Nebraska Runs Cost-Effective Cloud Solution

For more than a year, the city of Omaha and Douglas County, Neb., have been running Cityworks on the Cloud. This cost-effective approach has provided these municipalities a more reliable, flexible and affordable environment to run Cityworks, the proven GIS-centric management solution, while producing an increase in overall performance for both agencies.

In 2005, the Douglas County Engineers’ Office implemented Cityworks. A year later, the city of Omaha implemented the program for the street and sewer divisions of their public works department. Through a unique joint venture, the city of Omaha and Douglas County share IT/GIS resources that have helped them extend Cityworks into many departments. In late 2010, the city and county attended a presentation promoting Esri’s ArcGIS Server on the Amazon Cloud. They began seriously looking at the feasibility of administering resources within a cloud environment, as well as potential impacts on functionality and cost.

“We started getting familiar with the environment and how it worked, and really liked the flexibility,” stated Mike Schonlau, GIS coordinator for Douglas County. “Since that time, we’ve moved almost all of our production web applications up there, as well as our enterprise geodatabase. Today, we’re probably 90-95% fully implemented in the cloud environment.”

Flexibility and cost were the driving forces behind Omaha and Douglas County’s move to the cloud. The cloud presented a cost-competitive, long-term alternative, while the inherent flexibility offered a compelling means to deploy throughout the enterprises. Cityworks users are now able to access information from anywhere.

Omaha and Douglas County had a choice of servers they could spin up in the virtual environment. They simply loaded the software they wanted to use and configured it to their needs. Because back-office IT is provided by Amazon, concerns such as backup power, data redundancy, fail over and Internet connectivity were no longer an issue. This alone allowed them to focus more on applications and supporting data, and far less on supporting the computing infrastructure.

In the event that something was to happen to a production server, the city maintains images of all their machines, keeping those in the cloud. They have also replicated their server settings, allowing them to spin up a new version in the server in less than half an hour.

The cloud environment has delivered a notable increase in overall performance for both agencies. When breaking down the cost per hour of the cloud environment versus owning and operating physical servers, the city discovered that it is significantly less expensive on the cloud. The cloud has helped the city and county accelerate deployment for park maintenance, who is now able to manage their work more efficiently and track costs more accurately. It has also facilitated more effective communication between agencies and departments, bringing about an increase in production and performance. The city and county are currently in the testing phase of deploying Cityworks from the cloud on mobile devices via Freeance Mobile and expect to be up and running soon.

Source: Azteca Systems Inc.