The City of Portsmouth relies on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support essential public services, from infrastructure planning and utility network management to emergency response and day-to-day municipal operations. As its GIS environment continued to grow, the City needed a more scalable, secure, and resilient platform capable of keeping pace with operational demands.
Through cloud modernization with CyberTech, the City of Portsmouth migrated its ArcGIS Enterprise environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using a phased Development-to-Production approach, completed an in-place upgrade from ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 to 11.5 with zero rollback, and replaced its previous manual backup process with automated daily backups. AWS infrastructure management remains with the City; CyberTech delivers and operates the ArcGIS environment through its Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering.
Our GIS is central to how Portsmouth delivers public services, from maintaining our water, sewer, and stormwater utility networks to supporting mobile field crews and cross-departmental web applications. As our geospatial workload and reliance on complex data models expanded, our legacy infrastructure simply couldn't keep pace. Partnering with CyberTech to modernize our platform on AWS established a secure, high-availability foundation that protects our critical municipal assets, eliminates infrastructure overhead, and scales seamlessly as our enterprise GIS ambitions grow.
Highlights
GIS has become a critical part of how the City of Portsmouth delivers public services,
supporting everything from utility network management to emergency response
coordination. As the City’s reliance on GIS deepened, so did the need for an environment
that could keep pace: one with the scalability to grow, the resilience to recover quickly
when something went wrong, and the operational discipline to introduce changes safely.
A modernized, AWS-based ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 environment supporting approximately 50 GIS users and 640 ArcGIS services, running at 99.88% availability since go-live, with automated daily backups and a structured, lower-risk approach to production change management, delivered through CyberTech’s ongoing managed service model.
The Need for a More Resilient GIS Platform
As the City’s GIS environment grew, so did the limitations of its existing infrastructure. The City’s ArcGIS Enterprise environment ran on ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 and had become increasingly difficult to maintain as requirements continued to grow. The legacy environment relied on manual backup processes, which required significant administrative effort and introduced additional recovery risk, while limited infrastructure visibility made it more challenging to monitor the environment and proactively manage GIS infrastructure.
The City also needed a controlled way to introduce changes into its ArcGIS Enterprise environment. Without a dedicated process for validating updates before they reached production, every change carried more operational risk than it needed to. The goal was to establish a scalable cloud foundation that could support the City’s growing GIS workload while improving operational efficiency and recovery readiness.
Finding the Right Partner
The City of Portsmouth selected CyberTech, an Esri Platinum Partner, to lead its ArcGIS Enterprise modernization to AWS. CyberTech’s Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering gave the City a proven, accelerated path to the cloud, combining deep ArcGIS expertise with a standardized migration approach built on AWS. CyberTech’s experience delivering similar modernizations for municipal and utility GIS environments meant the City could move quickly and confidently, without the trial-and-error of a first-of-kind cloud migration.
Through MACS Advanced, CyberTech took responsibility for the ArcGIS Enterprise platform itself, including ongoing environment maintenance and operational support, while the City retained management of the underlying AWS infrastructure. This gave the City’s team a clear path to modernization without ceding control of its cloud environment, and freed them to focus on using GIS rather than managing the infrastructure running it.
Building a Modern, Automated GIS Foundation
The City of Portsmouth partnered with CyberTech to migrate its ArcGIS Enterprise environment to AWS. CyberTech delivered the migration through its Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering, moving the City from an on-premises, legacy deployment to a modern, cloud-hosted environment running ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5. The migration included an in-place upgrade from ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 to 11.5, completed with zero rollback and zero follow-on incidents.
The migration followed a phased Development-to-Production approach, giving the City a controlled path for validating changes before they reach the live environment. This helps reduce the risk of production issues and gives the City’s team more confidence when rolling out updates. CyberTech also implemented a Daily Maintenance Script to support ongoing ArcGIS environment operations, and automated ArcGIS backups now run on a consistent daily schedule in place of the City’s previous manual process.
Core Platform Components
- ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 – Centralized ArcGIS platform running on AWS
- ArcGIS Enterprise Portal – Access point for the City’s GIS services and applications
- Hosting Server – Supports the City’s published GIS services
- Utility Network federated servers – Support the City’s Water and SewerDrain workloads
- Daily Maintenance Script – Automates recurring ArcGIS environment upkeep
CyberTech’s approach was also built on Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon S3, AWS Backup, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS WAF, and Amazon Route 53, forming a secure, scalable foundation for the City’s production ArcGIS services. The resulting environment supports approximately 50 GIS users and 640 ArcGIS services.
Results and Operational Impact
The modernization gives the City of Portsmouth a more structured, efficient way to operate its enterprise GIS environment, with improvements spanning reliability, recovery readiness, and change management.
- System Reliability
Since go-live, the environment has run at 99.88% availability. CyberTech’s managed service model keeps it running smoothly day to day, letting the City’s team stay focused on delivering GIS-powered public services rather than on infrastructure upkeep. - Backup and Recovery Readiness
Backup retention has also been extended from 7 to 90 days, giving the City a much longer window to recover data if needed and further strengthening its overall recovery posture. - Controlled Change Management
That structure gives the City’s team real confidence when rolling out updates, knowing changes have already been validated before they reach the systems the City depends on for day-to-day service delivery.
CyberTech’s ongoing monitoring and scheduled maintenance keep our production GIS stable and protected, ensuring our departments always have access to the data they need.
With a modernized, well-governed ArcGIS Enterprise environment now in place, the City of Portsmouth has a scalable foundation that can grow alongside its future GIS needs, and is well positioned to keep pace with demand well into the future. Where the legacy environ ment constrained what the City could do with GIS, the AWS-based platform opens the door to expanding capabilities, supporting more users, and building on the City’s Utility Network investment as its enterprise GIS ambitions grow.
See how Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services can help modernize your ArcGIS Enterprise envi ronment on AWS or Azure.
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