A Power Electronics Manufacturer Used Files.com to Retire Its DMZ Server Without Interrupting Supplier Design Exchange

A global power electronics manufacturer designs and builds high-voltage power supplies and X-ray components for medical imaging, industrial, and scientific OEMs, with plants across a global manufacturing footprint.

The company’s business depends on exchange with outside partners, and that model means its most valuable asset is constantly in motion. Specs for an order, engineering designs, and drawings for subassemblies have to reach customers, suppliers, and trading partners outside the company, and they have to get there without leaving the company’s control.

Engineering Designs Moved Through a Server the Company Had to Keep Exposed

That exchange ran through a legacy file server the company hosted itself, sitting in the company’s DMZ. The arrangement put outbound intellectual property on an internet-facing machine that IT had to run, patch, and keep reachable, because reachability was the server’s whole job: suppliers and trading partners connected to it from outside to pick up designs and drop off documents. Giving a new supplier access meant administering another account on that box. The one piece of infrastructure standing between the company's designs and the internet was the piece the company had to defend by hand.

The server survived because the workload on it was live. Suppliers depended on it for the specs and drawings behind open orders, and its contents had accumulated into a full directory estate. A replacement had to take on that estate, and the outside parties connected to it, without a gap in the exchange.

It also had to do what the server never did. Suppliers had to keep connecting with the SFTP clients they already ran, with nothing new to install. Employees had to sign in with the company’s Azure identity instead of one more standalone password. Setting up a supplier had to become routine work rather than server administration. And nothing internet-facing could be left behind for the company to operate. The manufacturer selected Files.com to take the workload off the server.

A Tree-by-Tree Migration That Kept Suppliers Connected

The company’s IT team ran the move in phases through 2023 rather than as a single cutover. Using Files.com’s Remote Server Mount, the team brought the directory trees into Files.com one at a time. Because the estate moved tree by tree, the supplier-facing exchange never had to stop for the migration.

The access model was rebuilt on the platform in the same window. Suppliers received SFTP accounts and kept the clients they already used. Azure SSO gave employees their corporate sign-in. User groups carried folder permissions, and bulk user import and user cloning turned account creation into copying a working pattern instead of building each supplier from scratch.

What came out of it was a managed replacement doing the server’s job without the server: the same external exchange, with the internet-facing infrastructure and patching handed to Files.com and account creation reduced to a repeatable pattern.

Supplier Accounts Most Weeks, and Nothing Left in the DMZ

With the estate moved and the access model rebuilt, the manufacturer retired the DMZ server, and external file exchange stopped being infrastructure the company defends and became work it simply does.

• The internet-facing server is gone. No self-hosted machine sits between the company’s engineering designs and the outside parties who need them, and there is nothing in the DMZ for IT to patch.
• Provisioning a supplier is routine. IT sets up new supplier accounts on Files.com most weeks, cloning an existing account or importing users in bulk instead of administering logins on a server.
• The people who own a relationship share the files. A senior buyer in purchasing uploads engineering drawings and shares them with suppliers directly through the Files.com web interface.
• The platform expanded beyond the old server’s workload. The same site later completed an end-to-end EDI test with a trading partner over AS2 and began feeding its audit events into Rapid7, the company’s SIEM.

External Exchange Without a Server to Defend

Today, sending an engineering design outside the company no longer depends on a machine the company keeps exposed to the internet. A buyer shares a drawing from her browser. IT clones an account when a new supplier comes on. The exposed endpoint, and everything it takes to keep one safe, is Files.com’s to run.

None of it required a cutover weekend. The estate moved piece by piece over months while suppliers stayed connected, and what the manufacturer got in the trade was more than a new home for its files. An asset the company had to defend became a platform it keeps building on, one supplier account and one new workload at a time.