The City of Grapevine was at a crossroads. With a major infrastructure investment looming to upgrade on-prem servers, it was time to look at all the options available and decide what would align with their long-term goals. Capex versus Opex? Cloud versus continued infrastructure investment? Invest or divest? The decision was not one they took lightly.
They closely weighed all the benefits of MCCi’s Managed Cloud:
-
Eliminates the learning curve for architecting secure, scalable solutions on cloud platforms.
-
Reduces unplanned downtime for help desk and system administrators.
-
Improves agility in responding to new and ever-changing national and international regulations.
-
Maintains protection with next-generation firewall with application-layer security.
-
Meets government-grade cloud security and compliance standards while managing costs.
-
Delivers services 24/7 with ease to employees and citizens from anywhere with internet.
With the looming investment and increased concerns about security and redundancy, the City of Grapevine decided to move to the cloud.
“MCCi’s Managed Cloud is CJIS-compliant for our law enforcement records and sealed the decision for us,” exclaimed Barnes.
As the business process manager for the City of Grapevine, Texas, Shauna Barnes oversees Laserfiche and other human resources and finance applications. Shauna quickly voiced her biggest concern–migrating 320 Laserfiche Forms and Workflows. Grapevine needed a white-glove service that ensured minimal downtime while not losing any functionality of the complete Laserfiche solution currently in use.
“We are heavy users of Laserfiche Forms and Workflow. We have critical processes within fiscal services, the police department, and fire department that made availability a huge concern for us,” said Barnes.
The City first implemented Laserfiche in 2004 in the City Secretary’s office to manage birth and death records with optical character recognition (OCR) searchable metadata. The City has grown to 300+ Laserfiche users in human resources, employee onboarding, finance, fire training, police, parks and recreation, special events, public works, and development services. Every department uses Laserfiche for business processes and document management.
“We started small and grew our adoption very rapidly due to the flexibility and product growth of Laserfiche,”stated Barnes.
A few other large challenges made this cloud migration unique:
- The City decided to move to a newer version of the Laserfiche platform as part of this project
- Not only was Laserfiche a critical application for operations in Grapevine, but they also had this application integrated with other critical systems (HR, Finance)
- For increased security, Grapevine wanted to change identity providers as part of this project.
Although these challenges certainly increased the complexity of this move to the cloud, the City knew this was the right approach to gain the benefits of cloud infrastructure outlined above, along with new functionality associated with the upgraded version of Laserfiche and increased security of a new “cloud-friendly” identity provider.
The project team took a deliberate and systematic approach to this migration but completed the project in under four months.
