Why Los Angeles Moved Its Alternate Emergency Operations Center to the Cloud
Los Angeles, California ssguy / Shutterstock.com
A decentralized strategy is not only wise to maintain continuity, but it’s cost effective, too.
The city of Los Angeles is no stranger to emergency situations—from 1992’s riots to 1994’s Northridge earthquake, as well as local wildfires—so naturally crisis management is a city priority.
The downtown Emergency Operations Center can be activated for a variety of events like El Niño-enhanced weather events, allowing the city’s Emergency Management Department to coordinate response with police and fire.
As many as two alternate EOCs have been maintained at one time, but the redundant, legacy command sites proved difficult to afford and update.
“Once everything is centered around a physical building, you end up in a precarious situation because things happen to buildings,” Ted Ross, general manager of the city’s Information Technology Agency, told Route Fifty in an interview. “There could be a terrorist attack on the EOC or a fire or flood that cuts off access.”
Another problem in Los Angeles: The city’s main EOC and a backup site located 14 miles away near Los Angeles International Airport could be knocked offline in a major earthquake.
So ITA turned to Amazon Web Services’ geographically decentralized crisis management system.
Key municipal apps and data have been moved into Amazon’s cloud, creating a virtual operations center. Everything from evacuation tracking to volunteer and donation management is there.
Secure emergency satellite and cellular services can be used to create connectivity during disasters, so Emergency Management can work under canopy tents anywhere—makeshift crisis management shelters. The location independent system is highly scalable and sustainable.
“A physical EOC needs bodies,” Ross said. “They have to take trips to patch systems and keep server rooms at the right temperature.”
Cooling problems last summer, leading to server room temperatures of more than 100 degrees, actually prompted LA’s switch to AWS, said Joyce Edson, ITA’s assistant general manager. An older site got so dusty equipment began failing.
Because of tight city budgets that reduced the size of LA’s municipal workforce by 40 percent since 2008, the city didn’t have the human resources to continue to maintain the satellite EOC site. It was closed last year.
The new system is extremely cost effective, Ross said, because no hardware upgrades are necessary. The California state government and the federal government provide reimbursements when the EOC is activated, so LA now only spends when activation is necessary.
Ross estimates the city will save $50,000 to $80,000 a year now that the alternate EOC, with its failing hardware, is no longer .
AWS’ West Coast data centers are in Oregon, far enough from LA that they’re unlikely to be impacted if the city faces a crisis.
LA’s next step is to make the EOC more like a Google Hangout—completely independent of a brick-and-mortar site—to further mitigate disaster-caused disruptions, Ross said, and more cities should be identifying similar cloud use cases.
“We’re really trying to maximize cloud infrastructure where it makes sense,” he said. “We could actually have people who stay at home and do a virtual EOC that way, when it’s difficult for city managers to get in.”
Dave Nyczepir is a News Editor at Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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