Prometric Moved District Access From Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT to Files.com—Without a Coordinated Cutover

Prometric develops and delivers high-stakes exams and assessment services for regulated professions, government agencies, businesses, and schools. After acquiring EdPower, it formed Prometric Pathways, its K-12 business: tools school districts use to build assessments, deliver them at classroom and district-wide scale, and make sense of the resulting data.

A K-12 assessment business runs on file exchange. Pathways’ work with school districts depends on assessment files moving between Prometric and each district: two organizations on opposite sides of a network boundary, each with its own systems and staff. The layer that carries those files is the operational loop of the business. When it works, nobody thinks about it. At Prometric Pathways, it did not work.

To move district access without forcing every outside counterparty through a coordinated cutover, Prometric put Files.com in front of GoAnywhere first. The incumbent continued feeding the new portal while districts moved to self-service access.

An Exchange That Ran Through Engineers and Failed Without Saying So

The K-12 side of the business ran its district exchange on GoAnywhere MFT, and the platform had stopped earning the team’s trust. Files did not arrive on time. When a transfer failed, no notification said so, and the failure surfaced only when someone went looking for a file that was not there. Getting access to files was slow. And the platform was hard enough to use that districts could not operate the exchange themselves. File management was complex, response times were slow, and routine transfers ran through engineers.

That last part was the real cost. The core loop of the K-12 business depended on engineers brokering individual transfers, on a platform nobody trusted to announce its own failures. A district waiting on assessment files was really waiting on a person, and a late file announced itself only by its absence.

What a Replacement Had to Do

The incumbent could not simply be switched off. Live district exchanges ran through it, and each external school district held its own credentialed connection to it. An MFT platform with live external counterparties is entrenched by definition: every credential, every scheduled flow, and every district-side habit points at it, so a hard cutover puts all of them at risk in the same window.

So the replacement had a specification before it had a name. It had to give every school district its own login, scoped to exactly that district’s files and nothing else. It had to carry Prometric’s own branding, so a district sees the company it contracted with rather than a third-party tool. It had to speak SFTP for district systems and offer a browser path for district staff. It had to run the account hygiene that otherwise depends on someone remembering. And it had to arrive without disrupting in-flight assessment exchanges.

Prometric selected Files.com to be that district-facing exchange layer.

A Portal Scoped to Each District

The Files.com site became the front door districts use, and it runs under Prometric’s own branding. Each district gets its own login, and Files.com folder permissions scope that login to the district’s own folders. What a district sees is exactly its own exchange with Prometric.

Districts connect the way that suits them. District systems exchange files over SFTP. District staff who need to send or receive a file work in the browser: Files.com share links carry files out, and inboxes collect files in, with nothing for anyone at a district to install. Files.com encrypts and decrypts files automatically as they move through the exchange, and webhooks notify Prometric’s own systems the moment district files land, so downstream work starts when a file arrives rather than when a person notices it.

Account hygiene became a rule instead of a task. Files.com’s user lifecycle controls disable any account after 30 days of inactivity, so a district credential that stops being used stops working, without anyone auditing a user list.

GoAnywhere Fed the New Portal While the Districts Moved

The migration inverted the usual order. Instead of cutting every district connection over to a new platform in one coordinated window, Prometric stood the Files.com portal up first and fed it from the incumbent: a dedicated service account on the GoAnywhere side pushed files into a folder tree on the Files.com site. District-facing access moved to the new portal while the assessment flows underneath kept running.

That parallel run took the cutover off the critical path. There was no weekend where every district had to change credentials at once and no single window where live assessment exchanges had to stop. GoAnywhere went from being the system districts touched to a feed behind a portal they never see.

What Changed for Prometric Pathways

With the Files.com portal in production, Prometric Pathways changed an exchange that ran through engineers into one each school district operates itself. Engineers are out of the middle of routine transfers, and Prometric’s systems can begin processing when webhooks report a file’s arrival instead of waiting for someone to discover it. Dormant access no longer depends on someone remembering to audit a user list.

Onboarding the next district requires a login and a folder permission rather than a new piece of engineering work on a platform only engineers could drive.

District Access Moved Without a Cutover

Today, a school district exchanging assessment files with Prometric Pathways signs into its own branded portal and does the work itself. Before Files.com, that same exchange meant an engineer in the middle: someone to run the transfer, someone to grant the access, and someone to go looking when a file that was due had not arrived.

The project moved district-facing access rather than retiring the underlying GoAnywhere deployment. GoAnywhere remains in the underlying flow, feeding Files.com in parallel while districts work through the new portal.

The broader lesson is in how the change happened. Prometric did not need to switch off an entrenched MFT platform and hope its counterparties followed. It put Files.com in front of the districts first, fed the new portal from the old platform, and moved the counterparties without first moving the plumbing. That removed the riskiest step of the district migration—the coordinated cutover—from the path entirely.