Hampton Roads Transit Takes Axway Secure Transport Down to One Remaining Job—Without a Flag-Day Cutover

Hampton Roads Transit runs public transportation for six cities in southeastern Virginia: Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach. Riders took roughly 9.5 million trips on the system in 2025, across local and regional bus routes, paratransit, three passenger ferries on the Elizabeth River, and The Tide, Virginia's first light rail line, which HRT developed, built and now operates in Norfolk.

Behind that service sits a back office that runs on scheduled file exchange. Workday and the agency's on-premises HR system generate payroll, benefits, HR and leave-of-absence files. Those files have to reach the ADP payroll platform and HRT's Optima ERP encrypted with PGP, inside fixed delivery windows, while the source data stays on HRT's own servers. Some of those files carry protected health information. This exchange is how the agency's workforce gets paid.

To avoid staking those feeds on a single cutover weekend, HRT chose a workload-by-workload move from Axway Secure Transport to Files.com: each legacy job stayed live until its replacement was proven end to end. By August 2026, only one Axway job remained.

Every Change on Axway Was a Four-Month Project

That exchange ran on Axway Secure Transport, a legacy managed file transfer platform HRT operated as an appliance running a Linux kernel on Windows, plus a separate proxy server.

The cost was the cost of change. Implementing a single integration job on Axway took more than four months. Every new vendor feed was a project. Every modification to an existing feed was a project. In between projects, the unusual appliance architecture had to be kept patched and running whether or not anything on it changed. HRT was carrying a platform whose cost of change had outgrown the work it carried.

Payroll Feeds You Cannot Interrupt

The reason Axway lasted was the same reason it was hard to leave. The feeds it supported were the ones a transit agency can least afford to interrupt: payroll and benefits data, some of it protected health information, due at counterparties on fixed schedules. That ruled out a flag-day cutover in which every feed switched at once and any mistake landed on a payroll run.

The replacement had to pick up files where internal systems dropped them on on-premises servers. It had to keep an unencrypted copy on HRT's side for audit, apply PGP automatically, deliver over SFTP on schedule, and confirm to stakeholders that delivery happened.

HRT selected Files.com to be that replacement layer. Afonso Alves, HRT's Manager of Cybersecurity Services, later gave the verdict plainly:

“Axway proved to be very difficult to support. That's why I bought Files.com.”

One Agent Inside the Network, Automations Carrying the Job Logic

Files.com became the managed file transfer layer between HRT's internal servers and its outside processors, without exposing anything inside the network.

The Files.com On-Premise Agent runs on internal Windows servers with read access to the directories where Workday and the HR system deposit files. The Agent makes only outbound connections, so no inbound firewall rule was opened to move files out.

Files.com Automations carry the logic that used to live in Axway jobs. When a file lands, the workflow archives an unencrypted copy on HRT's side for audit, applies PGP encryption in Files.com, delivers the encrypted file over SFTP, and emails stakeholders on completion. Scheduled runs meet ADP's fixed delivery window with no one watching the calendar.

The team built the payroll and finance integration first as a proof of concept in a test environment, then validated encrypted delivery end to end. The legacy process kept running in parallel and was retired only after the production workflow was signed off.

Then the pattern compounded. After an HR pilot workflow tested successfully, the team found that payroll, benefits and leave-of-absence files sat in parallel on the same server. Serving them required no new Agent and no new design, only widening the scope of the Agent already in place and pointing Automations at the additional directories. The result is four parallel production workflows for HR, payroll, benefits and leave of absence, all running off a single Agent.

Five Weeks to Validated Delivery, One Session to Four Workflows

With the Files.com workflows in production, HRT replaced a platform where every integration was a months-long project with a pattern it extends in a working session.

• The payroll and finance integration went from first design session to validated, end-to-end encrypted delivery in about five weeks. A single integration job on Axway had taken more than four months to implement.
• One HR pilot became four parallel production workflows in a single working session, because extending the pattern meant widening an existing Agent's scope rather than building anything new.
• Payroll and benefits files, including those carrying protected health information, now move encrypted and on schedule, with an audit copy retained on HRT's side and a confirmation email on every run. Nobody exports, encrypts or delivers a file by hand.
• By August 2026, Axway Secure Transport was down to one remaining benefits job. HRT had retired each prior job only after its Files.com equivalent was validated.

A Platform Swap with No Flag Day

Today, when a new vendor feed comes up at HRT, the work starts from a pattern that already exists. The Files.com Agent already reaches the servers where files appear. Encryption, archiving, delivery and notification are settings on a workflow, not an implementation project. What used to open a four-month build now opens a design session.

The larger lesson is in how the migration ran. HRT never had to turn Axway off all at once to replace its jobs. Files.com absorbed the estate one workload at a time, with each legacy job running in parallel until its replacement was proven. By August 2026, just one Axway job remained. For an agency whose file transfer is how its people get paid, moving off the old platform without putting the migration on a single weekend was the requirement that mattered most.