A Sports Technology Company Consolidated Client and Vendor File Exchange Onto One MFA-Enforced Files.com Platform

A UK sports technology and fan-engagement business builds the digital platforms, data products, and marketing campaigns that sports rights holders use to reach and monetise their fans, working with clubs, governing bodies, competitions, leagues, and federations across the UK, Europe, and beyond. Its whole business is sport, and its work runs on other organisations' data: audience records, campaign results, and transaction data arrive from the vendors each club or league already uses, get processed by the company, and flow back out as products and reports.

That puts file exchange underneath everything the company sells. Every engagement means files moving between the company, the client, and the client's own data vendors, and much of what moves is personal fan data. The exchange path is the foundation of the product, and the company wanted it on one governed platform.

Files.com gave the company a way to bring those paths onto one governed cloud service, and when the company left its data centre, the file infrastructure did not need a new physical home.

Several Paths Doing One Job

For years, that path ran on an on-premises SFTP server that carried dozens of external and system connections, with individual clients setting their own SSH key and cipher requirements for how they would connect.

Around it sat several more paths doing overlapping jobs. A homegrown client file portal, built in-house, carried dozens of external users, with its folder structures and permissions maintained by hand. Nextcloud handled internal sharing. Custom SFTP scripts ran weekly to collect recurring files. And staff needed a way to send something large or urgent to a client. The company wanted every one of those paths under one set of controls, with every outbound delivery something IT could see, expire, and revoke.

No single piece of it could be swapped in isolation. The server had its own connections and per-client requirements, the portal had its own population of external users, and the large-file sends needed a path of their own. Replacing only the server would have left the rest where it was.

An MFA Mandate and a Data Centre Exit at Once

Two requirements arrived together. Management made multi-factor authentication and single sign-on a hard requirement across the business, and the file estate had to meet it on every path a client, vendor, or staff member used. At the same time, the company was migrating out of its data centre, which meant every piece of physical infrastructure had to be rehomed somewhere. The file servers were on that list.

The replacement had to bring the client and vendor exchange paths under one set of controls. It had to enforce MFA site-wide and plug into Google SSO. It had to give every client and vendor an SFTP endpoint that honoured that counterparty's own key and cipher requirements. It had to give clients a place to deliver files and confirm their uploads landed. It had to give staff a governed way to send large files. And it had to run somewhere other than a data centre the company was leaving.

The company selected Files.com to consolidate those paths onto one cloud platform.

A Clean-Slate Cutover for Clients, Vendors, and Bots

The company chose a clean-slate migration: fresh folder structures built on Files.com, with legacy data left behind rather than dragged along. Files.com groups made membership the single source of access, replacing permissions that had been edited by hand across the portal and the server. Internal staff and the portal's external users moved to the new structure together.

Each client and vendor received a dedicated folder and its own SFTP credential, with key types and ciphers configured to that counterparty's requirements. Clients deliver files into their folder and can log in to confirm the upload landed and is displaying correctly, and the company's commercial team checks receipt of data in the same place instead of asking IT.

The machine population moved onto the same platform. System users hold their own SFTP credentials and run unattended pipelines: a push-notification analytics vendor places click data into a dedicated folder on a schedule, and the company pulls it down programmatically for processing. Through the Files.com S3 integration, those credentials also let partners transact against the company's AWS buckets without AWS access. Dozens of external and system SFTP connections now run this way.

Outbound delivery was the last piece. One-time, expiring Files.com share links carry large or urgent files to clients, and a retention policy on client project folders expires delivered data automatically. MFA is enforced site-wide, with Google SSO handling sign-in. Partners were given cutover timelines and switched, while Nextcloud’s internal content moved to Google Drive. The SFTP server, the client portal, and Nextcloud were then deprecated.

One Set of Controls Across Every Exchange

Since the cutover, the company has run its client and vendor file exchange on one governed platform in place of a server, a hand-maintained portal, and several sharing paths.

• The management mandate is met: MFA is enforced site-wide with Google SSO, on every path a client, vendor, or staff member uses.
• Personal fan data moves through expiring links and retention-controlled folders, so every delivery stays governed and data cleans up after itself.
• Onboarding a new client or vendor feed is now a folder, a group, and a credential configured to that counterparty's requirements. The external and system connections all run on that one pattern, and usage has spread from a handful of IT users at rollout to staff and system accounts across the business.

One Less Thing to Move

The deeper change is what the data centre migration turned out to be. The company did not rehome its file infrastructure; it stopped owning any. When the racks were emptied, there was no SFTP server to move, no portal to re-host, and no permission tree to rebuild, because all of it was already running on Files.com.

Today, a club's campaign data lands in its own folder, the commercial team confirms receipt in a browser, a pipeline pulls it down for processing, and a report goes back out on an expiring link, with nobody at the company operating a server underneath any of it. For a business built on moving other organisations' data, the migration was not the moment to find the file infrastructure a new home. It was the moment to take it off the physical estate for good.