ESRI’s ArcGIS Enterprise is a major change in how corporations’ approach and operate a GIS. If your GIS was created prior to ArcGIS Enterprise, you will be required to migrate to this new platform in the future. Having a partner with extensive experience in both GIS software generations is critical to a successful migration.

Acorn Information Solutions (AIS) launched its MonARC Data Migration solution to help GIS enabled corporations navigate this critical and complex migration.  Relying on our extensive and award-winning experience in municipal and utilities GIS, we created this modular services solution. From project pre-planning, architecture design and implementation, data quality analysis, data modelling and custom tools, MonARC Data Migration is a total solutions system.

Understanding what ArcGIS Enterprise is and how your corporation can benefit from it, is the theme for this introductory series of articles.

We will start with: What is ArcGIS Enterprise? More articles about the 4 major components of the platform will follow.

ArcGIS Enterprise is a complete and modern, web enabled, GIS platform for an organization’s entire geospatial needs. From making maps, locational analytics and sharing results as part of a secure database driven system that is built on premises or in the cloud, ArcGIS Enterprise is a complete and scalable solution.

This modern GIS solution enables field workers to interact and update a corporate GIS in real time using maps and tools specifically tailored to their needs based on whatever form factor they may be using. It allows a corporation to interact with the public, customers, or contractors more easily while maintaining data security. Real time corporate metrics built from comprehensive datasets, designed for ‘at a glance’ use, can help managers quickly and easily assess problems and make decisions. Powerful next-gen tracing can allow corporations to plan, deliver and troubleshoot the resources they deliver such as electricity and drinking water.

GIS enabled corporations that have not migrated to ArcGIS Enterprise may not appreciate the degree of change in the foundation of the software, whereas previous iterations of the ArcGIS used a typical software install that referenced a corporate database, ArcGIS Enterprise is now comprised of several software components that all work together behind the scenes to make this modern GIS function.

With expanded reach to mobile and internet-based GIS workflows the ArcGIS Enterprise architecture now requires a planned approach to hardware and network resources as well as implementation, administration, and costs.

Before we dive into technical discussions regarding various architectural components and analytical capabilities of ArcGIS Enterprise, we need to appreciate the comprehensive foundation of the software and to do that we need to understand each individual software component.

To understand this comprehensive GIS platform, we need to understand it’s main components:

• ArcGIS Server
• Web Adaptor
• Portal for ArcGIS
• ArcGIS Data Store

In addition to understanding the purpose of each software component, GIS decision makers will also need to choose whether to implement the on-premises version or ESRI’s cloud-based version. Each product comes with its own advantages and challenges with consideration and planning required to assess a company’s internal resources and expertise.

We implement many ArcGIS Enterprise environments both on-premises and in the cloud, we also work in a variety of roles to administer and customize these environments for our clients.

Follow us on LinkedIn to be notified as we continue this series of Introduction to ArcGIS Enterprise. Our next topic will be ArcGIS Server.