One IT Manager Runs Mobile County’s Multi-Vendor Workday Payroll Exchange with Automated PGP on Files.com

Mobile County Commission is the governing body of Mobile County, Alabama. It funds county operations and runs the administration beneath them, including finance, purchasing, and payroll for a workforce of roughly 1,700 county employees.

That payroll runs on Workday, and Workday is only one end of it. Paying county employees means moving files to outside processors: the county’s payroll administrator, a credit union, and other vendors that handle pieces of pay and benefits. Those files carry some of the most sensitive data a government employer holds — what its people are paid and where the money goes — and the county controls only one side of every exchange.

A PGP Key with Every Vendor Credential

The county sought an SFTP service with two-factor authentication and encryption. Its firm requirement went further: every set of credentials handed to an outside processor had to come with a PGP key, allowing each counterparty to decrypt the files intended for it.

Per-partner PGP is the point where a file transfer requirement normally turns into an engineering project. Building it in-house would mean operating an SFTP server, generating and storing a key pair for each counterparty, rotating keys on each counterparty’s schedule, and maintaining the scripting that encrypts every outbound file and decrypts every inbound one. That plumbing has to run correctly on every payroll file, indefinitely, and it tends to live in one person’s head. For a county IT team, that is a permanent maintenance burden attached to exactly the data a government cannot afford to mishandle.

The county needed the opposite: SFTP the processors already used, support for two-factor authentication, and PGP handled by the system itself, with keys generated, stored, and applied without a server to run or a script to keep working.

Mobile County selected Files.com as that exchange point.

A multi-vendor, encryption-mandated payroll exchange for a county government runs as a standing configuration, not a standing project.

The Folders Carry the Encryption

On Files.com, the county structured its payroll exchange as a set of folders, with encryption applied as a property of those folders rather than a step somebody performs.

Each outside processor connects over inbound SFTP with its own credentials, issued alongside a PGP key as a standard part of onboarding. The county generated its key pairs inside Files.com and applied them as folder settings. The folders serving the Workday exchange carry automated encrypt and decrypt rules: when a file bound for a processor lands, Files.com encrypts it with the right key before it goes anywhere, and when an encrypted file arrives from a processor, Files.com decrypts it so it flows onward in usable form. No one has to run an encryption tool or keep private keys on individual workstations.

Monitoring rides on the same folders. Files.com emails the people watching the exchange whenever there is activity, including recipients outside the county’s own user list, so nobody needs an account just to stay informed.

One Administrator, Every Payroll Vendor

With the exchange in production, meeting the county’s encryption mandate stopped being work anyone performs per file. It is a configuration that applies itself.

The whole arrangement is operated by a single IT manager. Rather than operating and patching an SFTP server, maintaining encryption scripts, or handling keys file by file, he manages standing folder policies while Files.com applies them automatically.

Onboarding the next payroll vendor is issuing an SFTP credential and a PGP key against a folder policy that already exists, not a new integration build.