At the heart of the Nevada Department of Transportation is being a leader and provider of effective transportation solutions for a safe, connected, and innovative Nevada. The department is responsible for planning, constructing, and operating the more than 5,400 miles of highway and 1,000 bridges that make up Nevada’s highway system, which is used daily by residents and tourists alike. It’s also charged with supporting its internal employees, contractors, and civil engineers in maintaining the flow of movement throughout the state. To make things easier and more efficient for its workforce and greater community, the department recently adopted a cloud-first mindset and moved critical systems to Microsoft Azure, gaining agility, resiliency, and an improved position for the future.
“Between the Azure data platforms and Microsoft business intelligence tools, we’re set up for success.”
Sherri McGee, Chief of the Information Technology Division, Nevada Department of Transportation
Putting public safety first while boosting availability and agility
As one of the entertainment centers of the United States, Nevada attracts people to its highway system in droves as they transport goods and commute to or from the state’s many businesses, recreational opportunities, travel destinations, and landmarks. In addition to overseeing road and highway conditions, the Nevada Department of Transportation leads a Zero Fatalities initiative to help ensure the safety of anyone traveling those routes, particularly people who might be navigating them for the first time.
With resources spread across 78 facilities in the state, including rural locations with limited digital connectivity, it’s imperative that the department’s networks are always running so everyone can stay connected and communicate important public safety messages. “It’s a huge public safety issue, being able to respond to accidents and traffic congestion, deploy snowplows and road crews, share information on our dynamic message signs, and communicate across the state with our other offices as close as we can get to real time,” says Sherri McGee, Chief of the Information Technology Division at the Nevada Department of Transportation.
A Microsoft shop since day one, the department uses the Microsoft 365 platform as a core pillar in its public safety plan, with employees sharing documents and critical information through Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Differentiating itself from other state departments, the Nevada Department of Transportation leads the charge on a cloud-first initiative backed by its vendors. It set a goal to move everything possible, including capacity-intensive systems and administrative pieces, to the cloud by the end of 2026. To make this vision a reality, the department needed a cloud provider with high availability and ease of use to reduce on-premises datacenter costs, rightsize and scale, and explore growth opportunities while maintaining security, compliance, and business continuity.
“When we started looking into the future, we asked ourselves what we could do to make sure that we’re as agile as possible and positioned for all the new and emerging technologies,” says McGee. “It was a no-brainer to consider Azure for our cloud initiative because we were already heavily invested in Microsoft and it was always there to support us.”
Migrating to Azure and protecting key IT assets
Prior to moving to Azure, the Nevada Department of Transportation managed two datacenters in the state, and about 90 percent of its environment was virtualized using VMware. “We started moving some of those workloads to Microsoft 365, including SharePoint and Exchange, as we evaluated the cloud readiness of each of our internal systems,” says McGee.
In 2018, as it started to manage and deploy Azure resources, the Nevada Department of Transportation’s IT team built a strong foundation of cloud infrastructure services, including Azure ExpressRoute, Azure DNS, and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. The reliability and redundancy of these services enable the department to be confident in building out additional systems and services, now and in the future. Azure training and Microsoft support services were instrumental in helping the IT staff with execution and knowledge transfer, with the department noting that Microsoft and its partners continue to be with them 100 percent of the way. Support from Microsoft also helped the IT team plan to migrate systems that were cloud ready and rewrite other internal applications to be cloud native.
One of the first major systems the department moved to the cloud was its critical Esri geographic information system (GIS) environment—the largest and most complex mapping system in its environment—in collaboration with Microsoft and ROK Technologies, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network. The department also moved its identity and access management system to the cloud using Azure Active Directory, part of Microsoft Entra. With several migration milestones under its belt, the department is shifting focus to moving its database environment, on-premises virtual machines, and select VMware services to Azure.
With a growing number of its key systems in the cloud, the department relies on Microsoft security and monitoring tools, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Log Analytics in Azure Monitor, to help protect all of its data and IT assets. “We have all of our virtual machines set up to receive a Log Analytics workspace that reports to our Defender for Cloud environment so we can identify vulnerabilities and manage the security of all our machines through one portal,” says Dave Hamilton, Systems Team Lead at the Nevada Department for Transportation.
Doing more together: Joining with Commvault for a complete backup and recovery system
Since its establishment in 1917, the Nevada Department of Transportation has been no stranger to teaming up with vendors and external solution providers to deliver the best possible digital environment to its employees. Given the wealth of historical information it collects and creates, reliable backups are essential. For this, the department enjoys a joint solution between Commvault, a market-leading data protection company headquartered in the United States, and Microsoft for highly secure backups with highly scalable storage.
Commvault’s SaaS-delivered data protection solution, Metallic, is available through Azure Marketplace and built on Azure. It’s home to several petabytes’ worth of the department’s server and system data, including SQL databases, high-end CAD and engineering drawings, drone footage, and aerial images, along with its entire Microsoft 365 environment and Azure Storage accounts. The department is temporarily backing up data from a number of GIS machines and a handful of virtual machines in both Metallic and Azure Backup at the same time. “Although we’re backing up through Metallic, we still have different Azure environments so that we can fail over if we need to,” says McGee.
Using Microsoft and Commvault’s Metallic together over the past three years, the department has already cut the time required for backup operations in half, achieved full compliance with backups, and reduced infrastructure costs by 25 percent. Staff who were previously dedicated solely to managing backups and redoing failed backup jobs can rest easy and turn their attention to more impactful, mission-driven work. Notably, the joint solution is also a major driver of the department’s overall business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. “As we continue migrating our systems and applications to Azure, we’re going to be better positioned,” says McGee. “And if we have the need, support from Commvault and Microsoft is just clicks away.”
By implementing Metallic, the Nevada Department of Transportation has been able to securely move to the cloud to modernize its infrastructure, increase interoperability with other state agencies, and better serve the public. Metallic has brought the simplicity, security, and savings the department was looking for to solve its challenges.
Driving toward a new future for the department
Reflecting on its early days with Azure, the Nevada Department of Transportation is highly confident in the comprehensive hybrid cloud platform it’s built to respond to anything that might arise. Whether it’s evaluating new applications or initiatives, including automation, the department can drive change without having to engage other vendors or overcome learning curves. “What I value the most from our Azure deployment is that we’re prepared for anything that might come our way in the near future,” says McGee, noting that the department is currently creating an internal data and analytics program using Azure resources. “Between the Azure data platforms and Microsoft business intelligence tools, we’re set up for success.”
Being a state entity, the department has a long turnaround on its budgeting cycle; specifically, it must start planning technology three years out. “Any big lift and shift was always problematic, and if we weren’t aware of what was coming, it could be six years before we’d address it,” McGee explains. “With Azure, we’re way more agile now, which makes me more comfortable in my role.”
Thankfully, entering a new year and new era in its organization, the Nevada Department of Transportation is thinking differently about the future—in the best way possible. “The future used to be a question mark, but with Azure we now have a solid, robust platform that we can live, deploy, and strategize in where we don’t have those big question marks,” says McGee. “Thinking about how to address challenges in the days and years ahead isn’t as scary as it used to be.”
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“It was a no-brainer to consider Azure for our cloud initiative because we were already heavily invested in Microsoft and it was always there to support us.”
Sherri McGee, Chief of the Information Technology Division, Nevada Department of Transportation
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