Mead & Hunt Unblocked Its Microsoft Dynamics ERP Rollout with Files.com—Without Self-Hosting SFTP

Mead & Hunt is an employee-owned architecture and engineering firm that has been designing American infrastructure since 1900. Its roughly 1,450 people work from more than 55 offices nationwide, planning and designing airports, highways and bridges, hydropower dams, and food and beverage plants, largely for public clients: airports, state transportation departments, municipalities, federal and military agencies, and utilities. Engineering News-Record has ranked it among the top 100 design firms in the country every year since 2021.

A firm of that shape runs on its back-office systems as much as on its design tools. Paying, hiring, and accounting for 1,450 employee-owners spread across the country means enterprise applications that have to exchange data reliably, under the oversight of a central IT team. And Mead & Hunt 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 Mead & Hunt'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 Mead & Hunt started down it. Then Paylocity made API access a costly option, and the API path was dead. The implementation partner running the Dynamics deployment had been adamant all along about the alternative: SFTP file drops.

For most companies that would be a shrug. For Mead & Hunt 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

Shaun Danz, Mead & Hunt's IT Director, first tried to solve it directly. He stood up an SFTP server himself, along with a file share for Dynamics to read from.

The attempt confirmed that in-house SFTP hosting was a security liability the firm was not going to own, 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.

Mead & Hunt put Files.com in that role.

Two One-Way SFTP Drops Into an Azure Files Mount

Danz built the integration himself 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 Mead & Hunt already runs, inside the Microsoft environment the rest of the ERP lives in.

By January 2026, both feeds were validated and running.

The Feeds Run, and Nobody Defends a Server

With the feeds in production, Mead & Hunt 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, and the firm never had to buy API access.

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 owns the exposure. Today Danz administers service accounts and folder permissions, and nobody at Mead & Hunt patches an SFTP server, hardens one against the open internet, or rewrites firewall rules to keep a finance feed alive. With Files.com hosting the endpoint in front of Mead & Hunt'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.