Porsche Cars North America Built a Files.com Alternative to Email and FileZilla That Teams Adopted Without Promotion

Porsche Cars North America (PCNA) is the exclusive U.S. importer and distributor for Porsche AG. From its Atlanta headquarters, the company supports Porsche’s North American dealer network with sales, marketing, parts, service, and training.

A national sales company builds no cars. Its work runs through outside parties: agencies that produce marketing collateral, vendors that supply services and data, dealers and workshops that send documents in, business partners that exchange files with the legal department. And as a wholly owned subsidiary of Porsche AG, PCNA does all of it under the parent company’s security rules, including strict guidelines on where and how files may be hosted. Every one of those relationships needs files to cross the company boundary. There was no sanctioned way to do it.

Every Team Improvised Its Own Way to Move Files

Legal collected case documents over email. Files from dealers, workshops, and vendors arrived as attachments in individual mailboxes, with no way to manage what an external party could send or see, and no controlled structure for the documents to land in. Elsewhere in the company, users ran FileZilla on their desktops with direct FTP access to an external server in Germany. The Data Services Team issued individual FTP credentials to vendors and handled file distribution by hand.

The cost fell on the information security team. It did not have one place to see or manage who had access to what: access lived in email threads and FTP credentials scattered across teams. And it could not give the business any assurance that confidential material leaving the company met Porsche’s hosting security guidelines.

The improvisation persisted because nothing compliant existed to replace it. Any sanctioned channel had to clear the parent company’s hosting security guidelines. It had to authenticate users through single sign-on federated through Porsche AG’s identity estate. It had to carry Porsche’s own branding, meet partners’ data-location requirements, and serve needs as different as legal document collection, marketing collateral review, and vendor file transfer on a single platform. Until something met that bar, each team’s workaround stayed the path of least resistance.

When legal needed a compliant way to collect documents from vendors and business partners, the information security team took ownership of the problem and set out to stand up one sanctioned tool for the whole business, not another single-team workaround. The team selected Files.com to be that channel—and business units would expand its use without an internal campaign.

“The security team... brought in Files.com to provide a secure file sharing solution for the business to be able to share files externally.”

One Governed Site Behind Porsche’s Identity and Brand

What the security team built is a single front door for files crossing the company boundary, run under Porsche’s name and Porsche’s identity system.

Internal users sign in through single sign-on against Microsoft Entra ID, federated through the parent company’s identity estate, so access to the file platform is corporate identity rather than another account to manage. The site runs on a branded Porsche domain, so an agency or vendor who receives a link sees Porsche, not a third-party tool. The site’s storage sits in Files.com’s Canada zone, chosen to meet partner data-location requirements.

Inbound documents arrive through Files.com Inboxes. A partner uploads through a branded page without creating an account, the files land in a controlled folder structure instead of a mailbox, and received material moves into SharePoint, PCNA’s internal system of record. During onboarding, the legal team learned to configure its own Inboxes for collecting documents from vendors and business partners.

Outbound and iterative sharing runs on Share Links. Marketing, customer relations, and PR exchange collateral with outside agencies, sending drafts out and taking revisions back through the same governed site. It is the largest single body of activity on the platform. For some vendors, file exchange moved from FileZilla desktop clients to SFTP on the same governed site.

Access is deliberately pull-based. The security team does not promote the tool internally. An employee who needs to share files externally requests access against a stated use case, and the team grants it on the platform it already governs.

The Channel Security Owns Is the One the Business Asks For

With the site in production, PCNA replaced per-team improvisation with one sanctioned, auditable channel for external file exchange.

• External sharing for legal and compliance, for marketing, PR, and customer relations, and for IT runs through one platform the security team owns, with every exchange on the record.
• Documents from partners and vendors land in controlled Inboxes and flow into SharePoint, instead of sitting as attachments in individual mailboxes.
• Some vendors that once needed a FileZilla FTP client on a PCNA desktop now exchange files over SFTP against the governed site.
• Porsche reviews its vendors every year, and Files.com’s SOC 2 Type II report and bridge letter satisfy that review.

The internal user base grew by more than half in a single year, with no internal promotion at all. Business units bring their use cases to the security team because the sanctioned channel is already there: compliant, branded, and connected to corporate identity.

Security Went From Having No Answer to Owning It

PCNA did not beat improvised file sharing by banning it. It beat it by standing up one Files.com channel that is easier to get than the workaround and compliant by construction, and let demand do the rest.