A City Government Replaced IBM-Hosted FTP With Files.com Under Its Own Domain

A US municipal government serves its residents through departments including municipal court, public safety, and GIS.

A government like that runs on file exchange. Municipal court files, computer-aided dispatch data from public safety, and GIS mapping data all move between city departments, outside vendors, and neighboring municipalities. For years, all of that exchange ran through a single FTP service hosted for the City in an IBM datacenter. The infrastructure carrying it belonged to someone else.

A Datacenter Closure Set the Deadline

In 2021, IBM’s datacenter closure put the City’s FTP service on a hard cutoff. Every workflow pointed at that endpoint—court exchange, CAD data movement, GIS distribution, and vendor drops—was set to go dark on IBM’s schedule, not the City’s. And the counterparties were not the City’s to reconfigure at leisure. Outside vendors and other municipalities all needed a working endpoint by a cutoff the City had no say in.

Rebuilding the service on city-owned infrastructure would have moved the standing burden of hosting, hardening, and patching onto the City. The City instead needed an endpoint that required no servers for its team to build or operate.

The replacement also had to speak FTP and SFTP to preserve existing exchanges. It had to be live before the cutoff. And it had to sit under a name the City controlled, so that no future vendor decision could strand its counterparties again.

The City selected Files.com to be that endpoint.

A Managed FTP and SFTP Endpoint Under the City’s Own Domain

Files.com became the City’s file exchange without the City owning any transfer infrastructure at all.

The endpoint was published under the City’s own domain. Counterparties connect to an address the City owns, and Files.com operates everything behind it. That inverted the arrangement that failed in 2021: the vendor runs the machinery, but the name belongs to the City. The City can change what sits behind the address without changing the address its counterparties use.

SFTP and FTP were enabled folder by folder, allowing each department and external partner to continue exchanging files through the protocols already in use.

A Files.com Automation deletes files after they are downloaded, so exchange folders hand off their contents and stay clean. Nobody sweeps out delivered data by hand, and files sent to a counterparty do not sit on the endpoint after the counterparty has them.

The endpoint was configured with the custom domain, SSL, and protocol settings in place, and live SFTP connections followed. The City made the cutoff.

Live Before the Cutoff, Running Ever Since

Since the cutover in the fall of 2021, the City has continuously run its file exchange on Files.com. Municipal court, CAD, and GIS use the endpoint alongside outside vendors and neighboring municipalities, while Files.com operates the underlying transfer infrastructure.

The standing endpoint showed its long-term value when the GIS department extended its data sharing to a neighboring city. Adding another government to the exchange now meant creating a folder and setting its permissions—not deploying a new server, launching another service, or starting an infrastructure project.

The Address Belongs to the City Now

The FTP service the City lost in 2021 lived under a vendor’s roof and disappeared on the vendor’s schedule. Today, departments, vendors, and neighboring municipalities connect through the City’s own address. The City answers with a folder rather than a project.