A Shipping Software Company Replaces AWS File Transfer, Dropbox, Egnyte, ShareFile, and More Across Its Brands With Files.com

A shipping and mailing software company runs a portfolio of brands spanning online postage, order fulfillment, multi-carrier shipping APIs, and enterprise delivery management.

The portfolio was assembled over decades, and each brand in it kept its own name, its own domain, and its own customer relationships. That is the point of the portfolio. A customer of one brand buys postage from that brand, and a customer of another manages orders in that one, whether or not either has ever heard of the parent company. Behind all of those brands sits one central IT organization, accountable for security and governance across every one of them.

Many customer-facing identities in front, one governing IT team behind: that combination is what made the company's file transfer problem inevitable. The company needed to replace six kinds of file-transfer tooling with common governance without collapsing its customer-facing brands into a generic portal or moving their files out of its own AWS S3 storage.

The company selected Files.com to provide that layer: one account underneath every brand's front door.

File Exchange Had Accumulated One Brand at a Time

By 2022, file exchange across the portfolio looked the way the portfolio had grown. One brand at a time. Customer uploads and outbound file delivery ran on in-house custom SFTP servers in one place, AWS File Transfer in another, Google Cloud file services in a third, and Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile elsewhere. Six kinds of tooling, six administration consoles, six sets of accounts to keep in step by hand.

The cost landed on central IT. The company's file exchange is customer-facing in both directions: consumers and business customers upload files into brand workflows, and brands deliver large files back out. Each brand ran those flows on the tool it had. IT was accountable for all of it, and wanted one identity model, one permission model, and one audit trail across every brand. Every brand meant another tool to administer and another set of accounts to keep current by hand.

One Platform Normally Means One Domain

The obvious fix had an obvious problem. Consolidating file transfer onto one platform normally means one site: one domain, one login page, one sender address on every notification email. A multi-brand portfolio cannot accept that. A customer of one brand uploading a file needs to land on that brand's page, not on a generic transfer portal, and certainly not on a page carrying some vendor's name. Brand identity was not a preference the company could trade away for cleaner governance. It is what the portfolio is.

So the requirements the company's IT leadership set out in 2022 read as a contradiction by the standards of most platforms. A branded tenant for every brand, each with its own custom domain, its own SSL certificate, its own branding, its own email identity, and its own Okta SAML federation. All of it rolling up to one account and one set of controls. The same employee identity valid across every tenant, without being administered separately for each brand. And the files themselves staying in the company's own AWS S3 buckets, spread across multiple AWS accounts, rather than moving onto a vendor's storage.

A Child Site for Every Brand, One Account Underneath

Files.com carried the structure directly, using child sites: fully separate Files.com sites nested under one parent account. Each brand received a child site with its own custom domain, its own branding, and its own custom SMTP configuration, so every page a customer sees and every email a customer receives reads as that brand and nothing else. Each site federated to Okta with its own SAML metadata. Because every site links under one parent, an employee carries a single identity across all of them, and IT administers users, permissions, and policy from one place instead of one console per brand.

The storage never moved. Using Files.com remote server mounts, the company pointed each site's folders at its own S3 buckets, across multiple AWS accounts, so a file uploaded through any branded portal lands in storage the company owns. Files.com became the transfer, identity, and audit layer on top. The buckets stayed the buckets.

The day-to-day workflows then moved onto that structure. External customers upload into branded sites, and the staff who handle those files can see from Files.com file history the client IP each upload came from, without needing administrator rights to look. Outbound delivery of large files runs on share links with expiration policies. The sharing that once ran through Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile now runs as branded, expiring links recorded in the same Files.com audit trail.

The rollout ran in parallel with the old estate rather than as a cutover. The first brand's site went to production in early 2022 while subdomains for the remaining brands were reserved in advance, and the estate grew from the first few sites to one for every brand within roughly three months.

Six Tools Became One Platform

With the child-site estate in production, the company retired six categories of file-transfer tooling accumulated one brand at a time: custom SFTP servers, AWS File Transfer, Google Cloud file services, Dropbox, Egnyte, and ShareFile.

One identity model now covers the portfolio. An employee federated through Okta carries the same identity into any brand's site, and IT no longer administers the same person once per brand.

Adding a brand also became a pattern rather than a project. The company added the remaining brands in roughly three months, each stamped from the same design: a child site, a custom domain, a SAML federation, and a set of S3 mounts.

Many Brands in Front, One Company Behind

Today, the company runs file exchange the way it runs the portfolio itself: many brands in front, one company behind. A customer uploading to a brand's portal sees only that brand. The IT team behind the page sees one Files.com account, one identity model, and one audit trail across those branded sites.