AWS Public Sector Blog
From 911 to city hall: CentralSquare and AWS surpass 1,000 cloud deployments, modernizing public sector operations at scale
When a hurricane makes landfall or a power outage takes servers offline, government operations don’t get a pause button. Dispatchers still need to route 911 calls. Officers still need to access records in the field. Residents still need to pay utility bills and pull permits. But across the country, state and local agencies have been running these mission-critical systems on aging infrastructure that was never built for always-on availability.
CentralSquare Technologies, North America’s leading public sector software provider, saw an opportunity to change that. In December 2024, the company launched the Cloud 1000 initiative with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate 1,000 public sector agencies to the cloud. In just over a year, they had exceeded that goal with 1,065 deployments, reshaping how government agencies deliver the services their communities depend on. This milestone challenges a long-held perception that public safety and law enforcement agencies weren’t ready for cloud adoption. CentralSquare’s 1,000+ AWS deployments demonstrate that these agencies are not only ready—they’re embracing cloud innovation at scale to better serve their communities.
Public safety agencies lead cloud adoption
Of those deployments, 1,003 are already live and serving agencies, with another 65 progressing toward go-live. The initiative reached jurisdictions of all sizes, from large metropolitan departments like Fairfax County Police in Virginia to mid-sized agencies like Murrieta Police in California and smaller operations like Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center in Alaska.
Across these jurisdictions, public safety and justice agencies drove most of the momentum, accounting for 628 deployments, or nearly 60 percent of the total. These agencies migrated their most critical systems to AWS Cloud infrastructure, including computer-aided dispatch (CAD), records management systems (RMS), 911 communications, and corrections management. The emphasis on public safety reflects the stakes involved. When lives depend on system availability, aging infrastructure creates unacceptable risk.
Public administration agencies also recognized the need to modernize, accounting for the remaining 437 deployments. These included financial management systems, permitting tools, utility billing, and tax administration applications.
Building infrastructure that meets government requirements
Moving more than 1,000 agencies across systems ranging from 911 dispatch to utility billing, required architecture already proven at scale. Before the initiative launched, AWS partnered with CentralSquare to establish cloud-native foundations using the Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS and the AWS Well-Architected Framework. This framework evaluates deployments across six pillars: security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, operational excellence, and sustainability. This foundation meant agencies were migrating to tested, production-ready architecture from day one.
Security was central to that foundation. For agencies handling data regulated by Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), the architecture includes encryption at rest and in transit, network isolation, and comprehensive audit logging.
The architecture also addresses the availability requirements that make public sector infrastructure unique. Multi-Availability Zone deployments using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server with automated backups help keep systems operational even when local infrastructure fails. If one data center experiences an outage, systems automatically fail over to a physically separate location. Cross-Region replication provides disaster recovery without requiring agencies to maintain costly secondary data centers, and elastic scaling adjusts capacity during demand spikes.
Maintaining 911 operations during hurricane season in Terrebonne Parish
This resilience has already been tested. Terrebonne Parish sits along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, where hurricane season poses an annual threat to emergency communications. When storms knock out power or flood local facilities, 911 operations cannot afford downtime. The parish’s emergency communications team needed infrastructure that could withstand the region’s severe weather events and keep dispatchers connected to first responders.
By deploying across multiple Availability Zones, Terrebonne Parish Communications District achieved a level of resilience that on-premises infrastructure cannot match. With systems distributed across geographically separate data centers, the district can maintain 911 services even if a storm impacts one location.
For Mark Boudreaux, executive director of Terrebonne Parish Communications District, the shift changed how his team approaches hurricane season moving forward. “Cloud technology makes resilience possible,” Boudreaux said. “We don’t rely on hope anymore. We rely on the cloud, a bigger generator, and Starlink to get us through emergencies.”
Lessons learned and best practices for state and local government agencies
Stories like Terrebonne’s played out across the country, providing valuable insights for agencies considering their own cloud migration. Here are the key best practices that emerged from CentralSquare’s 1000 initiative:
- Start with a Well-Architected foundation. Conducting AWS Well-Architected Reviews before migration helps optimize deployments for security, reliability, and performance from the outset. For mission-critical systems like 911 and CAD, getting the foundation right is non-negotiable. CentralSquare performed these reviews systematically, confirming that each agency’s architecture met public sector requirements before going live.
- Design for resilience, not just uptime. Public safety systems must operate during the worst moments. Agencies that deployed across multiple Availability Zones with automated failover maintained operations during disasters when on-premises systems would have failed. Beyond infrastructure, agencies should establish primary, secondary, and tertiary cloud connectivity options—fiber, cellular, and satellite—to ensure access even when primary connections fail. The lesson is to architect for failure at every layer, not just availability.
- Prioritize security and compliance from day one. CJIS compliance, encryption, access controls, and audit logging must be embedded into the architecture from the start, not retrofitted. CentralSquare implemented these requirements during the initial phase of creating its AWS foundation landing zone, meeting stringent security controls and policies from the ground up.
- Build momentum with a phased approach. Starting with less complex workloads and building toward mission-critical systems reduces risk and builds organizational confidence. Many agencies migrated RMS and other public administrative systems first, then moved mission-critical CAD and 911 systems once they had early wins under their belt.
A blueprint for public sector critical system modernization
These best practices point to a broader shift. Many agencies had questioned whether large-scale cloud migration is possible in the public sector without compromising security or reliability. CentralSquare’s Cloud 1000 initiative proved that it can.
That blueprint extends beyond resilience. Cloud infrastructure opens the door to faster innovation. Agencies can deploy new capabilities without lengthy hardware procurement cycles or extensive maintenance windows, and they no longer need to build and staff backup facilities to protect critical systems. As CentralSquare and AWS expand this work to additional agencies, the architectural patterns and best practices from the first 1,000+ migrations offer a clear path forward.
For agencies ready to explore what cloud modernization could look like for their operations, the AWS Public Sector Team can help. Connect with the team to start the conversation.