Regional Storage

Files.com has servers across the globe and provides the option to configure the geographic region (and by extension, political jurisdiction) where your files will be stored.

Once the geographic region is changed, new files will be immediately stored in the newly selected region. Files that were stored prior to the region change will be migrated automatically to the new region in a background process.

There are a number of reasons, you might choose to enable Files.com multi-region storage feature for your site. You can use the feature for keeping or restricting files to a specific geographical region in order to comply with legal restrictions like GDPR, HIPAA, company policies, etc. You could enable regional storage for minimizing network latency for heavily used or large files frequently accessed by users residing in a region distant from the default region. You might use multi-region storage for conserving bandwidth in heavy traffic regions by leveraging the presence of servers in the same or nearby geographical region rather than transferring large files across multiple continents.

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.

The use cases listed at the top of this article are self-explanatory. The remaining cases are concerns for organizations with users based across multiple continents. Organizations with such an international presence are typically on a Premier plan.

Let's examine how to configure data routing when the goal is minimizing network latency for heavily used or large files frequently accessed by users residing in a region distant from the default region. If a company headquartered in Australia has offices in Singapore, Japan, France, and the UK but hardly any presence in the US, then the multi-region storage feature with proper configuration of the folder structure can improve the performance of their Files.com site.

The first step should be to identify which content is specific to each region, especially those files that are either frequently accessed or those that are extremely large, such as videos or architectural drawings. Once the high-impact content has been identified, a redesign of their folder structure may be needed.

All files targeted at a specific region should be contained in the same set of folders which will need to have their geographic region changed to the one closest to the primary users of this content.

Imagine we have a "Training Videos" folder as a top-level folder for training videos which are being produced in different languages for each country where there are offices. The easiest 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. This allows trainers to easily identify the language and region for videos specific to their locale.

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

The next task is to change the geographic storage region of the remaining five 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 we can configure the subfolders for "Videos-fr-FR", "Videos-fr-BE" and "Videos-sp-ES" to use the "EU - Germany, Frankfurt" storage region. Finally, we can set the "Videos-en-UK" subfolder to use the "UK, London" storage region.

Now, any videos that are placed into these folders will be stored in the corresponding regions.

Note: The above example assumes that you are creating an empty folder structure, prior to uploading content into the folders. If your folder structure contains existing data then start to configure the storage regions from the bottom, rather than from the top. This will avoid unnecessary migration of data between regions.

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