-pay files went to the bank by hand. Data moved out of the reporting utility to an archive location and to a remote partner by hand. One vendor feed depended on a copy job that a person repeated every 15 minutes, or whenever a file was created. Sensitive payroll data was handled manually on its way into an on-premise budget forecasting system.

The paths were not just manual. Exchange between campus systems ran through an internally run FTP server with no encryption, so data that deserved the most protection traveled the channel that offered the least. And some deliveries carried an ordering requirement nothing enforced. The bank consolidates a sequence of reports into a single report, and the second cannot be processed until the first has been sent. The only thing holding that order was a person paying attention.

The Reporting System Could Never Hold a Connection for Every Partner

None of this persisted because nobody noticed. It persisted because CIIS controlled neither end of the exchange. The counterparties dictate the protocols: the bank sets the terms for how its daily transaction files arrive, and each vendor runs its own SFTP or FTPS endpoint. On the sending side, the reporting application that generates most of these files caps how many outbound SFTP endpoints it can define. However the integrations were arranged, the source system could never hold a connection for every partner CIIS needed to serve. No configuration inside the existing tools could change that, and replacing a campus reporting system to fix file delivery was never a realistic option.

Meanwhile the roster kept growing. A bank, a payroll processor, library services, a bookstore platform, a training platform, and expense vendors each needed timely, secure delivery, and every addition meant more hand-carried files stacked on a process that already had someone copying files every 15 minutes.

CIIS selected Files.com to be the hub. The new layer had to speak whatever protocol each counterparty demanded, enforce delivery order without a person watching, keep a dated archive copy of files that arrive under the same name every day, and retain every transfer for three to seven years.

“We are limited in how many SFTPs we can set up from our reporting application, which is why we just send everything to Files.com and then deal with it there.”

Everything Lands Once, and Files.com Automations Fan It Out

Files.com became the integration layer between CIIS’s campus systems and every outside party. The reporting and finance systems push their files to Files.com over a single connection, and everything after that happens on the platform.

Each external partner has its own remote server connection on the Files.com side, configured for that vendor’s SFTP or FTPS endpoint. When a file lands, a Files.com Automation triggers on the upload and copies it out in one run: to the partner, and to the archive. Because the source files carry the same name every day, the Automation renames each archived copy with a date, so the archive holds a usable history instead of one endlessly overwritten file. Scheduled Automations replaced the manual copy cycle outright, so reports now run every 10 to 15 minutes and deliver themselves. The ordering the bank requires is enforced by the workflow itself: the second report is held until the first has been sent.

The same hub accommodated destinations a plain endpoint could not. CIIS provisioned its site on a custom domain with dedicated IP addresses, giving vendors a fixed address to whitelist, while SFTP, FTPS, and AS2 covered different protocol requirements. Payroll data arriving from Paychex was forwarded by the Files.com Agent to Axiom, the budget forecasting system on an on-premise server behind the campus firewall, over an outbound-only connection. Every transfer also copies to a local archive and to Amazon S3, meeting the three-to-seven-year retention requirement as a built-in step of the workflow.

CIIS built all of it in-house. Corinne Ewan, the application support engineer behind the deployment, configured the connections and Automations from the documentation, staged the rollout through parallel test and production environments, and had the on-premise Agent installed and its automations running the same day.

“Setting up the agent was crazy simple!”

Deliveries Now Run Themselves, in the Required Order

With the hub in production, CIIS replaced an estate of hand-run transfers and an unencrypted FTP server with a fan-out that runs itself. FileZilla, the internal FTP server, and the manual copy process are retired.

• The 15-minute copy cycle is automation now. Reports run on a 10-to-15-minute schedule and deliver themselves in the required order, with the second bank report held until the first has gone out. Nobody sequences deliveries by attention.
• Sensitive workloads travel encrypted and on the record. Payroll, positive-pay, and student-record files move over SFTP, FTPS, and the Agent instead of unencrypted FTP and manual handling, and every transfer is logged.
• Retention enforces itself. Every transfer copies to a local archive and to S3, so the three-to-seven-year requirement is met by the workflow rather than by someone remembering.
• Adding a partner is a destination, not a project. Eight external partners and platforms already run through the hub, and the next one is a new fan-out target on Files.com, not another outbound definition wrung from a capped reporting system.

The Cap That Stopped Mattering

Today the reporting application still limits how many outbound connections it can define, and that limit no longer describes anything about CIIS’s integration estate. The campus systems speak to one place, and Files.com speaks to everyone else. The staff who once repeated a copy job every 15 minutes, carried positive-pay files to the bank by hand, and held report order in their heads now point a new feed at the hub and let the Automations carry it.

CIIS never had to replace the capped system to get past its cap. It landed every file on Files.com once, and let the hub do the fanning out.