A Beverage Distributor Moves Partner File Exchange to Files.com and Off Its Own Hardware

A US beverage distributor wholesales beer, wine, spirits, and soft drinks across several states from a network of distribution centers.

A distribution business of that shape runs on files. Orders, routing data, and invoices move between the distributor and its supplier and distribution partners every day, and some of those files decide whether trucks leave a warehouse the next morning. For two decades, that exchange ran through an on-premises FTP server. Then the distributor decided that the data center it lived in was going away.

The distributor ran the move as a blank-slate build: only live partner workflows moved, each onto its own credentials, and nothing else came along.

A Fifteen-Minute Window Every Evening

The tightest fifteen minutes in the distributor's file estate arrived every evening. A daily routing exchange with one of its largest distribution partners ran between 5 and 6 PM local time, and it had almost no slack.

That file sets the next morning's delivery routes for a whole region, and any replacement had to carry it inside the same window.

The system carrying that transfer was an on-premises FTP server driven by WinSCP, sitting inside the distributor's data center. Partners dropped files onto it and picked files up from it, and the distributor wanted that exchange to happen outside its own network, with each partner on its own credentials and every transfer on the record.

The Data Center Exit Set the Deadline

What set the timeline was structural: the distributor was in the middle of a deliberate, multi-year move off its own infrastructure and onto SaaS.

The data center was scheduled to close by May 2026, and the FTP server had nowhere left to live.

The replacement had a specific job. It had to carry partner exchange over SFTP with no hardware behind it that the distributor owned. It had to keep plain FTP available for one partner whose AS/400 requires it. It had to ask partners to change almost nothing, because every change on a partner's side goes through that partner's own approval process. And it had to make the time-critical evening feed observable, with a record of every transfer and a notification when something fires. All of it had to happen on Saturday-only maintenance windows, before the exit date.

The distributor selected Files.com to carry that partner exchange.

Discovery First, Then One Partner at a Time

The distributor ran the migration as a blank-slate build rather than a lift-and-shift. Instead of copying twenty years of folders onto a new platform, the team inventoried the partner connections and moved only the live workflows.

The live partners migrated one at a time. The partner whose feed carried the fifteen-minute window was engaged first, to give its change-approval process the most time, and it cut over last. The change on the partner's side was deliberately held to a new endpoint and a new set of credentials, validated in a test environment before the production cutover.

On Files.com, each partner now connects over SFTP with its own credentials to an endpoint outside the distributor's network. The AS/400 partner kept plain FTP, served from the same platform, so that partner's system connects the way it always has. The distributor's own staff reach the site through Entra ID single sign-on, with conditional access and MFA.

The distributor's team also owned the build itself. The business systems team constructed its own Files.com Automations to route arriving files, and relies on the audit log and event-triggered email notifications to watch the feeds that matter.

The Server Retired With the Data Center

With the last partner cut over, the distributor had replaced a two-decade-old exchange hub inside its own network with a cloud platform its partners reach from outside it.

• Files.com is now the distributor's single external SFTP platform for partner exchange, and the on-premises FTP server retired alongside the data center, on the timeline the exit demanded.
• Each partner connects with its own scoped credentials to an endpoint outside the distributor's network, and every transfer lands in the audit log.
• The daily routing feed that sets the next morning's routes runs through a monitored platform that logs every run and fires notifications on file events.
• Only the live connections moved. Twenty years of accumulated folders retired with the hardware rather than being carried forward.

No Transfer Infrastructure Left to Own

Today, the file exchange that gates the distributor's deliveries depends on no hardware the distributor runs. There is no server to patch and no data center obligation attached to moving a partner file, which is where the company's five-year shift to SaaS was pointed all along.

The pattern also compounds. Connecting the next partner means issuing credentials on Files.com, not standing anything up in a rack.