With opportunities for great flexibility, scalability, and cost savings, cloud platforms offer advantages over traditional on-premise IT infrastructure. Cloud providers continuously deliver new capabilities and services allowing organizations hosted in the cloud to maximize opportunities to implement the latest technologies.
To take advantage of those capabilities, many utilities are moving their enterprise GIS to cloud-hosted platforms, and the trend continues to accelerate. Cloud platforms can be a great solution for hosting modern GIS infrastructure. But it’s often not a simple “lift and shift” effort to move legacy on-premise GIS systems into the cloud. Before making the move, you might consider the following opportunities and lessons learned.
Opportunity for Efficiency and Modernization
Infrastructure and Platform Flexibility
Hosting your enterprise GIS in a cloud environment provides opportunities to continually enhance your infrastructure. Unlike procuring hardware for an internally managed data center, cloud infrastructure can be continuously adjusted based on the needs of your users, applications, and business. The initial design of system sizes, instance types, memory allocations, and many other aspects of the system provides a base from which your architects and IT staff can adjust using observed metrics and performance.
Platform-level adjustments can be implemented with speed and limited impact or downtime to the applications and services in operation. Cloud providers are constantly delivering new and additional configuration and system options. Your organization can adjust system infrastructure as needed, to take advantage of less expensive options when they become available or more advanced technologies as they are released.
Scalability
Many elements of enterprise systems experience fluctuating demand. Examples include virtual user sessions, web applications, services, and data requests. Cloud-based systems can be auto-scaled either to reduce resource consumption during periods of low demand or to increase resource availability during high demand. Scaling resources to match demand will support well performing applications and minimize cost to the business.
The Locana Team implemented an auto-scaled virtual application solution to deliver ArcGIS Pro to utility mappers at a large northeastern U.S. utility. This was accomplished by integrating Citrix Cloud with Azure hosted ArcGIS Pro virtual machine catalogs. The Citrix Cloud control plane was configured to auto-grow the machine pools based on the number of active users consuming sessions. During overnight periods, machine pools with 10 servers assigned would scale down to one active server. Modeling the fluctuating demand of user virtual sessions into the availability of systems allowed a reduction in monthly cost of infrastructure.
Cost Savings with Consumption Pricing Models
Cloud-hosted environments provide multiple pricing model options. One option is to use consumption pricing or “pay-as-you-go" for infrastructure and services. This model allows you the flexibility to implement auto-scaling to turn machines off and reduce resources when not in use. Your organization only pays for the active usage of virtual machines or compute resources being consumed. When resources are not active, you are not charged. There is a small charge to store the machine images and configurations when they are deallocated – a minimal cost compared to paying for 100% uptime. Applying the consumption pricing model to targeted layers of an organization’s GIS platform represents potential for cost savings.
In addition, environments not in use (Development, Test, Quality Assurance, Training, Production) can be idled down to decrease costs. Cloud providers offer multiple tools to shut down and deallocate entire resource groups. However, these mechanisms need to be configured correctly to support safe shutdowns of the failover clusters that exist in the high availability configuration of the ArcGIS Enterprise components. ArcGIS Portal, data store, and server clusters are more stable when they are shut down and restarted in a specific order. Locana has devised a pattern of orchestrated scaling that ranks the GIS nodes by named cluster to allow the proper shutdown and startup order to be executed. This eliminates the need for reconfiguration steps after re-enabling an environment. Idling down large, enterprise environments when they are not in use can save organizations significant costs and further exploit the consumption pricing benefits.
Taking Advantage of Emerging / Advanced Capabilities
Cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GC) are continuously releasing new machine types, new service offerings, and innovative technology. With your GIS data and solutions hosted in cloud environments, your organization will be positioned to implement new and emerging capabilities. Cloud-native technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), serverless computing, among others are emerging technologies that can be integrated into your business analyses and workflows more easily because your data and systems are co-located with them.
Cloud Migration Considerations
User Access Control and System Security
Secure access control to cloud-hosted applications and services is an essential effort in the planning and execution of your cloud migration. Many organizations host and manage user accounts on an internal instance of active directory or similar identity management solutions. In some cases, IT organizations may have policies allowing a sync from the on prem identity management system to a cloud-hosted active directory instance. However, this is not always the case. Using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)—an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties— providers or other options will need to be considered early in the planning phase of the cloud migration.
Another common factor is planning for in-flight data security with integrated systems that may be hosted in other cloud platforms or on prem systems. Preparing for and defining your point-to-point security protocols needs to be addressed early in the solution design process to avoid complexity and reduce the number of integration protocols that need to be maintained and supported. Consolidating your supported integration protocols using industry accepted security practices can support more efficient long term maintenance efforts and reduced costs.
Integrations to Legacy Systems
Enterprise GIS systems typically have many direct integrations to other systems and applications. In many cases legacy systems integrated to GIS are connected through data protocols. Maintaining these legacy integrations requires using a VPN tunnel or express route from the on prem domain to the cloud-hosted GIS system. Another common approach is to change the connections to the legacy system to a web protocol to allow connectivity to the cloud-hosted data instances. These are just a few of the options to consider for maintaining hybrid legacy integrations.
Additional Database Offerings
Cloud hosting brings new choices for how enterprise databases are hosted. A key consideration for your solution design will be to determine if Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings or cloud-based database servers are the best fit for your organization. There are different aspects of database performance, redundancy, fail over, disaster recovery, and cost that need to be evaluated when migrating to cloud environments. Every solution and system design is unique, and there is not always a clear choice for each organization. Cloud platforms offer data-as-a-service which typically include redundancy, fail over, and disaster recovery aspects of the data solution. However, with many geospatial data workflows, data-as-a-service may be more expensive or less performant than single instance data stores. Locana has experience navigating the costs and benefits of data tier architecture options when migrating to the cloud.
Final Thoughts – Partnering for Success
Each organization has a unique set of business and IT requirements that will drive decision making when considering a transition to cloud-hosted platforms. Capitalizing on the many benefits offered by cloud-hosted systems and cloud-native capabilities can bring significant technology modernizations as well as cost savings to your organization. A key factor to making an organization’s cloud migrations successful is recognizing where native paradigms will support your organization being more efficient, both operationally and financially.
Organizations need to identify opportunities where adoption of modern capabilities can help them be flexible and adaptable with implementing future technology. Partnering with IT professionals with experience migrating enterprise GIS solutions and capabilities to cloud-hosted and hybrid solutions will help your organization plan, design, and deploy platforms that maximize the benefits of modern technology while minimizing the overall cost of ownership.