alice + olivia Feeds POS iPads in 300 Stores Without Exposing Its New York Image Server

alice + olivia is a New York contemporary womenswear label sold through wholesale partners and its own retail estate.

That business depends on current product imagery all the way to the point of sale. On the boutique floor, store representatives work from POS iPads that show current product imagery and process transactions. The website sells from the same imagery online. And all of it originates in one place: an image server in the company’s New York datacenter. The challenge was to get those images to 300 sales floors and the public website without exposing or replacing the server.

One Server in New York, and 300 Sales Floors That Depend on It

The image server holds the brand’s product imagery. The devices that need it sit everywhere else: POS iPads in 300 retail locations, and a public website. Every look a representative shows a customer, and every product page the site renders, traces back to files on that one internal machine.

An internal file server was never built to serve that audience. Feeding hundreds of public-facing retail devices and a website directly from the datacenter would mean exposing the server to the internet and sizing it for retail traffic, and neither was going to happen. At the same time, alice + olivia had committed to retiring its on-premises SFTP and FTP servers and moving partner and datacenter file transfers to a cloud-only service. Those file-transfer workloads could leave their servers behind. This one could not, because the image server was the source system. It was where the imagery lived, and replacing it was not the project.

alice + olivia selected Files.com to bring the requirements together: private outbound access to the source, automatic synchronization, branded public delivery, and distribution across its retail footprint.

An Outbound Agent Inside, a Public Feed Outside

The build had two halves, one on each side of the firewall.

Inside, alice + olivia deployed the Files.com Agent against the image server. The Agent made a single outbound encrypted connection to Files.com. Nothing connected inward: no inbound firewall rule was opened, and no on-premises system listened on the internet. Over that connection, a Files.com sync pulled product imagery off the server into folders on Files.com and kept pulling as the imagery changed, so the cloud copy stayed current on its own.

Outside, those folders became the feed. Files.com served them publicly over the brand’s own domain, on dedicated IP addresses, and the POS iPads in every store and the website read from them.

The division of labor was clean. The image server kept doing what it always did: holding the imagery, inside the datacenter, under the company’s control. Files.com did the part an internal server never could, carrying the public endpoint and the retail-scale traffic under the brand’s name.

Current Imagery in Every Store, From a Server That Never Faced the Internet

With the pipeline in production, the reach of the image server is no longer bounded by the room it sits in.

• Store representatives in 300 retail locations show products and process transactions using current imagery, fed automatically from the same internal source the company already ran.
• The website draws on the same folders, so the sales floor and the site work from one imagery pipeline instead of two.
• The image server was never exposed and never replaced. There is no inbound path to it, and the company’s move to cloud-only file-transfer infrastructure did not have to force out a source system that still does its job.
• Opening the next boutique adds nothing to the pipeline. A new store’s iPads read the same public folders every other store already reads.

From a Private Server to Every Point of Sale

Today a representative on a boutique floor pulls up a look on an iPad, and the image on the screen came off a server in New York that has never faced the internet. Nobody carried it there, and nothing was opened up to make the trip possible.

The usual assumption is that an internal system has to be replaced, or exposed, before it can serve a distributed business. alice + olivia did neither. The server stayed private, Files.com made its content public, and the retail estate can keep growing without the pipeline changing at all.