Gloucester County relies on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support essential public services, from infrastructure planning and asset management to emergency response and day-to-day county operations. As its GIS environment continued to age, the County needed a current, well-maintained ArcGIS Enterprise platform capable of keeping pace with operational demands and Esri’s supported-version lifecycle.
Through a platform upgrade engagement with CyberTech, Gloucester County completed an in-place upgrade of its ArcGIS Enterprise environment from 10.9.1 to 11.5, expanding to serve approximately 104 GIS users across 381 ArcGIS services, with the environment running at 100% availability since go-live aside from the planned maintenance window during the upgrade itself. CyberTech delivers and operates the ArcGIS environment on AWS through its Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering.
Gloucester County's experience using ArcGIS Enterprise on AWS has been nothing short of exceptional. It has allowed us to integrate using GIS products in multiple offices without having to provide much intervention once applications have been deployed. Since our deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise, we have trained multiple departments on how to use the technology, and it has become part of many offices' everyday workflow.
Without the deployment of our enterprise on AWS and MACS the process we currently perform would be nearly impossible. With our cloud-based environment it enables us to use CyberTech to manage and maintain our enterprise environment from anywhere seamlessly. If our Enterprise was deployed on on-premises servers, CyberTech would have to come to a county facility to deploy any updates and patches which would cost more time and money.
Highlights
Challenge – Gloucester County needed recommendations on GIS architecture and to upgrade an aging ArcGIS Enterprise environment to a currently supported version, reducing the risk of running end-of-life software while introducing a controlled process to validate the upgrade before it reached production.
Solution – CyberTech re-architected the county’s GIS production environment on AWS and upgraded the ArcGIS Enterprise through its Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering, applying a validated upgrade methodology to move the environment to a current, supported ArcGIS release.
Result – A modernized ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 environment supporting approximately 104 GIS users and 381 ArcGIS services, running at 100% availability since go-live, with a structured, lower-risk approach to platform change management, delivered through CyberTech’s ongoing managed service model.
GIS has become a critical part of how Gloucester County delivers public services, spanning everything from infrastructure and asset management to emergency response coordination. As the County’s reliance on GIS deepened, so did the need for a current, well-supported platform: one with the stability to run reliably, the compatibility to work with modern Esri capabilities and the operational discipline to introduce upgrades safely.
A Platform Ready to Evolve
As Gloucester County’s GIS environment matured, so did the limitations of running on an aging ArcGIS Enterprise version. The County’s ArcGIS Enterprise environment ran on 10.9.1 and had become increasingly difficult to maintain as the version approached the end of Esri’s support lifecycle. Staying on an outdated release limited access to platform improvements and introduced growing risk around vendor support and compatibility with newer Esri capabilities.
The County also needed a controlled way to execute the upgrade itself. Without a dedicated process for validating the upgrade before it reached production, the change carried more operational risk than it needed to. The goal was to move to a currently supported ArcGIS Enterprise version with minimal disruption to the County’s day-to-day GIS operations.
Executing a Controlled ArcGIS Enterprise Upgrade
Gloucester County partnered with CyberTech to upgrade its ArcGIS Enterprise environment. CyberTech delivered the upgrade through its Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services (MACS) Advanced offering, moving the County from an outdated, unsupported release to a current, supported environment running ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5. The engagement included an in-place upgrade from ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 to 11.5, completed with no unplanned downtime outside the scheduled upgrade window.
The upgrade followed a validated, staged approach, giving the County a controlled path for testing and confirming the upgrade before it reached the live environment. This helped reduce the risk of production issues and gave the County’s team more confidence in the outcome. CyberTech also introduced ongoing incident management and backup management to keep the upgraded environment running smoothly post go-live.
Environment at a Glance
- ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 – Centralized, upgraded ArcGIS platform running on AWS
- ArcGIS Enterprise Portal – Access point for the County’s GIS services and applications
- Hosting Server – Hosts the County’s published GIS services
CyberTech’s upgrade approach followed a structured methodology of environment assessment, pre-upgrade validation, staged testing, and production migration, ensuring a secure, low-risk transition for the County’s production ArcGIS services. The resulting environment serves approximately 104 GIS users and 381 ArcGIS services.
Results and Operational Impact
The upgrade gives Gloucester County a more current, sustainable ArcGIS Enterprise environment, with improvements spanning platform stability, vendor support posture and change management.
System Reliability
Since go-live, the environment has run at 100% availability, with no unplanned downtime outside the scheduled maintenance window during the version upgrade itself. CyberTech’s AWS-based managed service model keeps it running smoothly day to day, letting the County’s team stay focused on delivering GIS-powered public services rather than on platform upkeep.
Platform Support and Stability
By moving to ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5, the County is now on a currently supported release. Because the environment runs on AWS through CyberTech’s Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services, Gloucester’s platform benefits from cloud infrastructure that CyberTech manages and scales on the County’s behalf, rather than hardware the County has to size, purchase and maintain itself. The 11.5 release also introduces support for an S3-backed object store for hosted content — a capability Gloucester has not yet adopted, but one CyberTech can help implement as a future step to further reduce reliance on fixed, self-managed storage infrastructure.
Controlled Change Management
That structure gives the County’s team real confidence in the upgraded platform, knowing the environment was validated at each stage before it reached the systems the County depends on for day-to-day service delivery.
CyberTech has been an asset to Gloucester County's Enterprise deployment due to staffing capabilities. In years prior without CyberTech staff would manually deploy updates during business hours and would have extended downtime where the enterprise environment would not be accessible. Since onboarding CyberTech those downtimes are not existent as CyberTech has been able to deploy updates during non-business hours and keep our enterprise running without conflict. CyberTech has also been rapid to respond to any issues or bugs that are discovered by staff by using their GIS Support ticket platform.
Room to Grow on a Modern Foundation
With a modernized, currently supported ArcGIS Enterprise environment now in place, Gloucester County has a stable foundation that can grow alongside its future GIS needs, and is well positioned to keep pace with Esri’s platform roadmap well into the future. Where the legacy environment constrained what the County could do with GIS, the upgraded platform opens the door to expanding capabilities and adding more users as the County’s enterprise GIS ambitions grow. CyberTech’s ongoing managed service model gives the County a partner already in place to help fuel that growth, whether that means onboarding additional departments, publishing new services, or adopting future Esri capabilities as they become available.
See how Managed ArcGIS Cloud Services can help upgrade and modernize your ArcGIS Enterprise environment.
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