Same Team, Same Expertise, Different Locations
We are all working though these confusing and trying times to find a new normal. There is a plethora of advice for not going crazy and a few tips from other GIS Professionals. I thought I’d share how Cloudpoint Geographics has managed and migrated to a distributed workforce while continuing production on essential projects and even expanding.
As a company, we have always stayed nimble. We either use Dropbox or Google Drive to share files (You can see some past tweets of mine to see the frustration of BOTH those platforms). We use Trello for project management and Slack for messaging and even our employee procedures handbook is a Google website. Like everyone else, we have added Zoom to our repertoire of cloud-based apps we use on a daily basis, try to find a good home office chair and worry about the height our kitchen table should be. Our daily huddle kicks off at 8am. Since this quarantine mandate applies to our entire team, there is not any “Work from Home” advice that we can add to an already helpful space. It is new to us.
GIS Productivity
Projects drive our revenue and we are a GIS shop. By that, I mean most of our staff are not writing code, creating powerpoints or responding to proposals. We create GIS layers, fix client data and do geospatial analysis. It is imperative that we can edit GIS layers and see each others edits. You may have seen this post from GeoNet about ArcGIS Support for a remote workforce. The snippet that I want to emphasize is at the top of the article:
ArcGIS is designed to work in a distributed fashion. As long as it is deployed in a web GIS pattern.
(emphasis mine.)
This cannot be overstated enough, a properly implemented ArcGIS Enterprise is great for connecting to feature services from anywhere with an internet connection. With the use of ArcGIS Pro connecting to your Portal feature layers, you may not even feel remote at all (aside from wearing pajamas). The data is there to be edited as it is published. With this in mind, last week I created a couple of videos that help explain this process;
Part 1
Part 2
What if you don’t have that? What if you still need to directly connect to your SQL SDE that is behind a firewall? What are the options then?
I write blogs like I speak, so I’ll cut to the chase. You are limiting yourself and you must involve your IT department. So, if anything gets added to your to-do list from this quarantine: Implement WebGIS m’kay?
Remote Desktop
Having an open RDP directly to your database server is not the most secure implementation. So, we will pretend you are not doing that. For our local government clients, I would encourage you to stay away from the headless remote clients like Chrome remote desktop or the free TeamViewer. (note; even using the free Teamviewer for government work is a TOS violation) Nicely asking your IT to setup a VPN or terminal server is a much better practice to get to your desktop workstation. They are the best ones to do that and still protect the network. You must be aware ArcGIS Pro will run slowly on a remote desktop connection because of the lack of out of the box virtualized GPU support. You need a beefy server running a VDI solution like VMware Horizon View to get optimal performance.
To the Cloud!
For Cloudpoint, we do not have an internal server. Our ArcGIS Portal instances live on AWS. We use AWS workspaces and to direct connect to the PostgreSQL database. This allows our techs to have a workstation with a GPU while still on cloud infrastructure. We are just begining to look into AWS service AppStream. This would allow us to run ArcGIS Pro in a browser. Depending on your use case, you may be able to have a separate instance (server) which has ArcMap/Catalog installed. They do not have the GPU requirements that ArcGIS Pro does. Please know, that separating your relational database and direct connection interface onto separate systems causes unbearable lag. Meaning, using AWS EC2 instance to reach into your local Network via VPN for a direct connect will not produce good results. Either do full cloud or full hardware. In this case, the hybrid approach does not work well. Last year Esri also has outlined options for cloud deployment of ArcGIS Desktop in a blog post.
Our Services
We recommend you implement a cloud-based Web GIS & we can do this for you. It has been about 8 years since we first deployed on AWS. Just recently, we have productized this expertise and created a service offering of cloud-hosted GIS architecture for organizations looking to migrate their GIS network into a secured cloud environment.
Contact us with any questions.