An Investment Manager Retired On-Premises SFTP With Files.com—While Keeping Files in Its Own Storage

An investment manager serves hundreds of thousands of retail investors across retirement-savings and managed-fund investments.

A business like that runs on data exchange. Investment files move every day between the firm and the banks, fund administrators, and external advisers its operations depend on. And because those files contain sensitive investment data, where the data is stored is not a preference at the firm. It is policy.

Sovereignty Ruled Out Ordinary Cloud File Transfer

For years, that exchange ran on SFTP servers the firm operated itself. The firm's technology team owned all of it: the servers, the patching, the partner connections, the availability. Every new bank feed or adviser relationship added to an estate the team had to run by hand.

The obvious fix was a managed cloud file transfer service. But for the firm's security leadership, a managed transfer layer could not mean moving custody of files to provider storage. Sovereignty over the firm's data, wherever possible, was the standing requirement. So the on-premises estate survived. Not because anyone wanted to keep running servers, but because retiring them appeared to mean handing the files to a vendor.

As the partner estate grew, the requirements for a replacement sharpened. It had to speak SFTP to banks and fund administrators under the firm's own name. It had to serve three structurally different kinds of traffic: automated system-to-system feeds from banks, ad-hoc web uploads from lawyers and individual users, and bulk files bound for long-term backup. It had to carry the firm's security controls. And files in those workflows had to land in storage accounts the firm owns.

The firm selected Files.com to be that transfer layer, with its own cloud storage behind it.

Hosted SFTP in Front, the Firm's Storage Behind

Files.com became the governed front door for partner exchange, and the storage stayed the firm's. Partners would connect to a hosted SFTP endpoint on the firm's own branded domain, running on dedicated IP addresses with a certificate the firm supplied. What a bank or an adviser saw carried the firm's name, not a vendor's.

Behind that endpoint, Files.com Remote Server Mounts pointed at three customer-owned storage backends. Amazon S3 carried automated bank traffic, Azure Blob received web uploads from lawyers and individual users, and Wasabi held bulk backup and long-term retention. Files.com also mounted partner-operated SFTP servers, allowing it to push and pull files where the far end was infrastructure the firm did not control.

Because each backend was a mount rather than a migration target, a file uploaded through one of those workflows passed through Files.com and landed directly in the firm's own storage. Files.com processed and routed it without becoming the system of record.

On top of the endpoint sat the firm's controls: logins geo-blocked by country, SAML single sign-on against Microsoft Entra ID, and two-factor authentication. Over six months, the team migrated the partner-facing SFTP services onto the platform, and the firm's own cloud engineers built on it afterward.

The Partner-Facing Servers Are Gone and the Data Stayed Put

With the migration complete, the firm runs its partner exchange as a managed cloud service without taking on the storage risk it had refused.

• The partner-facing on-premises SFTP servers are retired. Banks, fund administrators, and advisers connect to hosted SFTP under the firm's domain, leaving no transfer server for the technology team to patch or keep alive for those exchanges.
• Files in these workflows land in storage the firm owns. Automated feeds, human uploads, and backups sit in the firm's S3, Azure, and Wasabi accounts, preserving its sovereignty requirements with a managed platform in front.
• Dozens of Files.com Automations run production flows, moving files between partners and the firm's storage without manual handling.
• Adding the next partner or feed requires a mount and credentials for storage the firm already owns, not another server for the team to stand up.

Separating Transfer From Storage

Files.com let the firm separate custody from transfer: the SFTP endpoint, governance, and automation live on the platform, while the data lives where a steward of hundreds of thousands of investors' savings decided it must.