San Francisco has embraced cloud services to address budget shortfalls and modernize IT. Key initiatives include migrating email, web content management, permitting systems, and virtual servers to the cloud. This has provided significant cost savings of over $27 million while improving security, scalability, and disaster readiness. The city leverages cloud services for video streaming, mobile apps, and social media analytics to better engage the public. Cloud adoption is expected to continue transforming San Francisco's government IT infrastructure and operations.

1. San Francisco Innovation
and Cloud Journey
Jon Walton
Chief Information Officer
Jon.walton@sfgov.org
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2. San Francisco Government
Combined City and County Government Structure
Elected Mayor and 11 Supervisors
Over 800,000 residents
Annual Budget of $7.4 billion
Over 25,000 city and county staff
60 departments
“Highly decentralized and independent….”

3. San Francisco Drivers for Change
and Adoption of IT Cloud Services
Culture Shift IT Benefits
• Leadership • Cost
• Public Perception • Speed to Implement
• Changing work force • Scalability
• Budget Shortfalls! • Disaster Readiness!
“I want us to ask “The Australian
“NIST Issues Cloud Computing
ourselves every government has
Guidelines for Managing Security
day, how are we issued its finalised
and Privacy.”
using technology - NIST Tech Beat, 2012
guide for
to make a real government
difference in “EU policy-makers roll out red agencies looking to
people’s lives.” carpet for cloud adoption.” move to the cloud.”
– President Barack Obama - The Channel, David McLeman - Josh Taylor, ZDNet

4. Having Less can Lead to Innovation
Budget Savings Decisions Result
in “Cloud First” Policy & Operations
Reduce staff
expense through
position
reductions Email
WCM System
Permit System
Reduce expenses Private Cloud VM’s
through deferred Social Media
hardware
replacement
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5. EXAMPLES OF SAN
FRANCISCO CLOUD
BASED INITIATIVES
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6. Cloud-Based Email
City Departments are migrating to cloud-based Email system (Microsoft
Office 365). The City consolidated 7 different email systems into a single
cloud-based solution that delivers greater security and easier cross-
department collaboration.
• 25,000 Users with 25 Gig
storage each.
• Adding SharePoint, Lync,
and Online Documents.
• Improved Security and
Disaster Readiness.
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7. Virtual Data Centers and Virtual
Severs in SF Private Cloud
• Moved from a 20,000+ sq.ft. data center to 3,000 sq.ft. in a Co-Location facility.
• So far during the project the city has virtualized over 700 servers around the
city, has begun construction a small shared city owned data center, and is
standardizing on EMC, NetApp, UCS, Commvault, and VMware technology.
• Positive results of the project include;
• Over $3M in data center equipment cost avoidance
• Critical services in a Tier 2 data centers
• PUE at new data center is under 1.6
• 3,000,000 kilowatt hours saved
• Carbon savings equivalent to taking 600 cars off the road and planting 12,000 trees
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8. Cloud-Based WCM
The city replaced an old premise based
Web Content Management (WCM) system
with a cloud-based WCM system (Vision)
allowing 300+ employees (without
engineering skills) to easily and quickly
publish content on 100+ City web sites.
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9. Cloud Services for Video Streaming
The City also leverages cloud based solutions (Granicus and YouTube) to
serve Terabytes of video content in both live and pre-recorded format with
the goal of increasing public access to government information.
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10. Web Streaming & Mobile
Cloud based video streaming services have been integrated with the SFGov
mobile app to enable citizens to watch or listen video of public meetings
anytime anywhere just by using their smartphone (IOS & Android).
 CIO 100 Award – 2012
 Hermes Creative Award – 2012
 Horizon Interactive Award – 2012
 PTI Solutions Award – 2012
 Sunny Transparency Award - 2012
“IT professionals and CIOs must
understand the nexus forces of mobile
and cloud, which are closely
related, because many mobile apps
and solutions will exploit cloud
services.” 10
- Gartner, The Future of Mobile Cloud, Sept. 2012

11. Leverage Social Media
Social media cloud solutions are
great for engaging residents and
delivering customer service. The
City has been able to
accumulate and reach a large
audience online. Most City
agencies now have a presence
on Facebook, Twitter or both
and are consistently active
users.
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12. Social Media Analytics
The City is leveraging cloud based Analytics tools (Salesforce Radian6 ) to
analyze online trends. This helps us identify valuable information such as
individual influencers and overall sentiment on specific topics of public interest.
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13. Final Thoughts
• San Francisco has embraced and implemented
cloud services in multiple key IT initiatives.
• Email, Permitting, Web Content Management, Social
Media, Virtual Servers, etc.
• The City is realizing substantial benefits in terms of
efficiency, disaster readiness, security and savings.
• Central IT expenses reduced by $27M
• The evolution of these technologies promises to
continue to change the foundation of San
Francisco’s Government.
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