HAVI Moved 460 Partner Connections to Files.com to Close Its German Data Centre

HAVI is a global supply chain management company. Today the group employs roughly 10,000 people, serves customers in more than 100 countries, and manages sourcing, warehousing and distribution for over 300 brands, moving more than two million orders a year through distribution centres across Europe, Asia and North America.

An operation like that runs on data as much as on trucks. Orders, invoices and shipping documents move constantly between suppliers, distribution centres and HAVI's ERP, and hundreds of external companies exchange files with HAVI every day. For years, that exchange ran through FTP and SFTP servers HAVI operated in its own German data centre.

The FTP Estate Holding a Data Centre Open

HAVI's Global Technology organization planned to close the German data centre. One estate stood in the way: the internal FTP and SFTP services running out of it, roughly 380 SFTP connections and 80 FTP connections serving suppliers, distribution centres and partners. This was not dormant legacy. A single server in the estate carried more than 5,000 SFTP transfers and 2,000 FTP transfers a day for 270 active users.

The cost was not just the building. As long as the estate ran, HAVI kept virtual machine hosts patched, maintained two transfer protocols where one of them, unencrypted FTP, had no business carrying supplier data, and retained an outsourced Linux support team just to keep legacy accounts working. And the closure itself waited.

“our migration to Files.com is a dependency for us to close our Data centre in Germany”

460 Connections HAVI Could Not Change by Itself

The estate had survived for a structural reason: its connections belonged to other companies. Every supplier, distribution centre and automated bot account pointing at those servers held its own connection details, and HAVI could not update a single one of them on the counterparty's behalf. The data flowing through was live transactional pass-through, orders and invoices in flight between suppliers and the ERP, so there was no quiet window to take the service down. A synchronized cutover of 460 external connections was never realistic, which is why the project to retire the estate had stalled repeatedly and passed through multiple owners without gaining traction.

What a replacement had to do followed directly from that constraint. It had to be a hosted endpoint that external parties could reach over the protocols they already used. It had to carry HAVI's own name, so a supplier updating connection details would still be connecting to HAVI rather than to a vendor's subdomain. And it had to absorb a staged migration: services moving one at a time over months, with the old and new estates running in parallel, ending on a single key-authenticated SFTP standard.

HAVI selected Files.com as the platform the estate would collapse onto.

One Service at a Time, With a Hard Cutover Date for Each

A dedicated project manager then ran the migration in parallel, service by service. Each service got a hard scheduled cutover date, and its external users got advance notice to update their connection details to the new endpoint: a Files.com site fronted by HAVI's own domain, so what a counterparty saw was HAVI, not Files.com. Because the data on the legacy servers was transactional pass-through, there was no archive to move. When a service cut over, its counterparties repointed and its traffic started flowing through Files.com.

The move was also a consolidation. The 80 FTP connections converted to SFTP on the way across, collapsing two protocols into one, and external bot accounts moved to SSH-key authentication only.

One Protocol, One Domain, and Nothing Left to Patch

With the services cut over, HAVI had replaced a two-protocol server estate that hundreds of external companies depended on with a single hosted SFTP endpoint under its own domain.

• The last file-transfer dependency on the German data centre was gone, and the closure the estate had been holding up could proceed.
• Roughly 460 supplier, distribution-centre and partner connections now run on one Files.com site over SFTP alone, and unencrypted FTP is out of HAVI's external exchange entirely.
• Machine-to-machine accounts authenticate with SSH keys only, so no automated connection depends on a password.
• The virtual machine hosts, their patching, and the outsourced Linux support arrangement retired along with the servers.

The project itself finished, too. What had stalled repeatedly as one immovable event completed as a sequence of scheduled cutovers, none of which required the rest of the estate to move at the same time.

File Transfer Off the Critical Path

Companies planning a data centre exit write migration plans for their applications. HAVI's exit shows that the file transfer estate underneath those applications is often what actually anchors the building, because its connections belong to other companies. It still does not have to move as one event. HAVI moved it one service at a time, and when the last service cut over to Files.com, the last reason to keep the data centre went with it.