Fortune 500 energy company moved 33 TB to Azure in 72 hours — no VPN tunnel required.
When a Fortune 500 energy company acquired a regional operator on the U.S. East Coast, IT had one week left on the cutover clock to move 33 TB of operational data into Azure Files. There was no VPN tunnel to the holding company's environment — and traditional transfer methods couldn't move that volume in the time available.
An M&A clock with one week left.
The acquiring Fortune 500 energy company needed to take possession of 33 TB of operational data sitting in the acquired company's holding environment. The cutover date was locked. Legal, finance, and operations were already aligned around it. Only one piece wasn't ready: the data.
With one week left on the clock, IT had to design and execute a full M&A data migration to Azure Files. Two problems made a standard approach impossible: the sheer 33 TB volume, and the fact that no VPN tunnel existed between the two environments. Building one in time wasn't realistic — even if it had been, the throughput limits and protocol overhead would have made the deadline unreachable.
33 TB in 7 days is a transport problem, not a tooling problem.
The team evaluated the conventional playbook for large-scale Azure migrations and ran into a wall on every option.
VPN-based SMB transfers were too slow
Even if a VPN tunnel had existed, SMB over a site-to-site link wouldn't have come close to moving 33 TB in the time window — single-stream throughput and protocol chatter would have blown the deadline.
No VPN tunnel existed between environments
Standing up a VPN between the holding company and the acquirer's Azure tenant required network engineering, security review, and approvals that simply couldn't happen inside the cutover window.
Physical shipping was too slow
Azure Data Box and similar physical-shipment options have round-trip cycles measured in weeks. By the time the box came back, the M&A cutover would have already missed its date.
Manual scripts had no audit trail
Robocopy, PowerShell, and ad-hoc scripts could in theory move some of the data — but with no chunked transfer, no parallelism, and no detailed per-file logging, validating a successful M&A handoff would have been impossible.
HTTPS chunked uploads — straight into Azure Files.
GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise included exactly the capability the project needed: direct server-to-cloud migration to Azure Files over HTTPS, with no VPN tunnel required.
Direct HTTPS to Azure Files
RichCopy 360 connected straight to the target Azure Files share over HTTPS — no VPN, no jump host, no protocol gymnastics. Authentication and encryption rode the same channel.
Chunked Parallel Uploads
Files were split into chunks and uploaded simultaneously across many concurrent streams. This is what made 33 TB in under 72 hours achievable — the network was saturated end-to-end instead of throttled by single-stream limits.
Detailed Per-File Logging
Every file transfer was logged with full path, size, status, and timestamp — giving the IT team a verifiable, line-item audit trail to hand to compliance and to the M&A integration office at cutover.
The defining technical capability here was the HTTPS transport with chunked parallel uploads. Most file-transfer tools assume SMB, NFS, or some form of native cloud-mounted drive — all of which either require a VPN or fall apart at this volume on a tight clock. By treating Azure Files as a first-class HTTPS endpoint and chunking large files across many simultaneous streams, RichCopy 360 turned a one-week deadline into a three-day job.
Just as critical for an M&A handoff: the detailed per-file logs gave the team a complete, auditable record of what moved, when, and from where. The integration office could validate the cutover without re-scanning the source — a major time-saver when every hour counts.
Deadline beaten by four days.
Real volume, real cutover, real M&A integration office sign-off.
In M&A, the transport is the strategy.
When the clock is short and the data is large, the limiting factor isn't the cloud target — it's the path that gets you there. For this Fortune 500 energy company, the right path was direct HTTPS to Azure Files with chunked parallel uploads, and the right tool was the one that already had it built in. 33 TB. Three days. No VPN. Cutover hit on schedule.
Facing an M&A or cloud cutover deadline?
GS RichCopy 360 Enterprise moves data straight into Azure Files, Azure Blob, AWS S3, SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive — over HTTPS, with no VPN required.