It’s only been a few weeks since the Japan earthquake ripped through the island nation, with an uprising of information that spread the news around the world in mere seconds.  While certain data networks were damaged, internet and mobile traffic soared, as loved ones tried to contact each other, and correspondents struggled to update the rest of us with localized information.  In this day and age, such information exchange can be the difference between life and death, fear and relief.  And as the world strengthens its connections through global networks and shared data streams, the faster we can learn from each other, and Mother Nature herself.

Swisstopo understands the importance of speedy data exchange, as it provides national catastrophe information for Switzerland.  Sending pertinent data to the government, Swisstopo must rely on its networks’ reliability to facilitate a steady connection for ongoing communication between organizations.  Responsible for federal spacial data infrastructures, Swisstopo not only gathers a lot of data, but must analyze and be ready to share it on-demand.

When the company realized it was facing problems scaling up and out, Swisstopo turned to Puppet Labs for its cloud adoption.  The provider of open source systems management solutions was selected to virtualize Swisstopo’s geodata as the topography center sought to simplify its infrastructure’s transition to the cloud.

“Two years ago we were facing problems with capacity and operational problems,” explains Hanspeter Christ, Swisstopo’s Deputy Head of the Federal Spacial Data Infrastructure team.  “We had very few, but very complex servers that handled all of our stuff.  After huge problems throughout 2009, we decided to go to the cloud.”

It’s a story many companies have in common with Swisstopo, having to find a way over the virtualization hurdle that can bog down a business and its internal resources.  Determining which cloud service to use, and how to use them, is a challenge all its own.  At the time, Swisstopo considered Amazon’s available S2 products, which were just becoming publicly available.  They lacked some of the key solutions Swisstopo needed, and was not complete enough of an offering to help the company with their needs, which were specific to server crashes and data loss.  “We were seeking a tool that helped us to automate the provisioning, and in the case of a server loss, to quickly re-create the server from scratch.”

The custom approach Puppet Labs provided was a big perk for Swisstopo, and so began an ongoing collaboration between the two companies.  For Christ, who’s not an IT manager, the ease-of-use with Puppet Labs maintenance and updates was also an important consideration for this partnership.  Replicating its on-premise processes in the cloud makes for easy server management at Swisstopo.

When it’s all said and done, this is an opportunity for the Swiss government to take a good look at what the cloud has to offer.  While Swisstopo is the only federal government department utilizing the cloud in this manner, there are already other departments eying Puppet Labs in particular, for their own specific implementation of cloud management services.  For any government agency, the journey to the cloud is one of caution, as sensitive data is cause for security concerns, among other potential issues.  Swisstopo’s geo-data isn’t as sensitive as most other government sectors, easing its barriers to entry in this regard.  The organization, however, remains an important case study for the entire nation when it comes to cloud integration.