We discuss the benefits of cloud-based GIS here quite a bit. One reason is obvious; it’s one of our products, and we’re in the business of selling products. But we also believe that cloud-based GIS is definitely a game changer.

The obvious

Cloud-based GIS changes the game in that it gets you out of tangling with your IT staff over server hardware, configurations, and permissions settings, or worse yet, trying to administer them yourselves when you’re a GISer and not a systems engineer! It also gives you a level of performance, redundancy, and failover that you’ve always known you should have and never managed to get in place.

The not-so-obvious

You’ve probably already realized the above game-changer issues, but here’s where we rock your world with an accounting paradigm shift. In the past, your server resources have been viewed as capital investments. As your needs have increased, you’ve no doubt had to engage in yearly battles to justify the expense of purchasing newer, bigger and faster servers. Over the past few years, many companies’ overall budgets have been tightened, which makes every department have to fight that much harder to get their piece of the pie.

Cloud-based GIS can save you from these battles, as it can function (and be accounted for) much more like a utility than may have been the case with your old server setup. You may find benefit in moving our cloud-based GIS services into operations.