How a Cloud Solution Brought Consistency to City Utilities
June 08, 2023 by Peter Friesen
The city of Chaska, Minnesota used to rely on physical servers for several important solutions underpinning their municipal utilities department. When a server failure, exacerbated by limited IT resources, resulted in several days without access to the department’s system, it became clear that cloud hosting was the way to go.
Taking Steps to the Future
Chaska’s Municipal Utilities Department serves around 12,000 people. The department had already adopted a handful of modern, efficient solutions that offered self-service functionality and online access for customers to view account and billing information. It took the next step toward the future by moving their hosting to the cloud after the server failure.
Benefits of Working in the Cloud
The department found that cloud hosting not only offered better and more consistent access to their data — through a large network of remote servers unaffected by local weather, power outages, or server failures — but required less attention from their limited IT staff. These employees are now freed up to work on other tasks.
When the pandemic shut down city offices for a time, Administrative Services Director Noel Graczyk said cloud hosting enabled his staff to work remotely without issue, accessing electronic documents and workflows from home.
Increasing Efficiency and Agility
Even now that employees have returned to in-person work, the benefits of their solutions keep presenting themselves. There’s less, repetitive, manual data entry, which increases efficiency, alongside reduced costs from online and in-person utility billing that eliminates paper mailing.
These solutions provided a quick and effortless way to share information back and forth with other city departments, Graczyk added, making city budgeting easier than ever.
“By using technology, streamlining and reinventing our processes, the city of Chaska is becoming more agile — responding to the needs that we have as an organization, as well as the needs of our residents,” Graczyk said.