An IT Services Firm Moves Multi-Gigabyte Files at Cloud Speed With Its Own Data Center as the Storage Tier

An Indian product development and IT consulting firm with thousands of employees delivers software engineering and managed IT services to enterprise clients around the world, including financial-services accounts.

That work runs on file exchange. Working files, routinely several gigabytes apiece, move between the firm's teams and enterprise clients around the world. The company also holds a firm rule about where its data lives: production files belong on company-owned storage, on the company's own server in its home data center. Those two facts were always going to collide: a global business that moves large files every day, and one fixed place every file has to end up.

Every Transfer Had to Cross the WAN Into the Data Center

For years, file exchange ran on internal infrastructure: on-premises file and SFTP servers fronting the data center storage. Because every file had to end up on that server, every transfer had to travel to it, no matter where in the world it started. The firm had outgrown an architecture in which the location of the data set the speed of every transfer.

The cost landed on people. Against routine multi-gigabyte file sizes, a normal handoff became a long wait. An employee pushing a deliverable, or a client team on another continent waiting to receive one, sat behind the same slow link into the same data center. And access to all of it was administered by hand, one account at a time, for a workforce of thousands.

The Measurement That Settled the Architecture

The obvious answers pulled in opposite directions. Keep everything on-premises and the data stays home, but every user inherits the slow path into the data center. Move to a cloud platform and transfers get fast, but the data leaves company-owned storage, which the company's own rule put out of bounds.

The firm did not have to guess which constraint was real. In early 2023, the team ran an on-premises, agent-based deployment fronting its own server and measured what users experienced. A file uploaded straight to cloud storage transferred quickly. The same transfer, routed into the on-premises server, crawled.

That settled the design question. The bottleneck was not the tooling. It was any architecture that put the data center in the user's path. When the firm returned to the project in 2024, the requirements were specific: delivery had to be cloud-first, while the architecture had to remain hybrid. Users needed to transfer files directly through the cloud from wherever they worked, while every production file still landed on the firm's own storage. Sign-in also had to run through Azure AD, using the company's existing identities. The firm selected Files.com to provide that cloud front door, with its own server staying as the storage tier underneath.

A Cloud Front Door With Its Own Server as the Storage Tier

The firm's corporate IT team built the deployment itself, consulting Files.com support along the way. The Files.com Agent went onto the company's on-premises Linux server, where it runs as a system service that starts automatically on reboot and connects outbound, so no inbound firewall port opens into the data center. Through the Agent, the data center server is attached to the Files.com site as its storage tier.

The transfer path is what changed. Staff and external counterparties upload directly to Files.com cloud storage, and sync pushes each file down to the on-premises server within minutes of arrival. Users get the fast path without waiting for their uploads to cross the WAN into the data center. Production data rests on the server the company's requirement specifies.

The whole portal runs under the firm's own domain with the company's own SSL certificate, so what a client sees when exchanging files with the team is the firm's own brand. SFTP and the Files.com API sit on the same site, so automated workloads travel the same path as people do.

Accounts Provisioned From Azure AD, Not by Hand

Identity came from the directory. The firm connected Azure AD over SAML for single sign-on and turned on SCIM provisioning, so accounts are created, updated, and deactivated from the directory rather than by an administrator. Group sync carries Azure AD groups into Files.com, and those groups drive folder-level permissions.

For a workforce of thousands, that ends per-user account administration: a new joiner gets file access with a directory account, permissions follow group membership instead of a list somebody maintains, and a departure removes access when the directory says so.

One Front Door for the Next Workload

With the hybrid design in production by mid-2024, the firm had replaced a WAN-bound transfer path and hand-managed access with a single governed portal under its own name. Employees and clients now upload directly through Files.com instead of waiting on the link into the data center, production files sync to company-owned storage within minutes, and Azure AD provisions access for thousands of employees.

The compounding result showed up later. The firm runs an email gateway application whose backup had previously landed automatically on a dedicated internal SFTP server. When the team wanted that traffic on the same platform, it pointed the backup at Files.com instead, and the dedicated internal SFTP server came out of the job. That is what the front door is now for: the next file workload gets a folder on the platform the company already governs, instead of a server of its own.

The Trade-Off That Stopped Being One

Today, an employee of the firm uploads a multi-gigabyte working file and gets on with the day. Minutes later, the file is sitting on the company's own server in its home data center, exactly where production data belongs, and the employee never touched the slow path that used to define the job. What used to happen instead was the wait: the same file moving through the data center path before work could continue.

The firm did not choose between keeping its data and giving its people cloud performance. It separated where files rest from how files move. Files.com handles the movement, under the firm's name and gated by the firm's directory, and the company's own server keeps the data. A residency requirement still decides where every file lives. It just stopped deciding how fast anyone can work.