Rimkus Replaced SolarWinds Serv-U Links and a 67,000-File USB Workflow With Files.com

Rimkus is a global engineering and technical consulting firm. Its experts investigate why things failed — a building, a vehicle, a pipeline, a product — and deliver findings for corporations, insurance companies, law firms, and government agencies, including independent expert reports and testimony under cross-examination on matters ranging from small claims to multi-billion-dollar disputes. The firm operates from more than 100 offices worldwide, covering all 50 US states and 10 countries.

The work is organized as discrete client jobs, and each job gets its own SharePoint site: the system of record for everything the project produces and receives. Nearly every job also means exchanging files with outside parties. Clients, counsel, and vendors send in drawings, photos, video, audio, and inspection records, and Rimkus sends deliverables back. In a forensics practice, many of those files are evidence. How a file arrived, and who has touched it since, is not a detail. It is part of the product.

To block USB devices without disrupting that exchange, Rimkus put Files.com in front of SharePoint as an auditable path for external files — replacing physical handoffs and SolarWinds Serv-U share links while keeping SharePoint as the system of record.

67,000 Files a Month, Hand-Carried on USB Drives

External file exchange ran on two channels, and neither one kept a record.

The first was physical media. Clients handed USB thumb drives to Rimkus staff in meetings, and the traffic ran overwhelmingly inbound: roughly 135 drives a month arrived from outside parties. In one sampled month, 134 employees moved 67,000 files on USB drives. Drives get lost. Every inbound drive was unknown media plugged into a company machine. The security team could measure the data-loss exposure precisely, and could not yet remove it.

The second channel was link sharing off an SFTP server. Ad-hoc exchange ran through a SolarWinds Serv-U server the team maintained itself, using links that expired on a fixed timer. When a client missed the window, someone at Rimkus went back, found the files, and shared them again.

“It's very cumbersome and hard to manage.”

There were no client credentials on that server, and no log of who retrieved what. For most companies that is an efficiency problem. For a firm whose product is expert findings, it was worse: material that might become evidence moved in and out with no chain of custody. Nobody could say who sent a file, when it arrived, or who had opened it since.

A USB Ban That Needed Its Replacement First

Both channels survived because they matched how clients actually work. A lawyer with a folder of site photos hands over a drive in a meeting. A one-time counterparty asks where to send a video. Shutting off USB acceptance with nothing in its place would not have stopped the files. It would have stopped the work.

So when Rimkus moved to block USB devices under an internal security policy, the ban came with a condition: external parties needed another way in before the policy could take effect.

That replacement had to clear four bars. Repeat clients needed credentialed access — a portal they sign into, not another anonymous link. One-off senders needed a path with no account and nothing to install. It had to carry the large drawings and media files the work runs on. And it could not create a second copy of the data: files had to land in the job's SharePoint site, the system of record, rather than on a staging server someone empties by hand.

“We're moving away from the use of USB devices and forcing our end users to share files with external parties using an FTP solution, ideally one that's connected to SharePoint, so we're not duplicating data, not moving data up and down.”

Files.com met those requirements.

One Connection Into 20,000 SharePoint Project Sites

The architecture started from where the data already lived. Using a Files.com Remote Server Mount, Rimkus connected Files.com to its SharePoint tenant through a single system-level Entra ID connection. Every job site's address is derived from its job number, so one connection and one credential set can reach an estate of more than 20,000 active project sites, with each mounted site appearing in Files.com as an ordinary folder. A file uploaded through Files.com writes straight through to the job's SharePoint folder in real time. Nothing is duplicated, and nothing has to be moved between systems afterward.

On top of that mount sits the exchange layer. Repeat clients get Files.com credentials scoped to the folders for their own project. They sign in, see their job and nothing else, and what they submit lands in that job's SharePoint site. For a one-off sender, Rimkus issues a Files.com share link or an inbox address instead. The sender uploads from a browser, with no account, and the file arrives in the same project folder.

Rimkus's own engineers use the same front door from the field. On site, they upload photos and recordings from the Files.com mobile app directly into the job's files.

Every one of those actions — the sign-in, the upload, the download — lands in the Files.com audit log. The record the old channels never kept is now produced as a side effect of using the system.

The USB Ban Went Live Without Breaking Client Work

With Files.com in front of SharePoint, Rimkus replaced hand-carried drives and expiring links with one governed exchange path, and the USB restriction could take effect without cutting clients off.

• A channel that moved 67,000 files in a single sampled month is closed. Lost drives and unknown media plugged into company machines stopped being a standing exposure.
• Every sign-in, upload, and download now leaves an audit record. For a business whose files are often evidence, that provides a transfer history where there was none.
• Files land directly in the correct job's SharePoint folder. Nobody copies data off a drive, re-shares an expired link, or maintains a staging server by hand.

The compounding result is that the pattern applies to every new job Rimkus opens. Because the mount is keyed to the site naming convention, each new project's SharePoint site can be reached through the same connection. The governed path is the default, not a per-project build.

Evidence Exchange With a Record Behind It

Today, a client with data for Rimkus signs into a portal or opens a link, and the file is in the job's SharePoint site with a record behind it before anyone at Rimkus has touched it. The consultant in a meeting no longer takes custody of a stranger's thumb drive, and nobody spends the afternoon re-sharing links that timed out.