Esri Uses AWS ISV Accelerate Program to Help Waukesha County Deliver Reliable Geospatial Applications to Residents

AWS Partner Esri participated in the AWS ISV Acceleration Program to help Waukesha County serve its customers better with faster deployment of resources. Waukesha County, a long-standing Esri ArcGIS customer, committed to migrating to AWS, using services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon WorkSpaces. Now, employees can render GIS content in moments, helping the County deploy new features faster. The County can also provide more reliable services to internal and external customers.

Waukesha County is the third-most populous county in Wisconsin, with more than 406,000 residents. For over 20 years, the County’s Department of Parks and Land uses Land Information Systems (LIS) office, part of the Land Resources Division, has used a geographic information system (GIS) to manage and map geospatial data for the County. The County's GIS, which encompasses a comprehensive and spatially accurate data warehouse, including but not limited to aerial imagery, environmental conditions data, asset and land management datasets, citizen science, and parcel ownership, was developed using ArcGIS mapping software from AWS Partner Esri.

Over time, the LIS office recognized the need to move to the cloud. “We originally wanted to move to the cloud for cost savings, and we also saw added benefits of easier scalability and dynamic capabilities as the Esri software evolved,” Chris Dickerson, LIS Analyst for Waukesha County, says. “The County also sought more reliability. We get close to 1 million hits on the system every month, and we need to make sure these users can reliably access the resources they need.”

Through its participation in the AWS ISV Accelerate Program (ISVA), Esri received co-sell and technical support for Waukesha County. The AWS ISVA program is a co-sell program that helps AWS partners drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting with AWS sellers, who service millions of active AWS customers globally.

Waukesha County addressed its scalability and reliability issues by moving the County’s Esri ArcGIS Enterprise system to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Esri provided the cloud templates for deploying and running Enterprise on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The County is also using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets for data storage and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as the GIS system’s primary database.

In addition, the County’s LIS office uses Amazon WorkSpaces as a virtual desktop solution to better visualize geospatial data. “We sometimes had latency issues between on-premises work and data in the cloud,” Dickerson says. “That caused data editing delays and longer lead times for our applications.”

By running ArcGIS Enterprise on AWS, Waukesha County can also quickly develop and deploy new GIS features. For example, the County created a Land Information Systems Hub site that provides centralized access to all the County’s public GIS applications. Dickerson says, “It only takes moments to render content, which is the same pace users are used to working on local files.”

Waukesha County can deliver reliable services to county residents by using AWS. “We have better disaster recovery practices on AWS and the right processes in place to ensure we provide a highly reliable product to our internal and external customers,” Dickerson says. “This gives us peace of mind, knowing that we can recover the GIS quickly if something goes wrong.” The County also runs its GIS Open Data Site, which the public can use to download data from Amazon S3. Additionally, because of AWS ISV Accelerate, Esri has seen an increase in the number of AWS shared opportunities, with the new opportunity pipeline increasing by 300%.

Waukesha County will continue to work with Esri and is evaluating additional features, such as ArcGIS Monitor, to analyze and optimize the health of the county’s GIS system. The county is also considering enhancing its offerings with AWS services including Amazon CloudWatch and Systems Manager. Dickerson concludes, “This technology gives us an easy path forward to best serve the residents of the County.”