u-blox Retired Its Legacy FTP Platforms—and Three Years Later, Files.com Remains Its Only External Sharing Channel

u-blox designs the chips and modules that tell machines where they are. The Swiss fabless semiconductor company builds GNSS positioning and short-range wireless technology for automotive, industrial, and consumer IoT products. Its roughly 1,400 people work from 33 locations worldwide, selling to OEMs and Tier 1 integrators who put u-blox silicon into automated driving systems, precision agriculture equipment, drones, and robots.

A component supplier's relationship with its customers does not end at shipment. When a device built on u-blox silicon misbehaves in the field, the customer sends u-blox an error log. Engineers analyze it and send files back. That round trip of operational data, in and out across the company boundary, is built into how u-blox supports the companies that design its modules into their products.

A Business-Critical Customer Workflow on Servers Marked for Retirement

That exchange ran on legacy FTP platforms, and u-blox had decided they needed to go. The head of the company's Microsoft and Linux architectures framed the search plainly: a platform for exchanging data with external customers, replacing the FTP platforms, preferably over modern protocols such as HTTPS.

The cost of the old arrangement was carried every day the exchange ran. External accounts on the FTP servers lived outside the corporate directory, so access to customer data did not follow the identity system that governed everything else at u-blox. The rules on what could be shared existed as a documented SOP applied around the servers, not as a property of the channel itself. And the files were not small: a single diagnostic log shared with an external party can run to 4 GB, which is exactly the kind of transfer FTP existed to carry, and exactly why the servers could not simply be switched off.

The structural constraint was the shape of the company. u-blox is distributed, with R&D centers around the world, each working with its own external counterparties. Every new external account routed through central IT, and the company's security team wanted that inverted: power users inside each R&D center able to add users on the platform, without any ability to reach another center's folders.

So the replacement had a specification before it had a name. It had to become the single approved channel between u-blox and everyone outside it. It had to speak HTTPS for people and SFTP for systems. It had to take identity from the corporate directory. It had to let each R&D center administer its own external users inside a hard boundary. And it had to work as a transit facility, holding files only for the duration of an exchange, never as an archive of customer data.

Replacing FTP would never be just a protocol swap. The old servers could only be switched off if the replacement absorbed everything that had grown up around them: identity, delegated administration, and the discipline of not keeping files whose work was finished.

One Governed Channel on Files.com

u-blox selected Files.com to be that channel. What the company built is a single doorway to the outside, with key controls built into the doorway rather than written down beside it.

Identity comes from the directory. u-blox connected Files.com to Microsoft Entra ID for single sign-on, with SCIM provisioning creating, updating, and deactivating accounts from the directory itself. Nobody at u-blox maintains a second list of file users, and when someone leaves the company, their access to the channel ends when the directory says it does.

External parties reach files over modern protocols. Files.com Share Links deliver files to outside companies and individuals over HTTPS, in a browser, with no account to create and nothing to install. Counterparties that script their transfers connect over SFTP. Bare FTP is gone from the path entirely.

Administration is federated the way the security team asked for. Using Files.com group admin delegation, power users in each R&D center create and manage users scoped to their own center's folders. Central IT is out of the user-creation path, and a power user in one center cannot see or administer another center's space.

And the platform runs deliberately as a transit facility. Internal SOPs decide what may be shared, and files are deleted on a rolling basis once an exchange completes. Files.com moves the data; it does not accumulate it.

Three Years as the Company's Only External Sharing Channel

Three years on, the retirement has held. u-blox replaced its legacy FTP platforms with a single governed exchange, and nothing has grown up beside it.

• Files.com is u-blox's only channel for sharing anything with external companies and individuals. The FTP platforms did not linger alongside their replacement; they are gone.
• Onboarding an external counterparty is now a local action, with no central IT ticket.
• Storage proves the transit model works: roughly 4 TB today, roughly the same as three years ago, with a 2024 peak near 9 TB that drained back to baseline as files finished their job and were deleted.

The immediate result was the retirement itself. The compounding one is that growth in external exchange no longer accumulates anything: not accounts outside the directory, not data past its useful life, not administrative load on central IT.

Key Controls Moved Into the Channel

When a customer's device misbehaves in the field today, the u-blox engineer supporting them exchanges diagnostic files through the same Files.com channel as every other team in the company. The engineer's access came from the corporate directory. The external contact was set up by a power user in the engineer's own R&D center. The files will be deleted once the exchange is done. The identity and administrative boundaries do not depend on anyone remembering the rules, because those controls are now properties of the channel.

That is what made the retirement stick. Three years later, the old servers are still off.