An EHS Software Company Retired Its On-Premise FTP Estate and Automated Customer Provisioning With Files.com

A software company makes cloud software for environment, health, safety and sustainability management, running EHS programs for thousands of customers.

A platform like that runs on customer data. Safety records, chemical inventories and employee data all start in the customer's own systems and have to reach the company, in bulk during onboarding and on a steady rhythm afterward. At that scale, receiving files from customers is not an occasional task. It is part of delivering the product, and it happens again with every customer the company signs.

With Files.com, the company retired its on-premise file transfer estate and made customer provisioning automatic from the moment a Service Desk ticket was submitted.

An FTP Estate With a Manual Step Inside Every Onboarding

For years, those files arrived on FTP and SFTP servers that the company ran on premise. The servers did the job, but they carried two standing costs.

The first was the estate itself: aging, internet-facing file transfer infrastructure the company had to keep online and keep secure, work that had nothing to do with building EHS software.

The second cost was heavier, because it repeated. Every new customer who needed to send files meant a manual IT task. An employee submitted an FTP request ticket in SolarWinds Service Desk, and someone on the IT team created the folder, created the matching user account and set its permissions by hand. Done once, that is a small job. Done for every customer, at a company adding customers continuously, it was a permanent tax on onboarding: IT time spent on every new relationship, and a customer waiting for access at exactly the moment they were ready to start.

The company had outgrown file intake as a hand-run operation.

Why the Replacement Had to Be More Than a New Server

The FTP surface faces customers. They connect to it with their own clients and their own scripts, over the protocols their systems already speak, at an address that carries the company's name. Anything that replaced the servers had to keep all of that working: the same protocols, an endpoint under the company's own domain, and a folder per customer so no customer ever sees another's data.

It also had to do one thing the old servers never did: open the provisioning workflow to automation. Moving the files to a new platform while the folder-and-account step stayed manual would have retired the hardware and kept the cost.

The company selected Files.com as the organization's official FTP and SFTP platform.

A Branded Endpoint Where a Ticket Creates the Customer

Customer file intake now runs through Files.com behind an FTP address on the company's own domain. Customers connect over SFTP, FTPS or FTP with whatever client they already use. Each customer lands in its own folder, under its own login, and sees nothing else.

The provisioning workflow was rebuilt rather than carried over. When an employee submits an FTP request ticket in SolarWinds Service Desk, an AWS Lambda function calls the Files.com REST API and creates the folder for that company along with a user account scoped to it. The access exists the moment the ticket goes in. No one on the IT team touches routine customer FTP setup at all.

Cleanup runs itself too. A Files.com user lifecycle rule disables any account that goes without a login for a set period, so credentials a customer stops using stop being access, with nobody maintaining the list by hand.

The cutover was incremental. The company kept the legacy servers running alongside Files.com while workloads moved over, then retired the on-premise estate entirely.

Provisioning Without IT, Growth Without New Work

With Files.com in production, the company replaced infrastructure it owned and a per-customer task it performed with an endpoint that provisions, fences and cleans up on its own. As customer-facing account usage grew, none of the new folders and logins were created by hand.

• The on-premise FTP and SFTP servers are retired. The company no longer runs internet-facing file transfer infrastructure, so there is nothing left to patch or keep online.
• Routine customer provisioning takes no IT effort. The folder and login are created when the ticket is submitted, not when an engineer gets to it.
• Dormant access shuts itself off. A set period without a login and Files.com disables the account, so unused customer credentials do not accumulate as standing access.
• The company passed its SOC audits with Files.com as its file transfer layer.

The Server Was Never the Expensive Part

Today, customer file intake begins without routine IT involvement.

That is the difference between moving an FTP server to the cloud and actually replacing one. The hardware was the visible cost, but the recurring cost lived in the workflow around it: the per-customer folder, the per-customer account, the engineer in the middle. The company retired the servers and the job of running them at the same time, because Files.com let it rebuild that workflow instead of carrying it over.