A Medicare Brokerage Moved Its Five9 Call Archive to Files.com and Scaled It Into the Hundreds of Terabytes

A US Medicare brokerage’s licensed agents sell and service Medicare plans on behalf of national carriers through a regulated contact-center operation.

Those calls are regulated work. A recording is the record of what an agent said to a Medicare beneficiary, it carries protected health information, and HIPAA obligates the company to keep it for 7 to 10 years. A brokerage that sells by phone at this scale is, whether it planned to be or not, in the business of operating a very large audio archive.

A Retention Obligation That Lived Inside the Phone System

Five9 runs the company’s contact centers and records the calls. For years it also kept them. The recordings stayed on the telephony platform that created them, which meant the retention copy the compliance function depended on was a feature of the phone system.

That arrangement tied a recurring compliance workload to the contact-center platform. Compliance requests are business as usual at a Medicare brokerage, and a request typically names specific recordings and needs them quickly. The archive had to preserve individual retrieval across hundreds of thousands of files. Meanwhile, nothing ages out for the better part of a decade: every day of selling adds recordings, and none leave for 7 to 10 years. An archive like that only grows, and it was growing inside a product bought to route phone calls. Its capacity and retrieval both ran through decisions about the contact-center platform rather than decisions the compliance function controlled.

By the time the brokerage moved, the history was tens of terabytes. The archive also needed to receive everything Five9 produced from then on, let the person fielding a compliance request pull a single named recording on demand, and support an automated second copy. The brokerage selected Files.com as the archive of record.

An Archive of Record, Fed by Five9 Over SFTP

The historical recordings were ported out of Five9 and into Files.com over SFTP, taking the retention copy off the telephony platform for good. Five9 keeps recording calls. It now delivers each recording downstream to the company’s Files.com site over the same protocol, authenticated with SSH keys and restricted by IP whitelisting so that only known systems can connect.

Retrieval runs the other way. When a compliance request names a recording, the team that fields it pulls the file through the Files.com web interface, directly from a browser.

The archive also keeps its own insurance. An in-house Python tool works against the Files.com API and automatically downloads files to a secondary location, so the retention copy is never the only copy. One platform receives from Five9 over SFTP, serves a person in a browser, and serves a script over the API. That combination is what makes it an archive of record rather than a pile of files.

Into the Hundreds of Terabytes Without Changing the Pattern

With the Files.com workflow in production, the brokerage separated a decade-long compliance obligation from the platform that generates the recordings.

• The HIPAA retention obligation, 7 to 10 years across hundreds of thousands of recordings, is carried by a platform whose job is storing and retrieving files. Five9 is back to doing telephony.
• Compliance pulls are routine. A request naming specific recordings is answered by the person who received it, from the browser, without touching the contact-center platform.
• The archive has grown on Files.com from tens of terabytes at the move into the hundreds of terabytes today, and the operating pattern never changed. Each day’s calls land over the same SFTP feed, and the growth is simply absorbed.
• The second copy is automated. The Python tool keeps a secondary location current through the Files.com API, with no one running downloads by hand.

A Compliance Archive That Answers to Compliance

The lesson travels beyond Medicare sales. Long-term retention of call recordings does not have to live on the platform that recorded them.