Vestis Replaced Its Legacy MFT With Hosted File Exchange for Every Vendor—No Server Required

Vestis Corporation is a uniform rental and workplace supply company in North America. Formerly Aramark Uniform Services, Vestis became an independent public company after its spin-off from Aramark. It delivers uniforms, workwear, and facility and hygiene products to business customers through a recurring route-service model supported by 20,000 employees.

A route business at that scale runs on a web of external counterparties: logistics providers, suppliers, service vendors, consulting partners. Orders come in, acknowledgments go out, and logistics data moves in both directions, around the clock. Those counterparties vary wildly in technical sophistication. Some run full automation stacks. Others have nothing but a web browser. Exchanging files with all of them is not a side task at Vestis. It is how the integration backbone of the business reaches the outside world. To reach both kinds of counterparties without becoming their infrastructure, Vestis moved the exchange to Files.com.

A Blocked Delivery and Partners With No Infrastructure

In 2019, Vestis ran partner file exchange on a legacy SOA/MFT platform, with an on-premises FTP server handling scheduled file drops. The MFT's SSH encryption had aged out of the modern internet. It supported only outdated CBC ciphers, so it could not negotiate a session with a modern SFTP endpoint at all. When the business needed to deliver files to its provider in China, the transfer did not fail intermittently. It could not start. The limitation lived inside the platform itself, and no configuration could bridge it.

The other half of the problem sat on the partner side, and Venkat Kellyan, Director of Data Engineering and Analytics, describes it plainly:

“We had vendors and partners who we needed to interface with, and they did not have the infrastructure to host an SFTP site or an HTTPS file upload site. We didn't want to create Active Directory accounts and set up an SFTP server. We didn't want to manage a repository.”

The default answer would have made Vestis the infrastructure: directory accounts for every external party, an SFTP server to stand up and patch, a repository to manage forever. So the fix had to do three things at once. It had to speak the modern protocols the legacy MFT could not. It had to give every counterparty a usable endpoint, whether that counterparty ran automation or only a browser. And it had to do both without Vestis hosting anything. Vestis selected Files.com to be that hosted exchange point.

One Exchange Point Between SnapLogic and the Outside World

Files.com became the neutral exchange layer between the Vestis backend and every external counterparty. Neither side hosts the other. Both sides connect to the same place.

On the machine side, backend integrations write files to the Files.com site. SnapLogic, the company's standard integration engine with more than 4,000 interfaces, reads, writes, and moves files over SFTP, FTP, and the Files.com REST API. That flow carries all inbound orders and outbound acknowledgments, 24x7.

On the partner side, each vendor or partner is provisioned as a Files.com user against its own folder. A partner with automation connects over SFTP or FTP with its existing tooling. A partner with nothing logs into the browser to pick up and drop files. The site runs on a Vestis subdomain with Vestis branding, so the front door external users see carries the company's own name.

14,000 API Calls a Day, and No Server to Run

With the Files.com workflow in production since 2020, Vestis replaced a cipher-bound legacy MFT and a self-hosted FTP server with an exchange layer it does not host, patch, or staff.

• The delivery to China that the legacy MFT could never complete went through Files.com, which negotiates the modern ciphers the old platform lacked.
• The workload is overwhelmingly machine-to-machine, at roughly 14,000 API calls a day, carrying every inbound order and outbound acknowledgment around the clock.
• External exchange now supports logistics, network optimization, and BI workloads, and the two-person team runs this layer as part of the 4,000-interface SnapLogic estate.

The Endpoint Vestis Never Had to Build

Today, there is a question Vestis no longer has to ask before working with a counterparty: is this vendor equipped to exchange files? A partner with a full integration stack connects to Files.com over SFTP. A partner with nothing but a browser logs into a branded portal. The Vestis pipelines on the other side read both the same way. What once meant standing up a server, creating directory accounts, and running a repository is now provisioning a user against a folder. After more than four years in production, Files.com is the endpoint for every counterparty Vestis works with, and Vestis never had to build it.