A Traffic Technology Company Kept Its Roadside Evidence Pipeline Running Through a Data Center Migration With Files.com

A North American traffic technology company runs two businesses: automated traffic enforcement for municipalities and state agencies, and parking and curbside programs for cities.

The company acquired both businesses from their previous owner. The programs came across, and with them a planned migration: the infrastructure that moved all of that image data still ran in the seller's data center and had to move to the company's own.

The product of an enforcement program is evidence. Roadside cameras and scanning LiDAR capture images of a vehicle, its plate, and its recorded speed, and people review every capture before a citation can issue. The business, in other words, runs on moving image files, every day, from hardware at the roadside to the reviewers who judge them.

A Field Pipeline With a Data Center Migration Ahead of It

A pipeline that fed government enforcement programs in three countries had to keep running every day while every server underneath it moved to a new data center. That was the job in front of the business the day after the deal closed.

The mechanics of it were physical. Contractors and technicians collected camera and incident data in the field every day and uploaded it to what the business calls way stations: file servers with large storage, installed at field sites and reached over VPN, all inherited with the acquisition. An inherited SFTP server, due for retirement in the migration, still carried some employees' transfers as well.

The cost sat at both ends. In the field, data went where the server was, so a technician's day ended with delivering captures to a way station rather than uploading them from wherever the work happened. Downstream, the SFTP server was scheduled to go with the rest of the inherited estate, and the daily uploads could not pause while its replacement was built.

More Than a Thousand Cameras to Repoint, and Daily Uploads That Could Not Pause

Getting out was a full data center migration. Roughly 200 servers and their applications had to come out of the seller's facility and onto the company's own data center. More than a thousand traffic cameras had to be repointed at the new servers, in some cases by climbing poles to update the hardware.

None of it could stop the pipeline. Field data arrives every day and image processing runs continuously, so the old and new environments had to run in parallel, with tunnels held open to the legacy estate while users and cameras moved across.

That shaped what the landing point for field data had to be. It could not live in the data center being vacated, and it could not wait for the one being built. It had to be reachable by any technician with a laptop, speak the SFTP that existing scripts already spoke, and feed the downstream application servers wherever those ended up running. The company selected Files.com to be that landing point.

A Middle Way Station in the Cloud

The workflow that replaced the way stations is direct. A technician or civil enforcement officer downloads image data from the LiDAR or camera hardware to a laptop and uploads it to Files.com under an individual login. A back-end script pulls new files from Files.com into the application servers for processing. Image-review staff in three countries pull the same data down to work it. Typical files run to tens of megabytes, and a bulk upload can carry hundreds of capture events at once.

Because the ingestion point belonged to neither data center, the migration underneath could run at its own pace. Files.com Agents installed at field sites bridged the legacy way stations over outbound-only connections, so data kept flowing from sites that had not yet been cut over while users were progressively moved onto Files.com. During the heaviest month of the migration, the pipeline moved tens of terabytes through the platform.

Upload From the Laptop, Review From Three Countries

The compounding result is what a new site costs. A way station was a server: bought, installed, connected over VPN, and maintained at the field site. On Files.com, standing up field capture at a new site means issuing logins.

With the Files.com pipeline in production, the company could replace a network of per-site file servers, and the VPN that reached them, with one cloud ingestion point that no data center migration can strand.

• Field upload happens from the technician's own laptop, under their own login, from wherever they are working, instead of queuing at a shared server on site.
• Review teams in three countries work off the same uploaded data on one platform.
• The pipeline carries tens of terabytes a month in steady-state operation.

The Data Path Moved First

Today, the day's captures leave the field the moment the work is done. A technician opens a laptop, signs in, and uploads. A reviewer in another country pulls the files down the same day. None of it touches the data center the company migrated away from.

That is the part of the carve-out Files.com changed. Everything else in the migration had to be rebuilt or repointed: 200 servers stood back up, more than a thousand cameras aimed at new addresses, pole by pole where it came to that. The file pipeline was the one piece that did not need rebuilding in either data center. Files.com became the way station first, the data path switched over, and the servers, tunnels, and VPN behind the old one could be retired at the migration's pace instead of on its deadline.