Meritage Retired Plain FTP Across 365 Restaurants with Files.com—Without Rewriting Its Scripts

Meritage Hospitality Group is a US multi-brand restaurant operator with roughly 365 locations and 10,000 employees.

Every restaurant has an office computer, and every one of those computers is an endpoint in a fleet spread across multiple states. Software installers, local configuration, and configs for in-store networking equipment have to flow out to every store, and each store’s sales data has to flow back. The pipeline that carries that traffic is not a convenience. It is infrastructure the whole fleet runs on.

A Legacy FTP Server Under Every Restaurant

For years, that pipeline was a self-hosted FTP server. A scheduled script on the office computer in each restaurant pulled installers, configuration files, and networking-equipment configs down from the server, and pushed the store’s sales data back up.

The pattern was sound. The transport was not. The fleet spoke plain, unencrypted FTP, which meant every executable sent to a store and all the sales data coming back crossed the internet in the clear, at every location, on every run.

The server itself was the other cost. It was a single, self-managed machine, and everything at roughly 365 restaurants depended on it. Meritage’s IT team owned its uptime and its patching, on top of the restaurants the team actually exists to support.

Hundreds of Scripts, and No Room for a Big Bang

The arrangement survived because it was wired into every store. The deployment script at each location was pointed at the old server. Replacing the server meant changing what every one of those scripts pointed at without breaking software distribution or sales collection at restaurants serving customers every day. A synchronized cutover across a live fleet was not a realistic option.

So the replacement had a specific shape. It had to support the scripts’ existing automated pull-and-push pattern over encrypted transport, so they could be repointed rather than rewritten. It had to absorb machine-driven traffic at fleet scale, from hundreds of endpoints running on schedules with no person watching. And it had to take the server itself off Meritage’s hands entirely.

That fit led Meritage to select Files.com as the managed SFTP endpoint for the restaurant fleet.

Repointing the Scripts, Store by Store

Meritage’s own systems engineer converted the deployment scripts in place over roughly two months. Each script changed its destination from the legacy FTP server to Files.com SFTP. The logic that decides what each store pulls and what it pushes stayed exactly as it was. Dedicated Files.com service accounts carry the fleet’s automated traffic, and Meritage administers those accounts itself.

The cutover is visible in the platform’s own telemetry. In March 2024, transactions on the Meritage account rose from roughly 20,000 a day to roughly 1.3 million a day: the moment the fleet’s scripts arrived. Files.com absorbed that 65-fold jump with nothing for Meritage to size, provision, or re-architect.

Encrypted to Every Store, with Nothing Left to Patch

With the fleet on Files.com, Meritage replaced a self-run server and unencrypted transport with a managed endpoint and encrypted transfer to every restaurant in the workload.

• Every store endpoint now pulls installers and configuration, and pushes its sales data, over encrypted SFTP. Plain FTP is gone from the fleet.
• The legacy FTP server is retired. Nobody at Meritage patches, monitors, or restores the machine that every restaurant used to depend on.
• Files.com now handles roughly 1.3 million daily transactions from the restaurant workload.
• The migration was completed in-house by repointing scripts rather than rebuilding the workflow.

Distribution Without a Server to Run

For an operator running the same automation across roughly 365 restaurants, that is the difference between adding load to a box Meritage has to operate and adding another script to a platform built for the workload. The scripts were never the problem. Meritage kept them, changed the one thing about them that mattered, and retired the server they pointed at.