NJ TRANSIT: Managed ArcGIS Enterprise on AWS | CyberTech

One of the largest public transit operators in the United States modernizes its geospatial platform on AWS, with a federated imagery tier and a security-first managed-services model serving more than 600 users across operations, engineering, and planning.

NJ TRANSIT operates one of the largest public transit networks in the United States, moving passengers daily across rail, bus, and light rail service spanning the New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia metropolitan regions. At that scale, geospatial information is part of how the agency runs. Operations rely on it for asset awareness. Engineering builds capital plans on it. Planners use it for service design. And every one of those teams needs information that is accurate, secure, and available the moment they need it.

In November 2025, working with Esri partner CyberTech, NJ TRANSIT deployed a federated ArcGIS Image Server within its managed ArcGIS Enterprise platform on AWS. The deployment caps an architectural posture built around one principle that matters most when GIS underpins a transit network: resilience by design. The platform now supports more than 600 portal members across the agency and is positioned to scale imagery and analytical workloads as new use cases come into use.

A Resilient Imagery Foundation

NJ TRANSIT’s ArcGIS Image Server runs as a dedicated federated site, provisioned with its own compute and administrative controls separate from the platform’s hosting server. Federating the imagery tier means imagery workloads scale independently as the program grows, and issues elsewhere on the platform stay contained rather than cascading into imagery operations.

Raster imagery resides in dedicated Amazon S3 storage, kept separate from the operational data layer. That separation gives NJ TRANSIT room to scale its imagery holdings independently and helps contain a storage-tier fault where it originates, rather than letting it ripple across the platform.

For the analysts and engineers who work with imagery every day, ArcGIS Pro is streamed through AWS AppStream 2.0, delivering the full, GPU-accelerated desktop experience from virtually any location. Centralized provisioning, security, and patching allow NJ TRANSIT to bypass the maintenance of costly, high-specification local workstations. This ensures a consistent, managed user configuration across the entire distributed workforce.

Taken together, these architectural decisions determine whether a platform can absorb growth and handle disruption without breaking.

Security and Continuity by Design

Running GIS as mission-critical infrastructure means the platform carries data that warrants genuine protection: facility layouts, rights-of-way, asset locations, and operational details that touch how a public transit network functions day to day. NJ TRANSIT’s platform is built with that in mind from the ground up, running under CyberTech’s DataSafe™ security framework with layered controls across the network perimeter, identity and access, data handling, and continuous monitoring.

The framework puts the following controls in place across the platform:

• Single sign-on through NJ TRANSIT’s enterprise identity provider with multi-factor
  authentication
• Role-based access controls aligned to how the agency operates
• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• A dedicated cloud subscription that keeps all agency data and backups within U.S.
  geography
• Annual penetration testing to validate the security posture

Business continuity is engineered on the same principle. Infrastructure, application, and database tiers are each protected by independent backup schedules and written to geo-redundant storage, so NJ TRANSIT’s recovery options never hinge on a single point of failure.

NJ TRANSIT’s platform operates under a managed-services arrangement, with a dedicated CyberTech team that continuously monitors the environment, manages patching and upgrades on a coordinated cadence, and responds to incidents under defined service levels. For NJ TRANSIT’s GIS staff, this operating model minimizes infrastructure overhead, allowing them to refocus their time on core geospatial analysis and agency initiatives.

Built to Scale with the Program

Today, the platform serves more than 600 portal members across operations, engineering, planning, and field-facing roles. That community spans power users working directly in the AWS environment, ArcGIS Pro users connecting through AppStream and on-premises clients, Creator-tier members who publish and manage content, and the broader Viewer community that consumes maps and apps across the agency.

As new imagery collections, consumption workflows, and analytical use cases come online, each will inherit the same security posture, governance, and operational standards as the rest of the platform. ArcGIS Image Analyst is provisioned on Pro, storage and compute scale with workload growth, and Image Server has the capacity headroom to absorb new collections without revisiting the underlying architecture.

A Reference for Modern Transit GIS

For peer transit agencies considering how to position GIS within a modern operational program, NJ TRANSIT’s approach offers a working reference. The architectural decisions made early, including federating the imagery tier, separating imagery storage, streaming ArcGIS Pro through AWS AppStream 2.0, applying a layered security framework from day one, and running the platform as a managed service, together produce a platform built for resilience. That foundation matters most on the days when the platform has to absorb something unexpected.

Learn how GIS supports modern transit operations

Explore Esri’s transportation resources

Learn more about the products used in this story.

• ArcGIS Enterprise – Explore ArcGIS Enterprise
• ArcGIS Image Server – Explore ArcGIS Image Server
• ArcGIS Image Analyst – Explore ArcGIS Image Analyst
• ArcGIS Pro – Explore ArcGIS Pro

CyberTech Systems and Software Inc.

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