From budget management and code enforcement to delivering public services in times of crisis, the work of government never ends.
However, far too often, state and local governments grapple with siloed legacy systems that hinder their work. To operate more effectively, they need a scalable, highly resilient technology infrastructure, specifically a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that brings together all their critical operations on one platform.
OpenGov has helped governments address this challenge for nearly a decade. The company, which works with more than 1,000 state and local governments, offers collaborative budgeting, robust financial management, and intuitive citizen services. The OpenGov ERP Cloud is specifically built for the unique needs of local governments and backed by a world-class, mission-driven support team with over 300 years of collective government experience.
As a provider of mission-critical technologies for government organizations, it is crucial to offer solutions that are reliable, highly available, and flexible enough to meet a surge in demand. OpenGov, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, achieved all these capabilities by leveraging the AWS Cloud to scale and innovate, providing governments with the resources needed to build more data-driven, resilient, and accountable organizations.
Harnessing the power of AWS Cloud infrastructure
OpenGov is a cloud-native company. Its ERP platform is purpose-built in this environment and fully integrates core government systems, including general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, human resources, payroll, licensing and permitting, utility billing, and more. With this single platform, city, county, and state agencies can easily integrate and consolidate data across teams and take advantage of real-time dashboards and reporting capabilities to track financial and program performance and deliver a range of digital services.
Since 2012, OpenGov has hosted its technology infrastructure on AWS Cloud and has designed its software solutions using the company’s well-architected framework. This framework allows technology companies to put operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization at the forefront when building their applications and evaluating their workloads. Companies can evaluate their risks, potentially avoid technical debt, and accelerate application development.
Although OpenGov has a longstanding relationship with AWS, the way it leverages the company’s cloud services has evolved as its business needs have changed, says Jayson Barley, an engineering manager at OpenGov.
“Over the past nine years, we’ve become much more sophisticated and have adopted industry best practices,” Barley says. “We’ve engaged with AWS to ensure we have good practices around our configurations, and we’ve worked with them on architectural decisions to ensure we’re using their tools in the best way possible. The longer we’ve been with AWS, the more sophisticated and better we’ve become.”
OpenGov continues to lean on the expertise of the AWS team as the company increases its customer base. For example, as OpenGov underwent disaster recovery testing for its systems, it sought feedback and guidance from the AWS team to make its strategy more robust. As its government customers seek more advanced security solutions, OpenGov also relies on the AWS Cloud to enhance that security.
“A lot of our customers are becoming more sophisticated, and as they do, they begin reaching out to us with questions such as, ‘What sort of security controls do you have in place?’ and ‘How are you securing your networks and workloads?’” Barley says. “What’s been really phenomenal for us is because we’re leveraging the Amazon Partner Network, we can often just reference the best practices AWS is following as a provider of compute and networking infrastructure and services, which allows us to focus on our application security.”
The scalability AWS provides has been beneficial for OpenGov, which is why the company is currently migrating an additional application in its portfolio to the AWS Cloud from another public cloud provider. The move will enable OpenGov to integrate all its technologies on the AWS platform, and more importantly, meet its customers’ service level agreements (SLA) and needs around availability and reliability.
Scaling and innovating with AWS
No company can scale and innovate if its applications and solutions are not reliable. To ensure high availability, reliability and redundancy, AWS places its data centers in multiple Availability Zones that are isolated from one another. Barley says this helps OpenGov from both a cost and disaster recovery perspective.
“Instead of us having to run multiple data centers to get that same redundancy, AWS does that for us,” he says.
OpenGov is taking advantage of a range of AWS offerings to scale and innovate, including tools from AWS that leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics and reporting tools; Amazon Aurora, a relational database built for the cloud;and flexible pricing models for cost optimization. These tools enable OpenGov to adjust its compute resources based on these insights. Some of OpenGov’s applications are using Amazon Aurora and open source applications that provide high performance and availability at one-tenth the cost of MySQL databases. Amazon Aurora delivers up to five times the performance of MySQL without requiring any changes to most MySQL applications.
A company also can’t scale and innovate if it can’t manage costs. OpenGov leverages two different pricing models — AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances — to better control its cloud expenses. AWS Savings Plans offer government technology providers a flexible pricing model to reserve capacity over one- to three-year terms, which provides savings up to 72 percent on cloud computing usage, especially compared to paying for these services on demand. Reserved Instances allow companies to pay for compute resources based on the type of workloads they run, how often they run them, and in which Availability Zones. By leveraging these AWS cost savings programs, OpenGov is able to pass on the cost savings to their government customers through the services they offer.
