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April 25, 2023

Municipality of Alkmaar migrates to Azure, improving IT operations and citizen experiences

As one of the largest municipalities in the Netherlands, the Municipality of Alkmaar supports its 115,000 citizens with impactful innovations. It has steadily introduced digital applications to connect and engage citizens but recently faced difficulty scaling and meeting timelines while relying on outdated hardware. In only three months, the municipality completed an expansive migration to Microsoft Azure to drive business continuity and overall agility. It also improved system performance, scalability, and security, making its digital offerings faster and more available to citizens than ever before.

Municipality Alkmaar

“In three months’ time, we moved 250 virtual machines running on more than 60 on-premises servers to Azure so we could immediately get insights, better monitoring, and have them all together in the cloud.”

Dave Bibo, Chief Information Officer, Municipality Alkmaar

A digital transformation to support rapid growth

Located near Amsterdam, the Municipality of Alkmaar prides itself on connecting the best of city and country. It’s now doing the same with data and digitization to help ensure that citizens can access critical services through a dynamic portal. The municipality’s IT team historically invested heavily in on-premises server hardware and maintenance, but as Alkmaar grew, so did its user base, which gradually demanded more licenses for people to use its applications. The government’s on-premises datacenter was also about to expire, and it needed to take control of the rapidly growing amount of data in its systems environment.

To best support its growth, the municipality sought to modernize and migrate to the cloud. Its existing use of Microsoft products and services, including Microsoft 365 and Windows 365, made Azure the ideal platform. Azure also fully complies with local Dutch regulations and the General Data Protection Regulation.

The municipality worked with digital transformation partner InSpark and Microsoft, including the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, and tapped into Azure Migrate to move to and modernize within Azure with minimal business interruption, despite the environment’s complexity and criticality. “In three months’ time, we moved 250 virtual machines running on more than 60 on-premises servers to Azure so we could immediately get insights, better monitoring, and have them all together in the cloud,” says Dave Bibo, Chief Information Officer for the Municipality of Alkmaar.

Certain networks had to remain physically connected by law but will soon be rerouted to a new government cloud platform. In the meantime, the municipality eliminated all of its other physical infrastructure and closed the on-premises datacenter. “With Microsoft’s expertise and InSpark’s knowledge, creating and maintaining a new environment for all of our processes in Azure was easy,” says Bibo. “This gave us flexibility to dive into our business needs and workflows instead of investing in more hardware and server licenses.”

Investing on the go and increasing scalability

While the Municipality of Alkmaar invests in all of its hardware, virtualization layers, and licenses every six years, it’s unable to move, scale, or invest in new technology during that period. InSpark helped draft an investment strategy aimed at shifting the municipality to a pay-as-you-go model rather than waiting six years to make changes. Now running on Azure, the municipality can scale completely on demand. As Bibo describes, “Instead of needing several different pieces of software to run one app, I now have a small set of resources that I can scale up or down based on our needs, the throttle that we want to have on it, or the speed with which we want the application to run.”

The municipality’s on-premises infrastructure was built on 154 Windows and 12 Linux systems, and moving those to Azure immediately enhanced management and monitoring with 30 percent cost savings on long-term investment compared with the physical datacenter. The municipality also now pays only for the specific resources it needs to support its goals. “We had old equipment in two different locations that took a lot of time, headaches, after-hours work, and costs to maintain,” says Bibo. “With Azure, we’re saving 30 percent over our on-premises assets and we get the benefits of the cloud.”

A more connected, confident, and cloud-driven Alkmaar

To enhance network connectivity in the cloud, the municipality adopted a hub-spoke network topology in Azure, which provides great visibility into what’s running on each domain and a central hub to manage connectivity rules. Every domain has an isolated network configuration and doesn’t contaminate or interfere with other environments. “On-premises, we had different brands of hardware and issues with firmware updates,” explains Bibo. “We can see how communication paths between the Azure virtual machines are connected so we can better access analytics, log errors, and monitor and optimize performance between machines.”

The Municipality of Alkmaar also wanted to invest in business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). An on-premises test showed that it would take more than 72 hours for the government to recover from a disaster, which it knew it had to address. The municipality uses Azure Backup as its BCDR solution and Azure Site Recovery for a few of its more critical virtual machines. “Rather than backing up every virtual machine or buying double the hardware, what helped us with data recovery is that every virtual machine in Azure running on Windows Server or Linux has a basic profile and works with snapshots,” says Bibo. “We can control our business, isolate any situation, and recover from only one virtual machine or spoke, which allows us to bring restoration time down to only one hour.”

Planning for the future with digital twin technology and security enhancements

Following an ambitious cloud roadmap, the municipality is now ramping up its use of Azure Maps and Azure Digital Twins to support smart city initiatives. By creating a digital twin of the municipality, it can follow developments and focus on specific issues that affect the area, such as road congestion and traffic light performance, with real-time data displayed on its own user interface. Through the use of its digital twin tool and Power BI Desktop, the municipality can analyze insights gleaned for trends to not only solve pressing challenges but better plan for the future—improving the citizen experience without having to worry about hardware. “With our digital twin, we can get and give insights about what’s being built in different neighborhoods, for example, and what they’re going to look like,” says Bibo. “Having more and faster insights in Azure helps our city council make more informed decisions for the betterment of the municipality.”

While working on big projects, the municipality is equally focused on security enhancements to protect crucial corporate and citizen data. “We’re tasked with saving data for later generations, and that’s where it was a no-brainer for us to work with Microsoft on a platform like Azure, which is much more secure than our local datacenter,” says Bibo.

“Stepping into the role of being in control”

The Municipality of Alkmaar is among the first governments in the Netherlands and Microsoft public sector enterprise customers to migrate its data and infrastructure to Azure—milestones it says wouldn’t have been achievable without the knowledge partners by its side. “IT isn’t our core business, so focusing on what we do best and collaborating with others on the rest is a smart decision,” says Bibo. “If we need a Microsoft specialist or an InSpark architect, they’re all in the same environment working together. As we progress with our cloud infrastructure and managed instances, Microsoft and InSpark will continue to help us step by step.”

Through its Azure migration and dynamic relationship with Microsoft, the municipality can now seamlessly integrate and take advantage of new technology faster and easier than before. “We’re far more connected, resilient, and high performing with Azure,” says Bibo. “Technology is no longer an inhibitor for us, and we can introduce new applications into our environment in two months rather than two years. We’re stepping into the role of being in control, which is a dynamic and exciting place to be.”

Find out more about the Municipality of Alkmaar on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“We had old equipment in two different locations that took a lot of time, headaches, after-hours work, and costs to maintain. With Azure, we’re saving 30 percent over our on-premises assets and we get the benefits of the cloud.”

Dave Bibo, Chief Information Officer, Municipality of Alkmaar

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