SPECIAL REPORT Working Smarter in
The Cloud Technology experts advise transportation departments to develop a plan for moving data and applications ‘off premise’
Written by Ryan Gray A
ntonio Civitella has a bone to pick with the so-called cloud. That is not to say the founder and CEO of Transfinder doesn’t champi- on the technology. It’s simply that he finds
the word “cloud” to be inaccurate. “I’m a stickler on the words we use to describe things,” he said recently. “That’s the best English word to describe that?” Civitella said the cloud is a marketing term that refers to a third-party software provider hosting client data off-premises, compared to the traditional and more costly way of an organization hosting that same infor- mation on its own servers. Gone are the days when most organizations need large, what he referred to as, “beefier” computers with a lot of memory and graphics cards. “And three years later, you have to replace that com-
puter because we’re putting [in] more features and functionality,” he added It was not that long ago, Civitella reminded, that many
organizations operated mainframe computers that were connected to “dumb terminals,” essentially a computer screen with a keyboard and sometimes a mouse to sim- ply access and display the data. That trend is returning. “[By moving to the cloud], you don’t have to keep rein-
vesting in latest and best CPU and memory because a lot of that stuff is happening off premises. You just want to see the results,” he explained. “There have been some school districts out there that
have invested heavily in state-of-the-art technology several years ago. Well now, it’s the end of life for that tech- nology,” Civitella continued. “So, the IT department has to make a decision. Do I re-invest in beefing up my technolo- gy? Or do I slowly shed [it] away and give it to vendors?” He shared that 77 percent of Transfinder custom-
ers have moved their transportation data off premises, where the data is backed up and managed by a dedicated team of engineers. The data is also located on multiple servers in multiple cities to ensure it is always accessible. It’s also less costly than hosting on premises. There are many “cloud” services to choose from. Trans- finder happens to use Amazon Web Services with over
18 School Transportation News • MARCH 2023
Roosevelt Elementary School District bus driver Christina Garcia in Arizona accesses routing and student ridership data that lives in “the cloud” and is then transmitted to tablets.
1,000 servers running at peak hours, Civitella added. “Generally speaking, regardless of what going to cloud means, whether using software-as-a-service in the cloud or your IT department is moving your applications to the cloud, it’s massively more advantageous to run- ning physical hardware,” agreed Gordon Waddell, senior vice president of software for Zonar Systems, which be- gan moving its products to Google Cloud six years ago. He explained that whatever going to the cloud means— using a vendor software as a service that is running remotely or the IT department is moving in-house ap- plications to off-premises hosting or vendors are giving access to what he called “do-it-yourself applications—it can result in greater efficiencies and cost savings. “Running systems in the cloud [is] massively more ad-
vantageous to the old way of lots of different companies be it vendors, be it your own IT departments, be it the subcon- tractors that your IT teams use running physical hardware,” he said. “The cloud has a lot of advantages there.” One advantage, he continued, is the cloud infrastruc-
ture, among them Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM. Those systems are running on hardware that are being closely supervised by “masses of professionals” who are dedicated to ensuring the sys- tems work. The result, he added, is a much higher-quality level of support than has been possible in the past. “That’s not to say you might not have a good IT team. But
does that other application from that other vendor, who is running someplace else, who is subcontracting to some- one else, do they have a really good team?” he observed. “As a user these days, you are dealing with an amalgamation of systems. If things are in the cloud, you know that backbone of system uptime and availability is much better.” The cloud also allows software providers to offer more
features and increased functionality to their customers as well as upgrades and other improvements available at near-instant speeds, Waddell said. He also noted flexible data plans, so customers only pay for what they use. The simple truth, however, is that not all data is avail- able in the cloud because the school district has yet to
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
