City of Cape Coral Retired Its FTP Server by Giving Ten Departments Their Own Files.com Accounts

Cape Coral is a full-service municipal government in southwest Florida. Roughly 1,500 employees support police, fire, public works, utilities, SCADA, parks, planning, finance, the city attorney, and, unusually for a municipality, its own charter school system.

Across those departments, work with outside firms produces files. Engineers trade large project files with outside consultants. City projects get documented in drone audio and video. Fire crews photograph scenes on iPads. The files are too large to send by email, and departments across the city produce them.

Ten Departments, One FTP Server

Whatever could not travel by email went through an internal FTP server that the city hosted itself. That put the IT team in the infrastructure business: a server to run, patch, and keep reachable for the outside vendors who needed to connect to it, sitting in the path of every large file the city exchanged.

The cost landed in two places. Departments squeezed what they could under email attachment limits and routed the rest through the FTP server. And the city carried a piece of internet-facing infrastructure whose entire purpose was letting outsiders connect to it.

The structural problem was that this was never one workflow. It was ten. Each department had its own users, its own vendors, and its own content, while a single city-run server sat beneath all of them.

What replaced it had to let each department administer its own users and content rather than routing everything through IT. It had to make vendor access governable by default, restricted by network and expiring on a schedule. It had to support SFTP for the systems already using it. And it had to require no server for the city to operate. Cape Coral selected Files.com to be that exchange layer, deployed the way the city actually works: as ten accounts, not one.

One Account Per Department, No Server to Run

Each of the ten departments, from police and fire through public works and utilities to the charter schools, holds its own Files.com account, with named users and departmental role accounts. Each administers its own users and its own content. A vendor working with one department gets an account in that department’s space, and nothing about it touches any other.

Systems and technical users connect over SFTP. Governance is built into the provisioning rather than bolted on afterward: connections are restricted to approved IP addresses using Files.com’s IP whitelisting, and users are provisioned with a 30-day expiration, so vendor and temporary accounts age out on their own instead of accumulating.

What is left of administration runs through a single shared mailbox: creating a departmental account, resetting a password. There is no server behind any of it for the city to patch or expose.

What Retiring the Server Changed

With Files.com carrying the exchange, Cape Coral retired the internal FTP server, and with it a standing category of IT work.

• The city no longer hosts, patches, or exposes an internet-facing file server. The infrastructure is Files.com’s to run.
• The large files move. Engineering project files, drone audio and video, and Fire Department field photos travel through the platform instead of bouncing off attachment limits.
• Departments run themselves. Each of the ten administers its own users and content, and central IT’s day-to-day involvement is account creation and password resets through one shared mailbox.
• Outside access ends by default. Accounts expire after 30 days and connections are limited to approved addresses, so a vendor’s access does not quietly outlive the work it was created for.

The model also compounds. The same pattern absorbed ten departments without centralizing anything, so standing up exchange for another departmental workload is another account through the same administrative path, not another server and not a new job for IT.

City-Wide Exchange Without City-Run Infrastructure

Today, departmental exchanges—from engineering project files to Fire Department field photos—run through Files.com.

That is the part other cities can copy. Cape Coral did not retire its FTP server by pulling file exchange tighter into central IT. It retired the server by pushing administration out to the departments that own the work, and letting Files.com carry the infrastructure underneath all of them.