QIMA Brings FTP Media Uploads From China Into Amazon S3 With Files.com—Without Building Its Own Gateway

QIMA inspects the products the world buys. Brands and retailers hire it to check goods on the factory floor, audit suppliers, and test products in its own laboratory network. Operating across 85 countries, QIMA provides quality assurance and supply-chain compliance services for consumer-goods brands and manufacturers.

That model produces files. Inspection is evidence work. What an inspector sees gets captured as images and video, and it does QIMA no good until it reaches QIMA’s systems. QIMA needed users across Asia-Pacific, including mainland China, to move roughly one to two terabytes of that media every month. Moving it across that geography was not an edge case for this business. It was part of how the business worked every day.

An S3 Bucket the Field Could Not Reach

The destination for that media was an Amazon S3 bucket of QIMA’s own. The problem was the route in.

S3 does not speak FTP. Without a front end, QIMA faced manual access provisioning for every user or a gateway it would have to build and operate.

Then there was geography. QIMA’s requirement was blunt: access from China was a must. Any route QIMA built or bought had to hold up there.

FTP Into S3, a Folder Per User, and It Had to Work From China

By 2022 the requirements were explicit. The front end had to speak FTP and SFTP. It had to land files in the bucket QIMA already ran. It had to create a folder per user in S3 automatically, with no administrator work in the bucket per person, because the user count was expected to keep growing. Web sign-in had to authenticate against Azure, QIMA’s identity provider, over SAML. It had to serve users across Asia-Pacific and work reliably from inside China. And it had to carry the volume QIMA was actually moving: roughly one to two terabytes of images and video every month.

QIMA selected Files.com to be that front end.

Files.com in Front, the Bucket Underneath

For QIMA, Files.com became the protocol, identity, and provisioning layer on storage it already owned. Using the Files.com remote server integration, QIMA connected its S3 bucket behind its Files.com site, so files delivered to the site landed in the bucket. A user connected over FTP or SFTP with an ordinary client. On the other side of that connection was S3, and nobody needed an AWS credential to get there.

When QIMA added a user, Files.com provisioned that user’s folder in S3 automatically. Each person got their own space in the bucket without anyone configuring bucket access by hand. Web access authenticated through SAML against Azure, so those accounts lived in the corporate directory rather than in one more credential store. And the endpoint reached users across Asia-Pacific and from inside China.

A New User Is a Folder That Creates Itself

With Files.com in production, the bucket stopped being a destination only an engineer could reach and became an endpoint any provisioned user can deliver to.

• Users across Asia-Pacific and China move images and video into S3 over standard FTP and SFTP, on the order of one to two terabytes a month.
• Adding a user requires no manual S3 folder provisioning. Their folder appears in the bucket automatically as the workforce grows.

QIMA never migrated the data and never built the gateway. It put Files.com in front of a bucket it already had, and object storage became something a person in the field can deliver to over FTP.

Years Later, Still the Route In

Years after it was stood up, the same route is still how field media reaches QIMA’s object storage.