Prospect14
Expanding GIS capabilities and achieving greater security, scalability, and advanced features by architecting and building an ArcGIS Enterprise environment in the cloud.
Assignment
Prospect14 is a solar developer focused on growing renewable energy, through the origination and development of solar and energy storage facilities throughout several markets across the United States. While they had been utilizing ArcGIS Online for their mapping operations, they sought to expand their GIS capabilities by incorporating ArcGIS Enterprise to achieve greater security, scalability, and advanced features. To achieve this vision, DVG was tasked with architecting and building the new ArcGIS Enterprise environment in the cloud. To reduce the infrastructure management responsibilities of Prospect14, DVG will fully host the Azure environment as a cloud managed service.
Approach
DVG designed a cloud solution in Microsoft Azure that allowed Prospect14 to start using ArcGIS Enterprise for specific production workloads and user base. The foundational ArcGIS environment can be expanded upon in the future to accommodate a larger user base, growing performance needs, and new use cases and user experiences. As the performance, resiliency, and feature functionality are enhanced in the future, so will the business productivity of Prospect14.
ArcGIS Enterprise will enable Prospect14 to host their own GIS content, publish custom geoprocessing tools, develop custom web applications, improve data accessibility, and extend the functionality with advanced server roles, such as ArcGIS Image Server. And as part of the Esri ecosystem, Enterprise will integrate seamlessly with their existing ArcGIS Online organization.
Results
DVG designed and deployed a Cloud Enterprise GIS model on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, featuring multi-environment deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise and a desktop GIS environment for publishing to the Portal and running automated geoprocessing tasks. Prospect14 has a thriving Enterprise GIS with an extensive and evolving catalog of GIS data, maps, apps, and processes.
The establishment of Cloud Enterprise GIS has opened several doors for Prospect14. It has enabled integration with other business systems, expanded the user base, improved performance of web mapping applications, and enhanced their capacity for geospatial analysis.
DVG is responsible for all infrastructure maintenance, security, and GIS upgrades. This managed cloud service ensures system availability, security, and business continuity. Additionally, DVG provides active support for customizing, updating, and scaling the environment which enables Prospect14 to focus on using GIS tools to keep their business running. Prospect14 is now more focused on solving business problems and accelerating growth within the solar energy market.
ArcGIS Enterprise Portal – Production environment
Prospect14 has a thriving Enterprise GIS Portal site with active users accessing hundreds of items the content catalog. The Portal has been configured for Single Sign-On (SSO) using SAML authentication, making logins seamless. There is also a Distributed Collaboration with Prospect14’s ArcGIS Online (AGO) organization so content can easily be shared and synced.
Azure Desktop environment
The managed cloud service also includes a Microsoft Windows virtual machine to serve as a desktop environment, which has ArcGIS Pro, Microsoft Office, Python, and other software installed to allow Prospect14 to publish content to the Enterprise GIS. The virtual machine has also been configured to connect to a Snowflake cloud-based data warehouse instance, empowering Prospect14 to integrate their business systems. The VM runs scheduled tasks to update data hosted in the Enterprise GIS.
Project Documentation in ArcGIS Portal Site
The documentation for the GIS Managed Cloud solution is hosted directly in a Portal for ArcGIS Site in the production environment. Hosting the System Guide in the Enterprise Portal makes it easily accessible for users, allows for direct links to Portal content, and is in a format that can easily by modified to keep alignment with the growing platform.
Powered by Esri & Microsoft Azure
Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute) is a global leader in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, providing powerful mapping and spatial analytics solutions for businesses, governments, and organizations. As a proud Business Partner of Esri and Microsoft, DVG implemented Esri’s powerful mapping GIS capabilities in Microsoft Azure cloud with great success for the customer. With cloud-based capabilities, Esri integrates seamlessly with platforms like Microsoft Azure, enhancing location intelligence and enabling real-time geospatial insights for smarter decision-making. By leveraging Microsoft Azure, businesses can accelerate digital transformation, enhance agility, and stay competitive in an evolving technological landscape.
