Aras Replaced Progress Serv-U With a Scripted Files.com Portal for 460 PLM Customers

Aras Corporation makes Aras Innovator, a product lifecycle management platform for large, complex manufacturers. Its enterprise open source model pairs heavily customized customer deployments with a subscription covering support, updates, and upgrades performed by Aras itself.

That model has a consequence for infrastructure. Delivering PLM as a service relationship means Aras's professional services and support teams work directly on customer systems. A customer's database comes to Aras, gets packaged and upgraded version by version, and goes back. Support receives a copy of a customer's instance, stands up the same environment locally, and shares the fix back. These files run 100 GB to 1.5 TB apiece, they carry customers' product data, and they move constantly between Aras and hundreds of subscriber companies. File exchange is not adjacent to Aras's business. It is how the product gets delivered.

Twenty Years of Customer Exchange on One Co-Located FTP Server

For 15 to 20 years, that exchange ran on an on-premises Serv-U FTP server in a co-location facility. The server offered no meaningful reporting on who was active or what they had done, and its logging was close to useless. Multiple internal teams had access to every customer's folders. Getting files to a customer depended entirely on individual employees: someone created the company's folder by hand, generated a share link, and personally sent the right link to the right company.

Aras leadership named the risk plainly. Nearly everything moving through the system was sensitive customer data, and nothing in the workflow prevented a single employee from generating a share link and sending it to the wrong customer. Nothing would have recorded it, either.

By late 2024 the server was moving roughly 18 TB a month, and more than 15 TB of customer data had accumulated on it over a decade with no lifecycle management.

The server survived that long because it was load-bearing. Its folder tree encoded twenty years of customer relationships and departmental structure, hundreds of companies had built habits around it, and professional services and support exchanged customer databases through it daily. There was no quiet moment in which to replace it.

Looking for a Long-Term Play, Not Another FTP Server

The pressure was structural rather than a single incident. Volume kept climbing, the risk stood open every day, and the co-located hardware was aging past what the company wanted to own.

“We've had FTP for 15 years, 20 years here, so we're looking for a long-term play.”

Aras was not shopping for a newer FTP server.

Every external user needed a named account instead of an anonymous link. Every subscriber company needed its own folder tree, separated by department, and internal access had to come from the corporate directory instead of being granted by hand. Every action needed a record that could feed the security team's monitoring. Transfers of a terabyte or more had to finish reliably. And 460 customer companies had to keep working through the entire transition.

Aras selected Files.com to replace the server outright and retire the co-located hardware behind it, rebuilding the exchange as a governed portal whose folders, accounts, and permissions could be created by script.

A Governed Portal, Built by Script

What Aras built on Files.com is a per-customer exchange portal: one folder hierarchy per subscriber company, one named account per external user, and permissions decided by directory membership rather than by habit.

The structure went in programmatically. Using the Files.com CLI, the team created more than 450 company folders, each with departmental subfolders; at that scale, they were explicit that nobody was going to build the tree by hand. Internal access comes from groups pushed out of Okta through the Files.com SSO integration, with group permissions applied recursively across the tree, so what an internal team can reach is a function of directory membership. The broad access that once let multiple teams into every customer's folder is gone.

External access got the same treatment. Subscribers and partners connect as named users, roughly 600 of them, permissioned in bulk against the Files.com permission report rather than one screen at a time. Managers and project leads carry accounts of their own purely for visibility into what their customers upload.

The heavy transfers that define the business run through the Files.com desktop app, whose multi-threaded uploads and downloads carry the 100 GB to 1.5 TB databases and instance packages that professional services and support exchange with customers. And where the old server logged almost nothing, every action now lands in per-user, per-folder activity history, with audit logs streaming into Azure Sentinel through the Files.com SIEM integration.

The Structure First, the Data Sync Last

The staged implementation ran for roughly nine months, from initial architecture work in August 2024 to external customer go-live in May 2025. The migration was staged so that the structure existed before any customer depended on it. Okta SSO, share links, inboxes, and branding came first. The folder topology was designed and piloted with a single department before being applied estate-wide. The company folders and external accounts were created and permissioned by script while the old server kept running.

Only then came the cutover: a final sync from the legacy FTP server, whose single tree had grown past 10,000 folders, roughly 7,800 of them empty. Only the populated folders came across. Aras went live with external customers in May 2025, and the co-located server was retired.

A Retired Server and a Record of Every Action

With the final sync done, Aras replaced a person-dependent FTP workflow with a governed exchange it can see into.

• The failure mode leadership feared is closed. Files reach a customer through that customer's own folder and named accounts, not through a link one employee sends to the right address, and every upload and download is recorded and streamed to Azure Sentinel.
• All 460 customer companies moved off the legacy server without disruption to their work.
• The co-located server and twenty years of accumulated FTP infrastructure are gone. More than 15 TB of accumulated data was dealt with in the migration.
• Onboarding the next subscriber company is a scripted folder tree and a named account, not a hand-built folder and a personally managed link.

Usage grew more than fifteenfold after the rebuild began, reaching nearly 900 accounts across Aras and its customer base by mid-2026. Combined storage and transfer climbed from 26 TB in September 2025 to over 48 TB nine months later, with single-day transfer spikes running into multiple terabytes. The platform absorbed all of it without anyone rebuilding anything.

Rebuilt Infrastructure, Not a Newer Server

Today, the exchange that delivers Aras Innovator to its subscribers runs through Files.com: the customer databases in, the upgraded instances back out, under named accounts and a complete record.

“I almost feel like we have rebuilt our whole infrastructure, so we have made our entire organization more efficient.”

The lesson in the cutover is worth stating. A twenty-year FTP estate serving hundreds of external companies did not move in a weekend of heroics. It moved because Aras rebuilt the structure first: the folders, the accounts, and the permissions, all by script, tested while the old server kept running. The data sync came last, so the cutover was a sync into a portal that already worked. What used to be a workflow individual employees performed, one folder and one link at a time, is now infrastructure the business governs.