Archdiocese of St. Louis Retires On-Premises SFTP and Adds Secure Inbound File Intake with Files.com

The Archdiocese of St. Louis is approaching its bicentennial. Founded in 1826 as a diocese so vast it was called the Rome of the West, it today serves more than 440,000 Catholics across the City of St. Louis and surrounding Missouri counties, through 178 parishes and more than 100 schools. Its operating portfolio runs from cemeteries and a seminary to a newspaper and a rural health clinic.

Behind all of that sits a conventional back office: Human Resources, Legal, Finance, and IT, administering roughly 2,000 employees from a central office of about 22 staff. Many of the schools operate under parish governance as legally separate entities, which makes the central office less a headquarters than a hub. Contracts, personnel and benefits records, and the data feeds of its ERP systems all pass through it constantly, moving between the archdiocese, its schools and parishes, and dozens of outside parties. That file exchange ran on two tools, and each covered half a job. For a central office of about 22 staff supporting roughly 2,000 employees, solving the gaps separately would have meant two new platforms, two integrations, and two administration burdens.

Secure in One Direction Only

Machine transfers ran on an on-premises SFTP server, one more piece of legacy infrastructure the archdiocese had decided to move off its own premises. Human exchange ran on encrypted email, and the encryption only worked outbound. The archdiocese could send a sensitive document securely. It had no governed way to receive one.

That gap was the daily cost. HR and Legal exchange contracts with outside parties as a matter of routine, and every contract, benefits file, or personnel document arriving from outside came in without a controlled path. Sending was solved. Receiving was left to whatever the counterparty could manage.

The problem was also about to get bigger. New SAP and Infor implementations were under way, and both required SFTP integrations. The machine-transfer workload was about to grow in importance at exactly the moment the archdiocese wanted its SFTP server gone.

Two Gaps, One Small Office

The two gaps pulled toward two different products. The server replacement was machine-to-machine infrastructure: ERP data feeds, roughly 20 external vendors connecting over SFTP, GPG encryption on transfers. The inbound gap was a human problem: HR and Legal staff who needed to receive a contract in a browser, not operate an SFTP client. Buying one tool for each would have preserved the split the archdiocese was trying to eliminate.

So the requirements were really one requirement stated twice. The archdiocese needed a hosted service, off its premises, running under its own name so vendors and ERP jobs had a stable endpoint to move to. It needed encryption applied to transfers without scripts to maintain. And it needed the same service to present a web portal that ordinary business staff could use without any client at all.

The archdiocese selected Files.com to be that platform.

One Platform Under the Archdiocese's Own Domain

That consolidation mattered during implementation as well: a senior systems architect on the central IT team ran the entire configuration single-handedly.

The hosted SFTP endpoint was stood up under the archdiocese's own branded domain, so the roughly 20 external vendors and the SAP and Infor integration jobs could move to an address the archdiocese controls. Files.com's built-in GPG support applied encryption on the platform itself rather than through scripts on a server.

The same platform's web interface became the portal. Staff in HR, Legal, and Finance receive sensitive documents through it in a browser, inside folder permissions the central office sets, so a contract coming in from outside counsel lands in a governed place rather than wherever the sender could reach.

One platform now carries both kinds of traffic: an integration hub for the machines, and a secure front door for the people.

A Governed Path In as Well as Out

With Files.com in production, the archdiocese replaced a server it had to run and an email tool that only worked one way with a single hosted service.

• The on-premises SFTP server is retired. Its workload runs on Files.com under the archdiocese's own domain, with no file transfer server left in the building to maintain.
• SAP and Infor exchange data through the same hub that serves roughly 20 external vendors, with GPG encryption applied to the transfers.
• The archdiocese has a governed inbound path for the first time. About 50 staff across HR, Legal, and Finance receive contracts, benefits data, and personnel files through the portal, instead of around an outbound-only email tool.
• The next vendor and the next department are a credential and a folder on the platform that already exists, not a second product for a 22-person office to evaluate, buy, and run.

Two Projects That Were Really One

Today the central office's file exchange runs in one place. An ERP feed from a vendor and a signed contract from outside counsel arrive through the same Files.com platform, under the same domain, in the same governed environment. When Legal needs a document back from a counterparty, nobody has to work out how to receive it securely, because the path already exists and it is the same path everything else uses.

Retiring an on-premises SFTP server and giving business departments a secure way to receive sensitive files looked like two projects. On Files.com, they were one.