A Wholesale Distributor Retired Its In-House SFTP Server With a Single-Day Cutover to Files.com

A US wholesale distribution and retail-supply-chain business distributes consumer products to grocery and mass retailers, runs third-party fulfillment for brands selling on major online marketplaces, and handles inventory procurement with vendors.

A business positioned between retailers and the brands that supply them runs on data files. Order files, item data, and shipment volumes move constantly between the distributor's systems and the parties on either side of it. For years, a share of that exchange ran through one machine: an SFTP service the company built and operated itself, on a server inside its own on-premises environment. In early 2025, the distributor moved dozens of internal and external users to Files.com in a single day, retiring the in-house server as a dependency.

The Server the Order Files Still Ran Through

Dozens of users connected to that in-house SFTP service. Some were internal staff. Others were external business partners, exchanging order files, item information, and shipment-volume files that fed live integrations downstream. The server sat in the critical path of the data that keeps product moving toward shelves, and it belonged entirely to the distributor to keep alive: patched, monitored, and available around the clock to parties outside the company.

It was also out of step with everything around it. The distributor's integration environment had become cloud-hybrid, with more than a dozen systems connecting across Azure and on-premises, including Dynamics 365 and the company's EDI software, and a great many interfaces already moving files through Files.com. The file-transfer layer had consolidated onto a managed platform. The on-prem SFTP server was the holdout, and every day it ran, someone had to operate it.

Why the Cutover Could Not Be Gradual

The server had survived for a reason. Retiring it was never as simple as moving accounts, because the files on it fed live integrations. Whatever replaced it had to hold the existing data, current as of the moment anyone switched. And the users were not all employees who could be walked through a slow transition. External partners could not be strung through a long migration window.

So the replacement had to do three specific things. It had to speak SFTP, so existing users and their existing clients reconnected without new tooling. It had to be seeded with the working data before anyone moved, so nothing was missing on day one. And it had to let accounts be created in bulk ahead of time, so the switch itself could happen in one motion. The distributor pointed the project at Files.com, the platform already carrying file traffic for the rest of its integration environment.

Seed the Data, Stage the Users, Move in a Day

The design made the cutover short by doing everything slow in advance. Using Files.com's Remote Server Sync, the team ran a two-way synchronization between selected Files.com folders and the Azure storage file share that held the working data. It was a one-time seed: by the time users moved, everything they expected to find was already on Files.com and current.

User accounts came next. With Files.com's bulk user provisioning, the team staged the accounts in advance rather than creating them one at a time on cutover day.

Then, in early 2025, dozens of internal and external users moved off the on-prem SFTP service in a single day. The distributor's own applications and integration team ran the whole sequence. From that day forward, net-new data lives on Files.com, and the old service stopped being anything anyone depended on.

No Server Left to Patch, Monitor, or Keep Online

With the cutover complete, the distributor replaced a server it had to operate with a service it consumes.

• The in-house SFTP service is retired as a dependency. Nobody at the company patches, monitors, or keeps a file server available for outside parties anymore.
• Internal and external users work directly out of Files.com, and net-new data lives on the platform.
• External partners no longer connect to a server inside the distributor's own environment. They connect to Files.com.
• File exchange runs on the same platform as the rest of the integration environment, where more than a dozen systems connect across Azure and on-premises. The company's EDI leadership describes Files.com as the middleware layer between its source systems, ERPs, and external partners.

The compounding effect is that the next connection lands on the platform too. Adding a system or a partner is configuration on Files.com, not a change to hardware in a data center.

Retiring a Live SFTP Server Without a Transition Window

Replacing an SFTP server that outside partners depend on sounds like a long project. The distributor's took a day, because everything slow happened before it. The data was seeded through sync while the old server still ran, and the accounts existed before anyone needed them. It was made redundant in advance, and then it was gone in a day.