The primary issues in both administration and security are vast amounts of workflow differences compared to traditional IT – Administration of a cloud environment, as well as securing it, both require a paradigm shift in the thought process and approach to architecting solutions and solving problems.

ROK provides 24/7 customer support for both your cloud infrastructure and your Esri software. We take care of every IT and GIS administrative task so you can focus on what you do best, GIS.

Actually, not all. The difference is, that instead of GIS Admins and DBA’s spending the majority of their time troubleshooting and maintaining the software, they can focus on developing and innovating with GIS. When you are calculating the Opportunity Cost, consider the value you can bring to your organization

Yes, the benefit of the cloud is that ROK can help specify a time window where your staff can develop and test in the environment and once they are done, we can automatically shut down the machines and spin them back up when they’re ready to continue. Another option is to deploy a dev environment for a few months while you test a new version or integration. Once satisfied with the testing, we can remove the machines from your environment. This way you only pay for what you use.

Technically yes, but there is probably a better way. This type of resource-intensive processing is best done on a dedicated machine. ROK can stand up a processing server for this task for very little cost in very little time. Once the processing is complete, ROK can terminate the processing server permanently, or turn it off until it is needed again. By managing the uptime of this server the cost can be kept low.

Hosting options for hybrid or full cloud solutions are vast. You can either go directly to a cloud solutions provider like AWS or Azure, or, you can engage with a Managed Cloud Services provider who will set up and manage the environment for you. Should you choose the latter option we would strongly suggest ensuring the MSP has experience standing up and managing Esri Software specifically.