Cloud Computing refers to a new paradigm in the delivery of virtualised IT resources. Cloud computing platforms are now available from Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon and others. The availability of this global virtualised infrastructure from major industry players including Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon has the potential to see a major shift in how we mobilise and deploy geographic information systems.

Cloud computing platforms are massive global virtualised infrastructures on which you can buy compute time. You can use this compute time to;

• Avail of an operating system level platform on which you can run your own applications. This is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a Service or “IaaS”.
• To participate in a developer environment on which you can use tools and resources to engineer applications. This is commonly referred to as Platform as a Service or “PaaS”.
• On which you can avail of applications that are pre built by a given supplier. This is commonly referred to as Software as a Service or “SaaS”.

Cloud Computing infrastructures offer you a means to deploy your GIS application almost instantly without the wait time normally associated with sourcing hardware and hosting facilities. Our work to date shows that we can instantiate a new cloud based ArcGIS Server instance in minutes.

After your cloud based platform is instantiated you pay for your platform only while you are using it. Pay as you Use billing schemes are very attractive if your budgeting is OpEx rather than CapEx based. If your project is finished and you have no further use for your platform you can simply shut it down. Likewise if your project is a huge success and you need to quickly ramp up your production capacity most Cloud Computing platforms have an almost infinite and automatic scaling facility that enables you to quickly add and remove compute resources.

These characteristics make Cloud Computing an attractive option for GIS project that can have a large compute and data storage requirements and often, especially in the public internet domain, may have very unpredictable and large peaks in traffic.

ESRI Ireland has first hand experience of building a Cloud Based GIS using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Our highly popular www.nimap.net application for the Northern Ireland Public Service went live on AWS in September of 2009 and we have been running successfully since then. Our experience has been that Cloud Computing offers uninterrupted services, massive performance boost and predictable service costs. We are happy to be able to offer the benefits of our experience to your organisation if you would like to consider the Cloud Based option for your GIS Project.