Many organizations experience challenges aligning their IT infrastructure with their staff’s data access needs, and this disconnect can hinder the ability for the business or agency to move forward in a timely manner with informed decision-making. In the forestry sector, staff are often in the field and may not have the ability to locate critical information for days, and in this world of “do more with less,” giving staff access to data the data they need when they need it, is a challenge for IT departments and decision-makers alike. An increasingly common approach to ensure data is available on-demand, is to host information in the cloud. More and more organizations are seeing the benefits of managing their data in a cloud environment, but the transition is not always an easy one. Questions arise regarding security, data management, access permissions, costs, etc. During this presentation, we will discuss a forestry use case to highlight one organization’s transition from desktop GIS software and paper records, to a cloud-hosted forest management system that integrates Esri’s ArcGIS Online capabilities. If you are thinking of making the move to the cloud and have questions you need answered, join us where we will share some of our experiences, advice and recommendations that apply to forestry and beyond.
