The Shift: The Future of the Geospatial Cloud

At Woolpert, we are very serious about the future of geospatial solutions and location-based services—basically, we are obsessed with anything that has a location component. We have always been at the forefront of GIS implementation and now we’re seeing another emerging trend, we’re calling it GIS modernization. And we’re very passionate about modernizing our clients’ geospatial systems and workloads.

As Dr. Qassim Abdullah noted earlier this month in his blog, Top Geospatial Trends of 2020, geospatial computing powers are beginning to shift into the cloud, and an increasing number of companies are offering cloud data hosting and processing.

This year, through this monthly Geospatial Cloud blog series, we will share our vision of how we see this shift to the cloud progressing and how we intend to help our clients get the most out of this ever-expanding geospatial market. Each month we will take a deep dive into each concept through a combination of knowledge sharing, best practices and technical guidance.

Through this series, we will impart lessons learned through the strong partnerships we’ve fostered with various vendors in the industry, including those with world-class APIs, SaaS platforms and content repositories. And we’ll discuss how each of these components fits with a healthy geospatial cloud strategy and how our clients are using these products and data to solve complex business problems to empower their geospatial future.

We’ll also explore how products like STREAM:RASTER™ are being developed to fill voids throughout the industry. STREAM:RASTER was developed by Woolpert to solve the problem of hosting and supporting large-scale imagery datasets in the cloud.

Oh, and don’t worry, we’re also planning to share some tips for maintaining security and privacy while working in the public cloud.

So, let’s get started! In today’s blog, I am introducing the specific concepts we plan to highlight each month. Those are listed below. As each blog is posted, we will include links to previous blogs in the series to provide a comprehensive repository of cloud-based industry knowledge for your reference.

We will officially kick off our journey in February with a blog by Woolpert Cloud Director Dylan Thomas. Since you are reading this blog, you likely have thought about or potentially developed a strategy for your cloud initiatives. You may, however, not know what to do next. Thomas will share best practices for implementing and optimizing your cloud strategy, as well as provide various cloud options (yes, there are more than one).

We look forward to navigating the #GeospatialCloud with you.