alice + olivia Replaced Two On-Prem SFTP Servers and Automated More Than a Dozen Partner Connections With Files.com

alice + olivia is a contemporary womenswear label headquartered in New York City. Its business spans design, wholesale, and direct-to-consumer retail, connecting the brand with trading partners, its own retail operations, and a distribution site in Secaucus, New Jersey.

A wholesale business at that scale runs on file exchange. Orders, inventory, and returns move continuously between the brand, its trading partners, and its own distribution operation. For years, all of that traffic—more than a dozen live partner connections plus transfers between two datacenters—passed through two on-premises servers.

Every Partner File Passed Through Two Aging Servers

The exchange point was a pair of on-premises SFTP/FTP servers, one in the company's New York datacenter and one in New Jersey. Partners and vendors uploaded orders, inventory, and returns to those servers for ingest at the New Jersey distribution site. The same servers carried transfers between the company's own two datacenters. In effect, the data that ran the business crossed those two machines.

The servers had become error-prone, and errors on an ingest path are never cheap: every failed upload stood between a partner's data and the operation waiting on it, and every failure had to be diagnosed by hand. That troubleshooting fell to a small IT group, and it had become cumbersome. The partner connections themselves were manual too, set up and kept working by hand, one at a time.

What kept the servers in place was their position. A dozen-plus live partner and vendor integrations pointed at them, both datacenters depended on them, and the traffic they carried was business-critical. Replacing them was not a re-hosting job. It meant moving live partner connections and both datacenter transfers before the old servers could be retired.

The Fix Had to Be Cloud-Only and Cover Everything the Servers Did

As the errors mounted, the company decided the fix would not be another server. The requirement was a cloud-only service, with no on-premises transfer infrastructure left to run. It had to cover both halves of the old servers' job: the partner and vendor exchange, and the movement of files between the New York and New Jersey datacenters.

alice + olivia selected Files.com to be that cloud exchange layer.

A Dozen-Plus Automated Partner Connections on One Files.com Site

Files.com became what the servers had been: the single exchange point between the brand, its partners, and its own datacenters, with the connections automated rather than managed by hand.

More than a dozen vendor and partner connections now run over SFTP on the Files.com site, carrying the orders, inventory, and returns that feed the distribution operation. The site runs on the company's own custom domain with dedicated IP addresses, so partners connect to an address that carries the brand's name, and partner-side firewall rules have a fixed target.

The internal traffic moved with it. Transfers between the New York and New Jersey datacenters run through the same site, on the same platform as the partner exchange.

Files.com also extended what the exchange can speak. One trading partner’s AS2 connection runs on the same site alongside SFTP. The old servers never offered that protocol at all.

With the traffic cut over, alice + olivia decommissioned the on-premises SFTP/FTP servers in both datacenters.

Both Servers Are Gone, and the Connections Run Themselves

With the Files.com exchange in production, alice + olivia replaced infrastructure it had to operate with a service it only has to configure.

• Both on-premises SFTP/FTP servers are decommissioned. There is nothing left to patch, size, or troubleshoot in either datacenter.
• More than a dozen automated SFTP connections carry the vendor and partner traffic that used to depend on hand-managed connections.
• Internal transfers between the two datacenters run through the same platform as the partner traffic.
• Partners that require AS2 can connect to the same site, a protocol the old infrastructure could not serve.

The compounding change is what the next partner costs. Onboarding a new vendor used to mean configuring a connection on a server the IT team then had to keep healthy. Now it is a connection configured on Files.com, on infrastructure nobody at the company operates.

More Than the Same Server in the Cloud

The easy version of retiring an on-prem SFTP server is renting the same server in the cloud and pointing the same manual connections at it. alice + olivia used the move to change what its exchange is. Today the data that runs the business still flows to the distribution floor every day, and nobody has to keep a server alive for it to get there.