A Cigar Distributor Eliminated a Manual Partner SFTP Pull with Files.com Dedicated IPs

A European cigar manufacturer and distributor holds the exclusive distribution rights for a premium cigar brand in its home market.

Its distribution business runs on files. Stock levels, invoices, and HR data move constantly between the distributor, its logistics partner, and the business systems behind its operations: Workday, NetSuite, and Sage. The distributor runs that exchange through Files.com, generating files for its partners and receiving files from them through one platform.

But one trading partner’s security policy did not fit that model, so one recurring transfer depended on a person remembering to do it.

An IP Whitelist Kept One Partner’s Files Manual

The partner ran an SFTP server that accepted connections only from IP addresses on its whitelist, and the whitelist admitted no more than six. That was the partner’s security policy to set. Without dedicated egress addresses, however, a multi-tenant cloud service sends outbound traffic from a shared pool, leaving no stable address for a partner to whitelist.

So the extraction stayed manual. When the partner published files, someone at the distributor connected to the partner’s server, pulled the new files down by hand, and moved them where the business could use them. The files were available when somebody went and got them, not when they arrived.

Ending that depended on three things. The partner needed a small, fixed set of source addresses it could add to its whitelist. The pull needed to run outbound to the partner’s SFTP on a schedule, with no one attending it. And the files needed to land on the platform where the rest of the distributor’s exchange already ran. The distributor met all three with two Files.com capabilities: Dedicated IPs and Remote Server Sync.

Two Fixed Addresses in a Six-Address Whitelist

Files.com assigned the distributor’s site two dedicated IP addresses. The distributor passed the pair to the partner, which added them to the whitelist: two entries in a list that admitted six. To the partner’s server, the cloud platform now looked like fixed infrastructure.

The distributor then scheduled a Remote Server Sync to connect to the partner’s SFTP from those dedicated addresses, collect new files, and deliver them into a Files.com folder. Nothing was installed at the partner, and nothing about how the partner published files changed. The only thing asked of the partner was to add two addresses to a list.

The Manual Pull Became a Scheduled Sync

With the Sync in production, the distributor replaced a hands-on exception with a standing, unattended connection.

• Extraction from the partner runs on a schedule. Nobody logs in to the partner’s server to pull files by hand, and the files sit on the platform waiting for the business instead of waiting for a person.
• The partner’s security policy was met exactly as written. The distributor never had to ask for an exception, stand up a self-hosted server just to get a fixed address, or route the transfer around its platform.
• The dedicated addresses cover every outbound connection from the site, not only this one. Connecting another partner that requires source-IP whitelisting means handing over the same two addresses, making the next connection a configuration rather than a workaround.

A Cloud Platform the Partner Can Whitelist

Today the partner’s files flow into the distributor’s Files.com site the way the rest of its partner exchange does: on schedule, into a folder, with no one attending the transfer. The transfer that used to happen when someone had time now happens whether anyone is thinking about it or not.

A partner’s IP-whitelisting requirement can appear to force a workflow off the cloud, because meeting a fixed-address policy seems to mean running a server with its own fixed address. The distributor’s rollout showed the opposite. Files.com Dedicated IPs gave a multi-tenant cloud platform the property the partner’s policy demanded—source addresses that do not change—and the partner’s security policy stopped being an obstacle to the distributor’s automation.