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Top 3 Reasons to Make a Move to Virtualized ArcGIS

For municipalities like the City of North Miami Beach or Pinellas Park, FL, hiring additional IT staff to manage on-premises GIS resources was neither feasible nor desirable from a cost perspective, yet the internal and customer-facing applications supported by the municipalities’ ArcGIS data are critical to residents and government agencies. The municipalities also faced concerns about server outages and system reliability in the event of hurricanes or other severe weather events.

LIMITED PRODUCTIVITY

For the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), a non-profit focused on environmental conservation, an in-house GIS database was sufficient for a single GIS analyst. But as the organization grew, the analyst wasted hours packaging and downloading data to allow him to work remotely from nine other office locations, and when a second GIS analyst joined the department, sharing data across the office LAN resulted in slower performance times and inconsistencies between workstations. In Nassau County, FL, the GIS manager spent hours every week updating data and troubleshooting IT issues. Every department in the county created and maintained its own maps, and residents and developers required separate visits to offices such as the flood zone department, tax appraiser’s office, and tax collection office to research a single property or parcel of land.  

COST SAVINGS AND FREEDOM FROM IT CONCERNS

The City of North Miami Beach moved to Virtualized Desktop in 2014. GIS manager Don Blalock estimates that the cost of maintaining IT staff and infrastructure to maintain their GIS in-house would cost three times what the municipality spends for the cloud-based solution. Additionally, North Miami Beach can now create online maps in near real time, get reports out to employees and residents before, during, and after a hurricane, and automatically access the most current versions of ArcGIS software and service packs every time they log in, from any machine.

Pinellas Park, which migrated to Virtualized Desktop in 2015, has able to move its GIS services forward without the need for a database administrator or the need to rely on in-house IT staff. The four members of the city’s GIS team are able to access their GIS data from any location and are free to focus solely on GIS tasks such as asset management and map creation.

The SELC’s move to Virtualized Desktop in 2015 allowed them to achieve their primary goals of democratizing workstation performance, so that every member of the GIS staff has the same response times and access to the same systems and same information, no matter what device they use to access the platform, or from what location. Virtualized Desktop allows employees to easily work from the organization’s different offices, or from remote locations and has eliminated time spent on hardware and software updates and data backups.

Nassau County switched to Virtualized Desktop in 2016. Since that time, GIS manager Jason Gregory estimates that productivity has increased at least 25 percent. Virtualized Desktop has eliminated the hours Gregory spent every week updating data, and previously siloed map and GIS information is now collected all in one repository, allowing the county’s customers (residents, realtors, builders, etc.) to generate one report online and eliminating the lines out the door at various zoning offices.

WHY THE ROK VIRTUALIZED DESKTOP?

The big names in cloud computing—think Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—provide pure infrastructure (hardware) solutions. Essentially, customers are renting a server in the cloud. The amount of server space can be scaled up or scaled back according to need, and the customer’s internal IT department or outsourced IT consultant makes the decisions about when and how much server space to acquire. ESRI itself provides this type of solution in its ArcGIS Online, where users can store and share GIS content and even publish web maps, all in the cloud.

Both infrastructure solutions and service-based solutions allow organizations to perform specific tasks that would be prohibitively expensive to run and maintain in-house.

A third type of solution offers organizations both the infrastructure to power their ArcGIS applications in the cloud and an expert technical team to install, maintain, and update ArcGIS for Desktop and ArcGIS Online, including all the hardware, software, licensing, and IT support required to host ArcGIS server-based map services and applications.

ROK Virtualized Desktop is a stable and secure infrastructure for ArcGIS desktops that frees GIS managers from the need to keep up with hardware, software, and licensing updates, allowing them to focus once again on their core responsibility: GIS. With ROK Virtualized Desktop, organizations can:

• Save money on server purchases or hosting fees, hardware maintenance, and software updates, as well as IT resources and staff.
• Increase productivity, with collaborative, interactive tools that streamline data collection, analysis, and distribution, plus a renewed focus on providing GIS services instead of maintaining the required infrastructure.
• Achieve faster processing speeds, with Citrix XenApp integration. RAM and CPU-intensive GIS applications such as ArcMap load on a dedicated cloud machine with plenty of capacity and processing power.

SUMMARY

ROK Virtualized Desktop provides organizations of every size access to the same ArcGIS platform they currently use, but with lower costs, faster processing speeds, and none of the hassle of managing legacy hardware or maintaining in-house systems.