Global Regions

Files.com has servers across the globe and lets you configure the geographic region (and by extension, political jurisdiction) where your files are stored.

When you change the geographic region, new files are immediately stored in the newly selected region. Files that were stored prior to the region change are migrated to the new region automatically in a background process.

You might enable Files.com multi-region storage to keep files in a specific geographic region for legal restrictions like GDPR, HIPAA, or company policy. You might also use it to reduce network latency for users far from the default region, or to conserve bandwidth by storing heavily used files closer to the people accessing them.

Multi-Region Pricing and Plans

Site administrators can set your entire site, at the root level, to store all files in any single region.

Your site can have more than one region active at the same time. Site administrators, and users with administrator rights to a folder, can set the region location for any folder.

Use Case Example

Multi-region storage is most useful for organizations with users based across multiple continents. Organizations with that kind of international presence are typically on an Enterprise plan.

Consider a company headquartered in Australia with offices in Singapore, Japan, France, and the UK, and hardly any presence in the US. Multi-region storage, combined with a well-organized folder structure, can improve the performance of their Files.com site.

The first step is to identify which content is specific to each region, especially files that are frequently accessed or extremely large, such as videos or architectural drawings. Once the high-impact content has been identified, the folder structure may need to be redesigned.

Files targeted at a specific region belong in the same set of folders, and those folders have their geographic region set to the one closest to the primary users of the content.

Imagine a Training Videos folder at the top level holding training videos produced in different languages for each country where there are offices. The simplest approach is to organize the videos by language and country into their respective folders. For example, Videos-en-AU for English language videos for Australian employees, Videos-en-UK for English language videos for British employees, Videos-fr-FR for French language videos for French employees, Videos-fr-BE for French language videos for Belgian employees, and Videos-es-ES for Spanish language videos for Spanish employees. Trainers can then identify the language and region for videos specific to their locale.

When the Training Videos folder's region is changed to Australia, all of its subfolders (Videos-en-AU, Videos-fr-BE, etc.) are also stored in the Australia region.

The next task is to change the geographic storage region of the remaining video folders to their respective regions. (Videos-en-AU is already set to Australia because the parent folder Training Videos is set to Australia.)

France, Belgium, and Spain are all members of the European Union, so you can configure the subfolders for Videos-fr-FR, Videos-fr-BE and Videos-sp-ES to use the "EU - Germany, Frankfurt" storage region. Set the Videos-en-UK subfolder to use the "UK, London" storage region.

Any videos placed into these folders are then stored in the corresponding regions.

Note: This example assumes you are creating an empty folder structure prior to uploading content. If your folder structure already contains data, configure the storage regions from the bottom up rather than the top down. That avoids unnecessary migration of data between regions.

A simple design like this can improve performance and reduce costs, even when your users are widely scattered geographically.