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Amazon Cloud, WordPress Help Arlington County, Va., Improve Constituent Services

The move has brought savings of approximately $12,000 to $15,000 per month in hosting, development and licensing costs associated with a proprietary content management system.

The value of an engaging website is hard to over-estimate. But at the same time, updating and maintaining a governmental online presence can be an expensive process.

In an effort to improve constituent services while keeping IT and operating costs down, Arlington County, Va., has found a winning approach. After exploring different infrastructure options, IT staff and county leaders moved to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and chose WordPress as its hosting platform.

The website’s primary focus is serving the county’s 220,000 residents, providing details on matters of public interest such as capital projects, closings or delays, and public meetings. A “Find It Fast” section includes such items as a property assessment look-up, the current year's budget, how to report a problem, and an A-to-Z service directory. Major headings highlight sections for residents and businesses, along with such areas as projects and planning, housing, parks and recreation, human services, taxes and payments, and government.

WordPress helps the county provide such information in the most effective way possible given its ease of use, frequency of updates and lack of cost, according to county CIO Jack Belcher. “Once that decision was made, we sought a hosting solution that met our stringent requirements,” he said. “Amazon Web Services gave us the capabilities we needed at an attractive price.”

Other managed service providers did not offer the degree of control the county required, and the other cloud hosting options considered were found lacking compared to the depth, breadth and maturity of AWS offerings.

Though Arlington opted for AWS, it passed on the company’s new cloud email offering, Amazon WorkMail, opting instead for Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. “We embraced this for the rich set of communication and collaboration features it offers,” said Belcher.

While technical specs were paramount in moving to the cloud, other factors were a part of the decision mix as the project moved from concept to reality.  

“Making our procurement and legal colleagues comfortable with the new aspects of cloud hosting was the biggest challenge,” Belcher said. 

Once key personnel were on board, county staff completed the rolling migration in April 2014 -- a move that has brought savings of approximately $12,000 to $15,000 per month in hosting and development costs, as well as the licensing costs associated with a proprietary content management system. In January, staff also migrated the county newsroom to AWS, which is expected to save an additional $6,000 per year.

Along with cost savings, staff say they feel use of the cloud has allowed the county to be more efficient in communicating with the public and is helping them meet their goal to be more transparent and agile. 

For others who might consider a similar move, Belcher advises careful planning.

“Don’t treat cloud computing as just a drop-in replacement for traditional hosting,” he says. “Embrace the unique capabilities such as usage-based billing, rapid scaling, and easily mixing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings.”