Barley says Reserved Instances and Savings Plans allow OpenGov to scale its resources based on changes in demand from its customers. This has been particularly useful during the pandemic, as state and local governments experienced a surge in demand for social services. “We’ve become much more aggressive with our usage of reservations and compute Savings Plans to the point where there’s very little infrastructure in production right now that is not reserved through either a Savings Plan or a Reserved Instance,” Barley says.
Kelly Hendrickson, a senior account executive at AWS who works closely with OpenGov says OpenGov also effectively uses AWS Auto Scaling to monitor its applications and adjust computing capacity as needed, so it can effectively maintain application performance and cost, especially as governments deliver more digital services.
“OpenGov has seen a surge in usage with their Budgeting & Planning applications, so we’re monitoring their traffic with AWS Auto Scaling to make sure they’re not getting overloaded,” Hendrickson says. “We ensure that their redundancy and disaster recovery plans are in the best place to scale and meet the new needs of their customers, given the current state of the economy during the global pandemic.”
However, it is not just the AWS Cloud that helps OpenGov scale and innovate. Barley says the close working relationship OpenGov has with the AWS team has been invaluable for the company. The company regularly undergoes well-architected reviews with the AWS team to ensure it is managing its computing environments the right way and that the company’s architecture is scalable and includes robust disaster recovery.
“We’re always concerned about how quickly we can iterate. We do quarterly business reviews and during those reviews we typically bring items to discuss, such as our upcoming plans from an architectural or design perspective,” Barley says. “That eventually branches out into deeper conversations with subject matter experts from AWS that can advise and help us design a good architecture. That helps to speed up the process of delivering new features or new architectures that might otherwise take much longer because we can talk to the people who are experts in it.”
Delivering best-in-class solutions to governments
This close collaboration allows OpenGov to serve its customers better at times when they depend on the company’s solutions most. Matt Singer, OpenGov’s chief marketing officer, says many governments have leveraged OpenGov’s suite of tools to maintain business continuity and resilience during the pandemic. Customers were already using OpenGov to increase financial transparency and post their budgets online for constituents to review. But since the pandemic, Singer says customers have used the OpenGov platform to host virtual town hall meetings and solicit feedback from residents on important matters.
Governments also use OpenGov Stories to communicate information about COVID testing sites. OpenGov Stories, which is part of the company’s citizen engagement solution, allows customers to easily build and deploy curated landing pages. Using a drag-and-drop interface and templates on the OpenGov platform, government agencies can share timely information with constituents, Singer says.
“OpenGov Stories enables customers to pull data from our budgeting and planning suite and through third-party integrations with our reporting and transparency platform. Through these integrations, they’re not only able to communicate budget information, but also communicate information about COVID,” he says. “They can pull data from a variety of sources into OpenGov, configure it quickly into a story or a landing page, and then push that out via their social media channels, text, or email. That was something we saw in the early days of the pandemic when people were scrambling to get information out there.”
OpenGov’s solutions have been indispensable to many governments this year, including Suffolk County in Long Island, New York. The county uses the OpenGov platform to integrate business processes across departments and automate manual data entry tasks. With the OpenGov platform, the county saved more than 100 hours per department as it completed its budget process. It also saved between 5 to 10 hours preparing a new budget book, more than one week on strategic and personnel planning, and one day per department on scenario planning and analysis related to personnel planning.
This automated solution became even more important after the pandemic, when the county had to process a massive amount of data to do new budget projections. The county was able to quickly assess its financial standing and share information with the public about a projected $469 to $590 million budget shortfall. Without the efficiency the county gained with the OpenGov platform, it would not have been able to be as transparent with the public or as prepared amid a time of massive disruption and uncertainty.
As OpenGov continues to serve governments, it will harness the AWS Cloud to ensure availability, reliability, and security of its systems. In turn, this will enable state and local governments to remain resilient and accelerate their transformation into digitally driven organizations. Barley says working with AWS allows OpenGov to be more nimble and better meet the needs of its customers.
“They’re really interested in seeing us succeed as an organization. We haven’t seen that level of engagement from any other cloud services provider we’ve worked with,” he says. “Nearly every week we have a conversation with the AWS team to make sure we’re on track, that we’re doing the right things, and that we’re continuing to iterate and improve on what we have now to get us to a better place. AWS is so deeply ingrained within our team and focused on ensuring our success, which is why we continue to work with them.
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