Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation and Performance is planning to migrate the city’s legacy IT systems to Google Cloud in order to save money and encourage the development of new digital services. The move is expected to cost $4 million over the four-year contract.
The city performed a partial migration to Google Cloud last year in order to increase storage capacity and were satisfied with the move.
“We were immediately impressed with the scalability and flexibility of Google Cloud after using the technology for an initial storage migration last year,” Heidi Norman, Pittsburgh’s acting innovation and performance director, stated. “We realized all the different ways we could partner with Google Cloud to reduce the barriers of entry to move to a more cloud-focused approach to service delivery, and from there, developed a plan to rapidly adopt Google Cloud for our remaining on-premises applications.”
The project will begin with moving IT tools and applications to monitor and manage the infrastructure. Next, they will move computer and storage capacity into the cloud; and the last phase will be lifting and shifting applications from on-premises to the cloud. The migration team will include city staff, Google Cloud, and Google Cloud Premier Partner Cloudbakers. Cloudbakers provides implementation and tech support for cloud migrations.
“Part of this innovative pilot partnership for Google Cloud’s added value includes not just migration, storage, applications, computing, and professional services but they will also provide training and certifications for city staff so that we can enhance our talent to manage the service,” Norman said.
Pittsburgh has plans to develop more digital services on the new cloud that enhance mobility, public safety, and city infrastructure. Departments will use query tools to analyze data in Pittsburgh’s Data Rivers – a cloud-based data lake – to build dashboards and reports. The platform also will handle services for the Department of Public Safety, including police, fire, and emergency medical services.