LVMH Fashion Group Asia Retired On-Premises FTP and Cleared One Files.com Site for Nine Maisons

LVMH Fashion Group Asia is the Hong Kong-based shared-services arm of LVMH's Fashion & Leather Goods business, the largest business group inside the world's leading luxury goods group. Created in 2010, it gives nine fashion maisons of different national origins — Loewe, Celine, Givenchy, Kenzo and Marc Jacobs among them — common commercial, operational and back-office rails, while each house keeps its own identity at the front. Those brands sell through more than 450 dedicated boutiques across the region, from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Singapore, Thailand and Australia.

The hard part of that model is the seam it creates. One back office runs operations for nine distinct houses, so one IT function ends up moving files for all of them: retail data out of the stores, HR data, partner exchanges, integration feeds. Every maison brings its own partners and its own data, and none of it may mix. Whatever platform carries that exchange has to hold nine brands apart while serving them all. The answer had to do more than replace FTP: it had to clear the group's reviews once, keep each maison's data separate and give each new feed or partner a common place to land.

On-Premises FTP Fell Short of the Group's Controls

The function's file exchange ran on on-premises FTP infrastructure. What LVMH requires of a system in that position is specific: management-console access behind the group's own Okta identity, with SAML single sign-on and MFA; IP whitelist control on every connection; and independent storage for each user, so no account sees another's data. The requirements the team wrote for a replacement were a map of what the FTP estate was not doing, because nobody lists what they already have.

The volume made the problem harder, not easier. At the start the workload was small: fewer than 200 files and under 20 MB moving in and out per day. The controls did not scale down with it. The group requires the same identity, isolation and audit standard on a 20 MB workload as on any other, so the team needed enterprise-grade governance on a footprint far smaller than the platforms built for it usually assume.

There was a longer clock running too. Anything that handles maison data inside the LVMH estate faces the group's scrutiny: a third-party security review, a disaster-recovery assessment against group audit policy, a data-classification review. The team needed one platform that could take SFTP and API traffic to external partners and to its Mulesoft API management layer and meet the controls from the first day.

LVMH Fashion Group Asia selected Files.com as that platform and retired the on-premises FTP infrastructure.

One Files.com Site, Every Maison Behind It

Files.com became the single governed exchange layer between the maisons' store systems, their business applications and their outside partners. The site went live small and controlled, with the full control set active from day one.

The boundary work came first. Console login ran through LVMH-owned Okta with SAML SSO and MFA. Connections sat behind IP whitelists. Every user had independent storage, and Groups with delegated Group Admins kept administration organized, so nine brands shared one site without sharing anything else.

SFTP was the primary path: scheduled point-of-sale and HR extracts flowed through Files.com into the team's Dynamics 365 environment, while per-maison Mulesoft service accounts let each brand's API integrations run under their own identity. Files.com Automations and sync rules routed recurring files without anyone touching them, and an outbound connection delivered files onward to SharePoint. Files.com thus handled recurring SFTP and API workflows across maisons while preserving separate identities and connecting to the application estate the team already operated instead of replacing it.

Cleared Once by the Group, Then Scaled Past Its Launch Profile

With Files.com in production, the shared-services function replaced its FTP estate with a platform that met the group's control requirements and that every maison now builds on.

• A single security-by-design assessment cleared the entire solution, and the group's data-classification review separately cleared the platform's continued use for the retail data work.
• The team ran a full disaster-recovery assessment of the platform against LVMH group audit policy, covering recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives and the recovery procedure itself, and Files.com remains the exchange layer on the other side of that audit.
• The site opened with fewer than 200 files and 20 MB moving per day. It has since expanded to carry daily retail feeds from stores in three countries and hundreds of thousands of API calls a day.

The immediate result was an exchange layer that met the controls. The compounding result is what followed: every subsequent workload has been configuration on an already-cleared platform rather than a new tool paying its way through a new review, whether it involved a new maison feed, a new partner or a new downstream delivery like SharePoint.

The Exchange Layer Every Maison Builds On

Today, when a maison brings a new partner or a new system feed to the shared-services team, the work starts on a platform LVMH's own reviewers have already assessed: Okta at the door, whitelisted connections, storage that keeps each house's data its own. Before Files.com, the same request meant either stretching an FTP estate below those requirements or introducing another tool into the estate and paying the group's review over again. For a back office whose whole purpose is giving nine houses shared rails without eroding what makes each one distinct, that is the change Files.com delivered: the group's control regime became a cost paid once, and file exchange became something every maison simply plugs into.