Tellabs Uses Files.com to Move Files Between Isolated Lab and Corporate Networks—Without Connecting Them

Tellabs builds fiber-based enterprise networks: Optical LAN hardware for buildings and campuses, and the software that provisions and manages it. For its DoD-facing work, strict controls on where data resides and who can reach it are part of the job.

Tellabs applies the same discipline to its own infrastructure. The lab networks where its equipment is developed and tested are deliberately kept separate from the corporate network where the rest of the business runs. The problem is that the work does not stay on one side of that line. An engineer can need a file produced in the other environment, and the architecture provided no sanctioned way for it to get there.

Two Networks, Kept Apart on Purpose

The separation is the point of the design. What the design does not include is a sanctioned path for a file to cross it.

Every convenient answer to that problem is a connection. A shared drive both networks mount, or a server one side exposes to the other, links the environments the architecture says must never link. The constraint ran deeper than topology, too: some of the internal servers where the files actually live are non-standard systems that ordinary transfer tooling does not cleanly reach. So the boundary held, and the file exchange the work required had no legitimate route across it.

When Tellabs decided in late 2024 to move its file transfer off self-managed infrastructure, closing that gap was on the requirements list.

What the Crossing Point Had to Be

The fix could not be a better tunnel between the networks. It had to be an intermediary that sits outside both, so that each environment connects outward and neither ever accepts a connection in. It had to reach the servers where the files live, including the non-standard internal ones. It had to control which direction files flow on each path. And it had to authenticate and record every crossing, so the one sanctioned route was also a fully accounted-for one.

Tellabs selected Files.com to be that intermediary.

Agents Inside Each Network, Files.com Between Them

Files.com became the crossing point between networks that never touch: a middle layer both environments reach out to, through which every file passes on its way to the other side.

The Files.com Agent is what makes that compatible with the isolation. Tellabs deployed agents on servers inside the separated environments, including the non-standard internal servers that had been out of reach, and each agent holds only an outbound, mutually authenticated HTTPS connection to Files.com. Neither network opens an inbound port. From the outside, each environment looks exactly as closed as it did before.

On top of the agents, Files.com Remote Sync carries the recurring flows. Tellabs runs its syncs one-way, so each path through the middle layer moves files in a single, deliberate direction. For the file a person needs to move right now, the Files.com Desktop App gives users direct access to the same folders, under the same permissions.

The middle layer did not become another place to keep data. Files.com connects to the OneDrive and SharePoint storage Tellabs already runs, so files cross through it without the company standing up a new storage silo. Access to the crossing point is governed from the corporate directory: users sign in through Microsoft Entra ID with two-factor authentication enforced, and SCIM provisioning creates and removes accounts as the directory changes. Every action performed through the platform lands in its audit log.

Within roughly four months, the agent-based sync to an on-premise server was in production and in users' hands.

The Isolation Holds, and the Files Move

With the workflow in production, Tellabs replaced a boundary with no sanctioned route across it with a boundary that has exactly one. Engineers can now retrieve needed files across the boundary without changing the network design.

Recurring flows run unattended as scheduled one-way syncs, while ad-hoc movement happens through the Desktop App. Both use the same permissions and audit log.

All the Connection the Work Ever Needed

Today, the isolation Tellabs built its environments around no longer stands between an engineer and a file on the other side of the boundary. What used to be a line the work had to stop at is now a line with one governed way across: Files.com authenticates whoever approaches it, moves files in the direction Tellabs chose, and records everything that crosses. The networks that were built never to touch each other still don't. Each one touches Files.com instead, and that turned out to be all the connection the work ever needed.