Gray Media Replaced GoAnywhere With Files.com—and Three People Govern File Transfer Across 130-Plus TV Stations

Gray Media operates 130-plus local television stations across US markets. The group also never stops growing: station acquisitions are folded in as regulatory approvals clear, each one adding users and distribution endpoints to the estate.

A local station group runs on file movement. Corporate distributes programs, commercials, promos, and re-feeds to every station. Every station takes in spots from its own local advertisers. Stations pull each other's news stories to air locally. And at every station, broadcast automation retrieves that content and assembles it for air. Multiply that by 130-plus stations and outside senders, and file transfer stops being an IT service and becomes the distribution system of the company.

Every Account Change Ran Through Two People at Corporate

When a local advertiser got locked out of its folder, the spot it was delivering waited on headquarters. Gray ran GoAnywhere as its managed file transfer platform for station file sharing, and its administration model concentrated every user and access change at corporate. An external advertiser account created at any of 130-plus stations, a forgotten password, a folder assignment: all of it routed through two people at Gray's corporate headquarters in Atlanta. Stations rely on the platform to get content to air, so a blocked account was not an inconvenience. It was a spot that did not reach the schedule, and airtime revenue at risk.

Gray's Chief Information Officer lived the problem from the station side earlier in his career. When an external user at his station forgot a password, station IT could do nothing about it. Every fix meant pulling in the corporate team and waiting.

The stations rendered their own verdict. Between stations, video moved on free WeTransfer accounts, outside the platform the company was paying for, because the sanctioned path was too constrained to use. A workaround that spreads across a station group is a judgment on the system it routes around.

Delegation Was the Fix, and Delegation Was the Hard Part

This was never a staffing problem. A bigger corporate team would have kept the same model and widened the funnel. The fix was delegation: let each station's own IT manager run that station's users. At Gray's scale, that was exactly what was hard to do safely.

Each station maintained its own population of external advertisers and partners. A national fast-food franchise, a car dealership, a local church, a small family business: these were non-technical senders, and each one had to see only its own folder. The dealership could never browse what the church sent. Getting that isolation right across thousands of external accounts, while station-level administrators managed them day to day, meant delegation with hard edges. Handing that many people site-wide administrator rights was never an option.

Meanwhile the estate kept growing. Acquisitions kept adding stations and advertiser populations, and by the platform owner's own assessment, the group had become too big for corporate to handle every user issue by hand.

So the replacement had a specification before it had a name. It needed a folder structure for every station, single sign-on, and automated provisioning from the corporate directory, so users would not have to be created by hand. It needed administration delegated to station IT and scoped to each station's own groups and folders. It needed a web interface for non-technical senders alongside the FTP and SFTP that broadcast automation already speaks, and automated deletion jobs so old content expires without anyone remembering to remove it. Gray selected Files.com to replace GoAnywhere as the single file transfer platform for the whole station group.

Three Groups per Station, Provisioned From the Directory

Gray built the structure per station from the start. Every station received three groups: one for its IT managers, one for accounts that connect over FTP and SFTP, and one for its external users. Folders were assigned to groups, users are provisioned straight into their station's groups, and under each station's advertiser folder every advertiser has a subfolder of its own. Files.com permission fences keep each advertiser sealed off from every other.

Delegation runs through Files.com group administrators. A station's IT manager holds admin rights over that station's own groups: creating external accounts, assigning folder permissions, resetting passwords, and removing users who no longer need access. None can touch site-wide settings. Corporate governs the platform; the stations manage their people.

Identity comes from the directory. Sign-in runs through Okta single sign-on over SAML, and SCIM provisioning handles the user lifecycle, so accounts are created and deactivated from Okta rather than by hand. In one two-month window in 2026, 206 users were created through SCIM and eight through the web interface. When work has to happen in bulk, the corporate team scripts it through files-cli: permission changes across several hundred groups, exported to CSV and applied in one pass.

The machines got the same platform as the people. Every Gray station runs Telestream Vantage, the broadcast automation system that prepares content for air, and several hundred Vantage workflows pull programs, commercials, and promos from Files.com over FTP and SFTP. Non-technical senders use the web interface, share links, and inboxes instead, so an advertiser delivers a spot from a browser while the station's automation retrieves it by script.

The cutover itself disturbed almost nobody. Gray mounted the outgoing platform as a Files.com remote server and kept folders synced through the transition, so external partners changed nothing but a hostname.

Six Million Activities a Day, Run by Three People

Today, with GoAnywhere retired, Gray has replaced a platform administered entirely from headquarters with one the stations run themselves, governed by a corporate team of three.

The primary Gray site carries 6 million activities a day and 87 terabytes of content across 130-plus stations. At that scale, station IT managers handle their own advertiser accounts, so a locked-out advertiser is fixed at the station instead of escalated to headquarters, and the content it was sending gets to air.

WeTransfer is gone by company policy, and the station-to-station video that used to travel on free consumer accounts now moves on the governed platform, on the record. Files.com also sits inside Gray's audited application scope, with the Files.com SOC report supplied for the audit.

The result that compounds is the onboarding pattern. Because the structure was built per station from the beginning, an acquired station is added the same way every time: three groups, a folder tree, a delegated administrator, and users provisioned from Okta. Acquisitions add endpoints without adding corporate workload.

“It's pretty low maintenance for us.”

Governed From Corporate, Operated by the Stations

What changed at Gray is where the work happens. Corporate sets the boundaries: the per-station structure, the permission fences, the identity integration, the audit trail. Inside those boundaries, the stations do their own work. An account change that used to open with a request to two people in Atlanta now ends at the station's own IT manager, and the corporate team is out of the password-reset business.