One of the integration options available in DemandCaster is post to FTP.

FTP, or "File Transfer Protocol" allows customers to post their DemandCaster data to a client specific FTP folder in the cloud. From there, DemandCaster will transform and load the data into the clients DemandCaster instance.

SFTP, which stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a separate protocol packaged with SSH that works in a similar way over a secure connection. The advantage is the ability to leverage a secure connection to transfer files and traverse the filesystem on both the local and remote system.

In almost all cases, SFTP is preferable to FTP because of its underlying security features and ability to piggy-back on an SSH connection. FTP is an insecure protocol that should only be used in limited cases or on networks you trust.

Things to Consider:

1. Which files are going to be uploaded, how often, and what time of day. This is critical since the clients post to FTP is done outside of the DemandCaster environment, the transformation and load on the DemandCaster side must be timed after the client post to FTP.
2. The data loaded to FTP must NOT BE compressed (zipped)
3. In addition, the method to update the data must be defined. For example, the client may choose to supply an initial historical upload of three to four years of customer orders and then subsequently upload shorter time frames of history. For example, the subsequent uploads may be the last three months of history on a monthly rolling basis with each new month indexing the history up one month. We prefer this brute force means of updating historical tables since it is  faster to replace a chunk of history as opposed to finding and replacing any record that has been updated from the last upload.