Emphasys Replaced Its Self-Hosted FTP Server Without Disrupting Housing Authorities’ Database Exchange

Emphasys Software builds enterprise software for public housing authorities in North America. It is a business unit of Aquila Software Group, part of Constellation Software.

That software is database-backed. When something goes wrong at a housing authority, Emphasys developers often need the authority's actual database to diagnose it. Those files are too large for email. So Emphasys has always needed a standing channel where clients send databases in, and where support sends release files and targeted fixes back out based on what the developers find.

The FTP Server Emphasys No Longer Wanted to Run

For years, that channel was an FTP site Emphasys hosted itself. The server sat on the internet, held clients' data, and had to be run, patched, and administered by a company whose actual business is housing software. Every client needed its own credentials. Every troubleshooting case and every release delivery depended on the server being up. Emphasys was operating file transfer infrastructure so that its developers could do their real job: pull a client's database apart and ship the fix.

The server could not simply be switched off. The channel was customer-facing and continuous. Clients uploaded databases whenever a case demanded it, and they expected updates back through the same path. The channel also carried a structural requirement that made a casual replacement risky: every client had to be sealed off from every other client, while Emphasys's own staff needed to work across a division's entire client population.

Emphasys decided it no longer wanted to support an FTP site. Whatever replaced it had to support the protocols and desktop clients customers already used. It had to root each client in a space of its own. It had to give internal teams broad access without letting the folder structure drift. And it had to take on new client accounts programmatically as the client population grew.

Emphasys selected Files.com to take over the channel.

A Folder Per Client, One Locked Structure

Files.com became the standing exchange between Emphasys and its clients: hosted by Files.com, structured by Emphasys, and accessible through the familiar protocols and tools used by the people on both ends.

Emphasys built the site as a folder per client under each division. Each client user was rooted in its own folder, while internal teams could work across every client folder in their division. Group and folder permissions kept authorities isolated from one another and locked the division-level structure so it could not drift as accounts grew. Housing authorities could continue connecting over SFTP or FTP, usually from desktop clients such as FileZilla, without changing their workflow.

Since 2017, Emphasys has created new client users with a PowerShell script running against the Files.com REST API. Onboarding a client stopped being administrative work: the account is created by the script and takes its place in a structure that isolates it by design.

Out of the Infrastructure Business

With Files.com carrying the channel, Emphasys replaced a server it had to operate with a service it only had to structure. The change shows up in what nobody does anymore.

• There is nothing left to host. The internet-facing FTP server is gone, and with it the patching, the uptime watch, and the work of keeping a public server that holds client data safe.
• Clients did not have to change their workflow. They connect over the same SFTP and FTP protocols with the same desktop clients, and the rhythm of databases in and releases out carried straight over.
• Adding a client costs a script run, not a project. Over its life, the channel has carried hundreds of client accounts, each isolated in its own folder from the day it is created.
• The security reporting Emphasys's auditors ask for comes straight from Files.com. By the company's own account, that is why it has never needed to evaluate an alternative.

In Constellation's decentralized environment, where every business unit picks its own tools, Head of Technology Seth Stankowski tells peer companies across the group, unprompted, that Emphasys runs on Files.com. The FTP server was never the point. The exchange it carried was. Files.com let Emphasys retire the one and keep the other.