00:01We do want to share with you an interesting success case from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on how they use...

00:06...GIS in cloud computing to meet some of their business needs.

00:09Please welcome the CIO from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, Jonathan Alboum, and his colleagues.

00:19Thank you, John.

00:20It's a pleasure to be here to speak about cloud computing.

00:23I'd like to begin with a few questions.

00:26How do you deploy interactive maps to 43 million customers when you have no GIS staff...

00:31...and current IT resources are dedicated to other mission priorities?

00:36How do you deploy a map server when power management controls are so tight...

00:39...that you can't stand up one machine without taking down another?

00:43How can you accomplish all of this in less than two months and on a limited budget?

00:47Well, we did it with a great team including my colleague Jonathan Bennett and a little help from ArcGIS in the Amazon cloud.

00:55My name is Jonathan Alboum, and I'm the chief information officer at the Food and Nutrition Service.

00:59FNS is an agency within USDA, and we have a great mission.

01:03Simply stated, we help needy people eat better.

01:06And we do this through a variety of nutrition assistance programs including the school lunch and breakfast program...

01:12...the special nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children, otherwise known as WIC and SNAP...

01:18...the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which you probably know by its old name, Food Stamps.

01:24I'd like to give you a little more information about SNAP.

01:27Presently, there are more than 43 million people receiving SNAP benefits which is...

01:31...more than 6 million people receiving them at this point last year.

01:35SNAP beneficiaries can redeem their benefits at any of 216,000 authorized retailers...

01:41...which results in more than 7 million electronic transactions a day.

01:45These increased program demands require that the agency think creatively about how to support SNAP recipients...

01:51...and the state agency workers that serve them.

01:54One of the things we realized we needed was a user-friendly map to help our customers and policy makers...

02:00...identify nearby SNAP retailers to better evaluate access to benefits.

02:05The result was a SNAP retailer locator which you're about to see demoed.

02:09It's one of the largest store locators on the Internet and was the USDA's first geospatial application to be hosted in the Amazon cloud.

02:17Like all projects, we had challenges and we needed to manage risk.

02:21FNS is not a GIS shop, and we had a very tight time frame for delivery.

02:25The secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, wanted to highlight the locator at the 2010 National Nutrition Conference.

02:32And there was also a lot of initial uncertainty as to the number of people that were going to be using the tool...

02:38...given the 43 million people on the program and the thousands of state eligibility workers.

02:43We needed scalability, but with a tight budget, we only wanted to pay for the extra capacity when we really needed it.

02:49That made the cloud a clear choice.

02:51By working with our partners, we quickly scoped initial requirements and we were in production in a matter of weeks.

02:57Our implementation was very smooth.

02:59After the application was created, it was staged in a cloud-based test environment...

03:03...where FNS performed extensive UAT before we pushed it live.

03:08The agency also achieved great cost savings by going to the cloud.

03:11We saved money and resources that we would have spent to purchase, deploy, and support new software and servers.

03:18We estimated that it would have cost about $300,000 to build, host, and maintain a similar environment internally.

03:26By going to the cloud, we did it in a fraction of the cost.

03:30Site usage has grown by 93 percent since we launched in July, and we're averaging more than 20,000 visitors a month.

03:37We're currently enhancing the locator with the addition of a Spanish language option, driving directions to retailers...

03:43...and the ability to download retailers by state.

03:46And by publishing our data through a consumable web service available on our site at data.gov...

03:53...we're going to be making retailer data available for integration with other applications across government and industry.

04:00One of the things that we're really proud of at FNS is the fact that we've been able to extend this work into other areas of the agency...

04:07...and support a very important initiative that you may have heard of, Let's Move.

04:12The Let's Move campaign was started by First Lady Michelle Obama last February...

04:15...and has the ambitious goal of solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation.

04:20As Let's Move is about to celebrate its first anniversary, FNS is excited to launch the Healthy Access Locator...

04:27...to highlight the many schools that have taken an active role in combating childhood obesity...

04:31...by introducing healthier school menus and including more physical activity during the school day.

04:37We've incorporated additional data layers, including some data from the CDC, to be able to see how well we're doing...

04:44...and where we can do better due to high rates of child obesity.

04:47Visually, we can see this.

04:50We can search nationally or by city, state, or ZIP Code.

04:53We can break down our search even more and look just at elementary schools, for example.

04:58This gives us the ability to study this data from a really localized perspective.

05:04Another unexpected benefit of GIS in the cloud was improved collaboration and coordination across USDA agencies.

05:10USDA's economic research service informs public and private decision makers on issues involving food, farming...

05:17...natural resources, and role development.

05:20Last year, my colleague Vince Breneman and his team turned to the Amazon cloud...

05:23...as part of their launch of a really cool GIS application, Your Food Environment Atlas.

05:29The atlas looks at food environment factors such as store/restaurant proximity, food prices, and nutrition assistance programs, like SNAP.

05:38Ultimately, the atlas helps to visualize food environment indicators...

05:42...and provide a spatial overview of a community's ability to access healthy food.

05:47For ERS, going to the cloud was about managing risk.

05:51Unlike FNS, they actually had staff and infrastructure to stand up their own map servers and applications.

05:57However, the Food Environment Atlas was launched in parallel with Let's Move, and the response was tremendous.

06:03Given the media's attention and rough usage estimates, ERS augmented their data center with the cloud for scalability and redundancy.

06:12The cloud provided insurance that ERS could rapidly scale to handle traffic spikes and confidently deliver the food atlas application.

06:21Cloud-based GIS proved valuable because ERS also needed a sandbox...

06:26...where they could quickly and easily develop new capabilities at a low cost.

06:30Given the benefits, GIS in the cloud has become a significant part of their strategy...

06:34...and new applications will be deployed there going forward.

06:37In fact, just this morning, ERS released new atlas functionality to the cloud.

06:42And Secretary Vilsack will discuss these expanded capabilities at today's conference of mayors' meetings.

06:48So you can see, everyone at USDA's excited about what we've accomplished with these tools.

06:54FNS and ERS are extremely proud of how we're working together.

06:58We're not just sharing data, but ideas and experiences about GIS in the cloud.

07:03We're leveraging our collective geospatial resources to do more with less.

07:07Further, these tools align really well with the administration's goals for cloud computing, open government, and transparency.

07:14We've made information available on demand that was previously inaccessible.

07:19And in doing so, we're advancing the USDA mission and providing a great service to our state partners...

07:23...program recipients, and the American taxpayer.