DC Water implements Microsoft Azure and PowerApps to cut costs, streamline processes, and better support customers

DC Water’s journey to the cloud did not start with COVID-19, but rather, back in 2010.  The utility’s Director of IT Infrastructure, Joe Edwards, recognized that technology was moving from being on-premises to “this Office 365 thing that was about to happen.” DC Water then set a goal to reduce its data center footprint. “It’s been a 10-year journey getting here,” said Edwards. “Moving to the cloud was not a popular idea back then, so I asked the team to make a commitment to move one thing to the cloud each year.” Before its most recent digital transformation, 90 percent of DC Water’s systems were already in the cloud. The asset work and resource management system was previously running on an inflexible hardware/software combination that drained both time and financial resources.

Utility companies need reliable and secure technology infrastructure to help them serve customers. This technology need increased as COVID-19 quickly impacted in-person operations and service, and the DC Water workforce shifted to working remotely. Employees needed to securely access applications, operational processes, and customer requests when in-person interactions were curtailed.

Saving resources and streamlining processes

DC Water’s IT department worked with ESRI, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to migrate the system to Microsoft Azure. The intended goal of the migration was to provide increased data security for the utility’s application portfolio, reduce lingering operational challenges, eliminate paper processes, and support innovation within the agency. The primary driver in the upgrade to ESRI support was cost, as it helped DC Water to reduce its year-over-year costs from six percent to two percent.

Director of Enterprise Applications, Hari Kurup, was a central player in finding a solution package that would help the utility save capital budget dollars. Kurup and his team worked with ESRI to derive a solution that met the board’s challenge to reduce the utility’s capital and operating expenses. “From an overall system standpoint, cost of maintenance was my biggest concern. I was challenged, along with my team, by the board [to review operating costs],” Kurup said. If DC Water completely migrates all its application servers and databases to an Azure environment, the utility expects to save over $1 million in its capital budget from 2019 to 2023.

A technology solution package that included a secure mobile application option was also important. As Manager of Work and Asset Management, Durmus Cesur saw early value in implementing Azure as part of the utility’s cloud-based application package. “Azure was the best solution with regards to providing continuous availability and by providing the scalability overall, as [DC Water] brings more and more mobile products and applications to the field crews,” Cesur said. Implementing Azure helped DC Water reduce IT operating costs, saving the utility $1.2 million in software costs. With the implementation of Azure and PowerApps, the utility’s full app portfolio is now 97 percent in the cloud.

This transition allows DC Water to make better use of resources, including personnel and finances. Being more cloud-based aligns with the utility’s vision for its employees to be more solutions oriented while serving and supporting residents through public service. DC Water’s Vice President of Information Technology, Tom Kuczynski, sees use technology as an aid to better engage with customers and employees. “We want to move more of our people away from being technologists for the sake of technology and more towards being a service-oriented, solution-focused group,” Kuczynski said.

To date, DC Water used Microsoft Dynamics 365 in a limited capacity, though the utility anticipates expanding its use in both 2021 and 2022. DC Water uses PowerApps to streamline application package offerings. PowerApps “has allowed [the utility] to analyze the data on time and that is being done by senior IT executives [internally],” said Kurup.

Achieving the utility’s business mission and objectives in today’s environment requires implementing IT services in a cyber-secure environment. COVID-19 has increased the mobile workforce as well as moved the security perimeter from the campus network firewall to the mobile end-user. According to the Senior Advisor of Information Security, Nelson Sims, the cyber team was challenged to maintain the risk posture with a dynamically changing cyber-security perimeter. “The implementation of Azure Sentinel as well as other Microsoft security products, such as Defender Advanced Threat Detection, Identity Protection, and Cloud App Security provided the cyber team the ability to monitor, analyze, detect, and respond to cyber events of interest,” Sims said.

Continuing cloud migration to better support stakeholders

So, what does the migration of the last three percent look like? DC Water anticipates moving to an entirely cloud-driven operating model, without any physical buildings or infrastructure, within the next decade, and that starts with making a more flexible application environment. The utility hopes that PowerApps will be the platform to help it achieve that goal.

“We need a capable mobile platform that is more [adaptable] to the utility’s changing needs,” said Kurup. PowerApps will provide both increased support and security for DC Water. The utility hopes to release three to five applications to better serve DC Water customers in the next calendar year, including one that helps the utility to remotely identify service outages so that it can more quickly respond to customer needs. DC Water is prioritizing more predictive analytics, creating dynamic dashboards, and machine learning applications in the coming months. “We have a big emphasis on exposing data to the enterprise so that they can [perform] a lot of these analytics,” said Kuczynski.