Mary Kay Replaced Progress MOVEit Without Pausing Latin American Shipping

Mary Kay is one of the world's largest direct-selling beauty companies. It develops and manufactures its own skin care and cosmetics at a Texas manufacturing and R&D center, and sells them through independent beauty consultants in roughly 35 markets.

A business built that way runs on file exchange. The manufacturing group trades new formulas and bid requests with raw-material vendors. Regional offices move payroll and supplier data. And in Latin America, the offices that get product onto trucks do it by file: an order and a shipping ticket go out to the carrier, and a tracking file comes back. When Mary Kay committed to a cloud-native infrastructure strategy, all of that file movement was running on a platform that could not make the trip.

An Aging MOVEit Estate in a Data Center Marked for Closure

For years, Progress MOVEit Secure Managed File Transfer, running on Mary Kay's own on-premises servers, was the primary tool for moving data. Around it sat the workarounds that accumulate around an aging platform. Payroll staff in China opened a MOVEit folder every day and pulled their file out by hand. A delivery to a health-services provider went out over manual SFTP. Other files were scattered across on-premises shares, SharePoint Online, and Teams, with little automation connecting any of it.

Governance had decayed along with the platform. Accounts were only ever added, never removed, and the user list grew into the thousands. Nobody could say who still needed access.

Security concerns with the on-premises platform were the leading reason to move. The deciding one was the calendar: the data center MOVEit ran in was being closed, against the corporate mandate to go cloud native. The platform was not just aging. It was losing its home, on a deadline.

Shipping Traffic That Could Not Pause for a Migration

What made the move hard was that the MOVEit estate was not one workflow. It was dozens, each configured differently, and the most important of them could not stop.

“They send a file off to DHL, to Paquetexpress, saying we had this order, here's the shipping ticket, it's on the truck headed your direction, and then they send back a file saying here's the tracking number.”

That carrier exchange ran across four countries, with every job configured differently and files arriving as often as every 15 minutes. Around it ran the rest of the estate: an hourly SFTP sync with Kallik, the company's content-management platform; a weekly backup retrieval from Tenrox, one of its software vendors; the China payroll flow; and supplier data for Colombia. The Windows file shares in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru that many of these jobs read from and wrote to were staying on-premises, so whatever replaced MOVEit had to reach storage that lived behind the firewall.

The replacement had to speak the protocols these jobs already used, chiefly SFTP. It had to reach on-premises shares from the cloud without exposing them. It had to run the archive cycles and schedules that people had been handling by hand. And it had to rebuild access on the corporate directory instead of an unmanaged local list. Mary Kay selected Files.com to be that platform.

One Agent, Every Workflow, and a Parallel Run With MOVEit

Files.com became the single transfer platform, with one piece of infrastructure on Mary Kay's side underneath it: a Files.com Agent installed on a jump server in AWS, connecting outbound to Files.com and brokering between the cloud platform and the regional Windows shares in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. The shares were never exposed to the internet, and the shipping jobs kept reading and writing the storage they always had.

The carrier workflows were rebuilt as SFTP jobs driven by Files.com Automations. Files.com archived each day's files nightly, so carriers opened folders each morning containing only the current day's work. A single carrier's working folder held more than 6,000 files, with new uploads arriving every 15 minutes.

Recurring vendor and regional feeds moved onto the same platform. The weekly Tenrox backup ran as a scheduled sync: the first run took nearly seven hours to move roughly 40 GB, and every run since has finished in under ten minutes because the sync moves only what changed. The China payroll file stopped being fetched by hand. The payroll team got a permissioned user and folder access, and the file is simply there.

Access was rebuilt at the same time. Sign-in runs through single sign-on against Azure Active Directory, with users provisioned from the directory rather than added by hand to a local list that nobody prunes.

The cutover ran workflow by workflow, behind a parallel run. Mexico's shipping suppliers moved first, then Colombia's, then the vendor feeds, one at a time, with MOVEit still running underneath. The carrier workflows went live on Files.com in September 2024, and MOVEit was disabled the same month, at the end of the parallel run.

MOVEit Disabled on Schedule, With the Manual Work Gone

With MOVEit off, Mary Kay had replaced an on-premises transfer estate held together by manual handling with a single cloud platform, inside the data-center deadline.

• MOVEit is fully decommissioned. The transfer platform left the closing data center on schedule, and there is no on-premises MFT server left to run.
• The daily manual handling is gone. Nobody in China pulls the payroll file out of a folder by hand anymore, and the health-services delivery moved from manual SFTP to a scheduled, permissioned workflow.
• Outbound connections expanded across trading-partner transfers, syncs, mounts, and automations. The carrier exchange, the backup retrieval, and the vendor feeds run on schedules, not on people.
• Access is governed. An unpruned account list became a directory-provisioned user base, so the people who hold accounts are the people who actually use the platform.

The larger result is that the estate became a pattern instead of a pile. Adding a carrier or a vendor feed is now a connection and an automation on a platform the team already runs, not a new project. The architecture has already proved portable: when Mary Kay later moved the underlying on-premises shares to Amazon S3, the Agent remained in AWS and the workflows above did not change. And demand inside the company has followed, with more teams asking to bring their external file exchange onto Files.com.

A Transfer Platform That Moves With the Company

Today, when a Latin American office has an order on a truck, the shipping ticket goes out and the tracking file comes back through Files.com, on schedules nobody watches, into folders that clean themselves up overnight. The payroll contact in China opens a folder they are permissioned into instead of fetching a file from a server in a data center that was being shut down. That is the distance traveled: the file movement Mary Kay depends on no longer lives on an aging platform with an unaudited account list, and when the next storage move or the next market comes, the workflows are already built to survive it, because Files.com sits between the storage and the work rather than inside either one.

Mary Kay never ran a big-bang cutover. A legacy MFT replacement does not have to be a leap. It can be a sequence.