An Architecture and Engineering Firm Unblocked Its Microsoft Dynamics ERP Rollout with Files.com—Without Self-Hosting SFTP

A US architecture and engineering firm plans and designs airports, highways, dams, and industrial plants, largely for public clients: state transportation departments, municipalities, federal agencies, and utilities.

A firm of that shape runs on its back-office systems as much as on its design tools. Paying, hiring, and accounting for a workforce spread across the country means enterprise applications that have to exchange data reliably, under the oversight of a central IT team. And the firm was nearly through the largest back-office project a company can take on: a 20-month replacement of its ERP, moving the firm onto Microsoft Dynamics.

The final step would require Files.com to route two isolated vendor SFTP feeds into the firm's existing Azure Files storage—without putting the firm back in the business of hosting SFTP.

The Last Dependency in a 20-Month ERP Replacement

Twenty months in, the program had one dependency left, and it would not close. Two applications the finance team relies on had no working integration into Dynamics: Paylocity, the firm's payroll and HR platform, and the system it uses to manage employee job postings.

The obvious route was the vendors' APIs, and the firm started down it. The API route was not viable within the program, and the implementation partner running the Dynamics deployment required the alternative: SFTP file drops.

For most companies that would be a shrug. For the firm it was a problem, because the firm had not operated an SFTP server in roughly 15 years. An SFTP server is an internet-facing piece of infrastructure that has to be patched, monitored, and defended, and the firm had gotten out of that business deliberately.

Why Self-Hosted SFTP Was Off the Table

The firm's IT Director first tried to solve it directly, standing up an SFTP server along with a file share for Dynamics to read from.

The attempt confirmed that in-house SFTP hosting was a job the firm was not going to take back on, deadline or no deadline.

Which left a narrow set of requirements. The integration had to run over SFTP, because the implementation partner required it. The files had to land where Dynamics could read them. Each source system needed its own credentials and its own boundary. And the server itself, the thing that gets patched and defended, had to be someone else's to run: a provider that operates SFTP every day, not a firm that had spent 15 years staying out of it.

The firm put Files.com in that role.

Two One-Way SFTP Drops Into an Azure Files Mount

The IT Director built the integration on Files.com. Each source application received a dedicated service account with folder-scoped permissions. Paylocity can write into its own drop folder and nothing else, and the job-postings system gets the same treatment on its own path. The connections are one-way: each application pushes files over SFTP on a schedule, and nothing flows back out.

Behind those folders, a Files.com Remote Server Mount points at Azure Files. A file dropped over SFTP passes straight through the mount into the firm's own Azure storage, where Dynamics picks it up. Files.com provides the SFTP endpoint, the credentials, and the permission boundaries. The data itself lands in storage the firm already runs, inside the Microsoft environment the rest of the ERP lives in.

Both feeds were validated and running.

The Feeds Run, and Nobody Defends a Server

With the feeds in production, the firm replaced a server it had to defend with an endpoint it only has to configure.

• Employee and job-posting data moves from Paylocity and the job-postings system into Dynamics on schedule, with no one handling files by hand.
• The final integration dependency on the 20-month ERP replacement is closed, on the protocol the implementation partner required.

The pattern also outlasts the project that forced it. The next vendor or application that arrives requiring SFTP is a new service account and a new folder on the same site, not a new server on the firm's network.

The Mandate Was for a Protocol, Not a Server

The implementation partner's requirement never changed. SFTP is still how Paylocity and the job-postings system deliver their data, exactly as mandated. What changed is who runs the server. Today the IT Director administers service accounts and folder permissions, and nobody at the firm patches an SFTP server, hardens one, or rewrites firewall rules to keep a finance feed alive. With Files.com hosting the endpoint in front of the firm's own Azure storage, the firm meets the mandate without running the machine. Twenty months of ERP replacement came down to a mandate for a protocol, and a protocol is not the same thing as a server.