A Consumer-Goods Distributor Consolidates Five SFTP Estates on Files.com Without Opening Its DMZ

A multinational consumer-goods distributor imports, markets, and distributes branded products for international manufacturers through fully owned business units in five countries, reaching tens of thousands of direct points of sale, from national retail chains to rural kiosks served by van. SAP runs the distribution process in most business units, and Power BI reports on it.

A distributor's position is the middle. On one side sit the manufacturers whose brands it carries; on the other, the retail chains, pharmacies, wholesalers, and foodservice customers it supplies. What flows between them, continuously and mostly without a person involved, is data, moving as files between the distributor's systems and those of its suppliers, customers, and sister companies. Unattended file exchange is not a side function at the distributor. It is how the business connects to its trading partners, and it feeds the ERP and BI systems the whole operation runs on.

The distributor's mandate was demanding: consolidate the fragmented estate onto one SaaS platform hosted in Western Europe, patched by the vendor, with day-to-day administration staying with each country's IT team. The platform had to enforce geo-blocking and per-partner protocol restrictions centrally, keep an audit trail that answers which user touched which file and when, apply retention schedules that differ by business unit, and deliver partner files onto on-premise storage without opening an inbound connection or changing any of the systems that read them.

Five Servers, Five Firewalls, Five Copies of Every Control

Each of the five business units ran its own on-premise SFTP/FTP server, administered by that country's IT team. The group had outgrown running its partner-facing perimeter that way: five separate installations meant every control was configured five times over, and every partner account was built by hand on the server for its region. The group blocks access from countries it does not serve, and on five independently operated servers that policy lived in five local firewalls.

Underneath all of it sat five servers that global IT had to keep patched and online, and no longer wanted to own. The group wanted one perimeter, with one set of controls and one audit trail across all five countries, and user and folder administration left with the regional teams that own the relationships.

Why the Servers Survived: Everything Downstream Read Local Disk

The servers lasted because they were more than endpoints. They were the landing pad. A partner pushed a CSV onto the server's hard drive, and a separate scheduled job picked it up off local disk and moved it onward, most importantly into the on-premise folder that a Power BI gateway read over CIFS. Every downstream consumer assumed files arrived on a local disk.

The group's security model raised the bar further, and deliberately so. External files passed through an intermediate host where Microsoft Defender scanned them before they reached the internal network, and connections crossed the DMZ boundary in one direction only, initiated from the LAN. A cloud platform that delivered partner files straight into the internal network would have broken the scanning hop and the one-way rule at the same time.

The distributor selected Files.com to provide the new platform.

One Perimeter in the Cloud, One Agent Behind the Firewall

Files.com became the partner-facing perimeter for the whole group, and the Files.com Agent became the governed bridge between that perimeter and the on-premise systems that consume the files.

The perimeter is a single Files.com site on the distributor's own branded domain with dedicated IP addresses, so a partner whitelists two addresses and connects over SFTP exactly as before. Countries the group does not serve are blocked by geolocation across the whole site, IP whitelisting applies site-wide and per user, plain FTP is confined to a single named partner's address, and retention runs per business unit, each on its own schedule.

Delegation came before data. The group configured SAML single sign-on through Entra ID, SCIM provisioning, and Active Directory group synchronisation so each country's IT team could create and manage partner users under its own regional branch, with no rights over anyone else's. Global IT owns the platform and its security posture. Consolidation centralized the governance without centralizing the work.

The Files.com Agent connected outbound only from a dedicated server, so no inbound firewall rule existed. It moved partner uploads from Files.com to on-premise storage and exposed a Files.com folder as a local network path. The LAN host initiated the connection, and files still crossed the jump host where Defender scanned them before they touched the internal network. The segmentation model the group designed is the segmentation model that runs.

A Supplier Feed Proved the Pattern, Then Every Region Followed

The first production workflow was a data feed from one of the distributor's largest suppliers, a multinational manufacturer that pushes CSV files over SFTP for consumption in Power BI. The supplier was provisioned as an SFTP user, connected, and its files were routed to a designated folder, synced down through the Agent, and validated end to end on the existing on-premise gateway. The migration was deliberately scoped to processes: workflows moved to the new platform while legacy data stayed where it was.

With the pilot validated, the migration proceeded across all five business units. Each region moved in two phases, automated and system users first through the summer of 2025, then human users that autumn. Only active accounts moved. Each legacy server ran in parallel until its region was verified on Files.com, then was shut down.

All Processes Moved, and Half the Accounts Are Machines

The first regional pilot proved the pattern before the migration proceeded across all five business units. With the cutover complete and the five on-premise servers switched off, the distributor replaced five independently administered transfer estates with one governed platform.

• Every file-transfer process in the group now runs on Files.com, and there is no regional legacy transfer estate left to patch, back up, or firewall.
• Who used which file, and when, is now a query. Per-user connection and file-access history is searchable and exportable through the Files.com API, and the team runs monthly reporting on upload volumes.
• Controls that used to depend on five local firewalls are enforced once: geo-blocking, IP whitelisting, protocol restrictions, and per-business-unit retention all live in one place.
• Roughly half of all accounts on the site are system users running unattended server-to-server SFTP with suppliers and customers. Automation, the reason for the platform, is now its primary workload.

The pattern also compounds. Adding the next unattended partner feed is a folder and an SFTP credential, created by the local IT team under its own regional branch, inside the same scanned, segmented path to the systems that consume it. No new server, and no new firewall work.

The Security Model Never Moved

Today the partner-facing side of the distributor's file exchange lives on a vendor-managed platform in Western Europe, and the parts the group cared most about did not move at all. Files still cross a jump host where Defender scans them before entering the internal network. The LAN still initiates every connection. Power BI still reads the same folder. What changed is who carries the perimeter: the patching and the internet-facing surface belong to Files.com now, and the global security team holds one audit trail across five countries. The distributor did not trade its security architecture for the cloud. It moved the perimeter to Files.com and kept everything behind it exactly where it was designed to be.