A Large US City Uses Files.com to Deliver Multi-Gigabyte Body-Camera Footage Without Relaxing Its Email Lockdown

A large US city government serves hundreds of thousands of residents through thousands of employees across dozens of departments, and central IT for all of them is a single organization.

A government that broad produces files that look nothing like office documents. Police body cameras and security cameras generate footage by the gigabyte, and the city's Legal department has to get that footage to people outside the government. The city's public art program collects proposals from artists. Contractors, vendors, and residents all have documents the city needs to receive. And the city's email system, the default channel for all of it, is built to refuse nearly all of it.

Locked to Word, Excel, and PDF, on Purpose

The city's email accepts ordinary office documents and blocks almost everything else, in both directions, with a hard size limit on top.

The wall landed hardest on Legal. A single delivery of police body-camera and security-camera footage runs to many gigabytes, and email could not carry a fraction of it. But the problem stood citywide: any employee, in any department, with a file over the size cap or outside the whitelist had no way to send it, and no way to receive one either. The default delivery channel for a government of thousands refused a large share of the files the government's work actually produces. Those files needed a sanctioned channel of their own.

The Fix Could Not Be a Looser Email Filter

The email restrictions are not an accident to be corrected. They are a deliberate security control, and loosening them to accommodate large or unusual files would defeat their purpose. The fix had to live beside email, not inside it.

That set the requirements. It had to carry large files and file types that email blocked. It had to be usable by attorneys, HR staff, and art administrators, not just engineers. It had to work for outside parties with no account and nothing to install. And it had to run on the city's own identity, under one central team's governance, with each department kept to its own space.

The city selected Files.com to be that channel.

One Governed Channel on the City's Own Domain

Central IT runs a single Files.com site as a shared service for the whole government, on the city's own branded domain, so every link an outside party clicks carries the city's name. Sign-in runs through the city's Azure Active Directory over SAML, with provisioning tied to the city directory. Employees use their city credentials, and central IT maintains no separate account list. Folder-level permissions and groups divide the shared site into departmental spaces, so Legal's footage and HR's submissions never share an audience.

Outbound, the pattern is one step: upload the file and send a Files.com Share Link. The recipient downloads it in a browser, with no account and nothing installed. Inbound, the same site collects what email cannot accept. Password-protected upload folders let outside parties drop files in, and web forms post uploads straight to a Files.com link, including one HR runs on a page of the city's public website. The public art program handles its entire proposal intake this way: a published folder where artists read the proposal document in the browser and upload their submissions back into the same folder.

Gigabytes at a Time, Citywide

With Files.com in place, “email won't take this file” stopped being a dead end for the city.

• Legal routinely delivers police body-camera and security-camera footage to the people who need it.
• Files the city could never receive by email, from contractor documents to artist proposals, now arrive through governed upload folders and web forms.
• Legal, Finance, Human Resources, the public art program, and the police department all work on one site, which holds terabytes of the city's files. For central IT, extending it to another department is a folder and a permission set, not a new system.

Employee access runs under city credentials, with transfers governed by folder permissions, so a government of thousands of employees has one governed answer to a blocked file.

The Lockdown Never Moved

Today the city's security posture and the city's work no longer fight each other. The email whitelist and the size cap stand exactly where they did. What changed is what happens on the far side of them: an attorney with gigabytes of camera footage sends a link the recipient can open in a browser, and an artist with a proposal uploads it straight into the folder the public art program watches.

A locked-down email policy did not have to be relaxed to move the files it blocks. It needed a governed channel beside it that any employee can use with a link, and Files.com is that channel for the city.