Uniphar Automates FTPS Supplier Stock Without Bending Its SFTP-Only Policy

Uniphar is Ireland's largest pharmaceutical wholesaler. It handles roughly half of the country's pharmaceutical wholesale market, fulfilling more than 24,000 deliveries a week to Ireland's 2,000 pharmacies.

To simplify how pharmacies buy, Uniphar built its own ordering platform: one channel through which a pharmacy orders and replenishes against Uniphar's warehouse stock and the stock of external suppliers. The platform matches each order to the best available supplier option, keyed by medicinal product ID, and triggers replenishment as pharmacies dispense. That matching is only as good as the stock data underneath it, so the design called for supplier inventory to refresh every 10 to 15 minutes. Without automated ingress, those stock files had to be uploaded by hand, leaving the feed to run at whatever pace a person could manage.

An SFTP Mandate Meets a Supplier That Will Not Leave FTPS

Uniphar was replacing an ordering platform an external vendor had built for it. The old platform was not fit for purpose, and Uniphar chose to build its successor internally, on Azure. As the new platform was in penetration testing, with acceptance testing and a soft launch scheduled, two facts collided.

The first was internal. Uniphar's head of IT security had made SFTP the only permitted file transfer protocol across the estate. FTP and FTPS were out, everywhere.

The second was external. Suppliers pushed their stock files over FTP and FTPS, and at least one wholesaler declined to move. Uniphar proposed several alternatives and got nowhere. The supplier was staying on FTPS.

Uniphar controlled neither side of that standoff. The policy was not going to bend for one supplier, and the supplier was not going to change for one customer. The premise of the platform—pharmacies ordering against external suppliers' live stock alongside Uniphar's own—was blocked at the ingress layer.

What the Bridge Had to Do

Redesigning the platform around one holdout was not on the table either. Uniphar's ingress architecture was deliberate: each supplier would get its own isolated endpoint, stood up by script, with credentials generated, stored in Azure Key Vault, and then distributed to the supplier. Suppliers could not see each other's data. That was a hard requirement, not a preference.

The fix had to accept FTPS from the supplier at the perimeter, speak only SFTP toward Uniphar's environment, keep every supplier separated behind its own credentials, and change nothing about the scripted, per-supplier architecture inside.

Uniphar selected Files.com to be that bridge.

A Protocol Bridge in Front of an Unchanged Azure Estate

Files.com became the perimeter layer that accepted the supplier's protocol and presented only SFTP inward.

On the supplier side, each external supplier connected to Files.com with its own credential set and saw only its own space. The wholesaler that refused to leave FTPS connected over FTPS, exactly as it always had. From the supplier's point of view, nothing about the exchange changed.

On Uniphar's side, Files.com used Outbound Connections to deliver each file over SFTP into that supplier's scripted Azure endpoint. From there, the flow remained untouched: event-driven handlers on AKS normalized each supplier's XML and CSV files into the platform's canonical stock model.

Nothing behind the bridge changed. The security policy saw only SFTP. The supplier saw only FTPS. Files.com was the one component that spoke both.

Live Supplier Stock, With No Policy Exception

With the bridge in production, Uniphar replaced manual stock uploads with the automated ingress the platform was designed around.

• The FTPS holdout is onboarded. The supplier changed nothing, and the SFTP-only policy holds across the estate with no exception granted.
• Supplier stock flows on the designed 10-to-15-minute refresh cadence instead of arriving whenever someone can upload it, so the platform matches pharmacy orders against current inventory. At Uniphar's scale—more than 24,000 deliveries a week to 2,000 pharmacies—that freshness is a business requirement, not a background technical detail.
• Every supplier remains isolated behind its own endpoint and its own credentials. No supplier can see another's data.
• Onboarding the next supplier no longer depends on its transfer protocol. Uniphar's scripts stand up the endpoint, Files.com absorbs the protocol at the edge, and the pattern repeats for every supplier that follows.

The work drew unprompted praise from Uniphar's CTO:

“Best engagement I have had with a SaaS provider in a long time.”

One Standard Inside, Any Protocol Outside

Before the bridge, a security standard and a supplier's refusal were being reconciled by hand, one uploaded file at a time. Now the supplier pushes its stock file the way it always has, Files.com carries it across the protocol boundary, and minutes later a pharmacist orders against inventory that reflects it.