Anyone with an online life that includes the likes of Amazon or Google or Apple has heard of cloud computing. But what and how much information a municipal government should have stored on a rented slice of servers in a building somewhere, as opposed to maintaining its own, is a question right at home with the thorny tech issues covered in the recent Next City feature, “Welcome to the Open Data Movement’s Turbulent Teenage Years.”

Similar to a utility like the electricity grid, cloud computing is more efficient because it shares resources between multiple users and gains benefits through the economy of scale. And cities have embraced the cloud to save money and create apps that engage citizens. But so far many governments have been reluctant to move crucial backups to the cloud. (Montana and Idaho have implemented a somewhat hybrid solution, giving some data center space in Helena, Montana and Salem, Oregon to each other so that each state has a backup, some 700-odd miles away linked by a 10Mbps connection.)

Asheville, North Carolina, however, has taken a leap, recently becoming one of the first cities to use a hybrid cloud computing system for its disaster-recovery systems.

“Every time I ask about giving up control,” says Jonathan Feldman, the city’s CIO, “nobody can give me a good answer. I say, ‘What are you giving up?’ ‘Well, you know, our data … it’s out there.”

For Feldman, who’s been with the city for a decade, moving some of Asheville’s backups to the cloud was a no-brainer. For one thing, the city’s backups were on the same street, just a few blocks down from the city hall and the main servers. That didn’t provide much in the way of redundancy: A fire or storm that damaged the main servers would likely have damaged the backups too.

Asheville’s plan to build a disaster recovery center as part of an annexation and a new fire station fell apart when the annexation did. “There was no way we were going to build a standalone data center and we just didn’t have a suitable location,” Feldman explains.

“We went to the marketplace … all of a sudden, I got this pitch in my email, and I was like, ‘wow, this [software] is exactly what I was talking about.’”

He’d been pitched by CloudVelox, a Santa Clara, California-based startup that specializes in disaster recovery.

“We felt like it was a little risky, because [CloudVelox] was a startup, but in the world of government, we manage risk every day,” Feldman says. “We started thinking about how we could use this startup to not have to build a data center.”

A disaster recovery center is by definition redundant. Redundancy is good from a public safety standpoint, Feldman says, but terribly expensive, especially for a small city like Asheville (pop. 87,000), where the city’s IT budget is less than 2 percent of its overall budget. And the backups sit idle much of the year. “It’s a terrible use of taxpayer funds,” Feldman says.

Asheville’s cloud disaster response system can run a water maintenance and management system, as well as a point-of-sale system backup for the U.S. Cellular Center, Asheville’s 7,600-seat downtown arena, so the arena can process credit cards. “We could lose … $20,000 in an evening if people can’t buy beer or popcorn,” Feldman says.

The system is designed to kick in during major events (snow, tornadoes) as well as minor ones (a burst pipe in city hall). “It’s always something you’re not expecting,” Feldman says.

He says that while some IT guys have an emotional response to outsourcing systems (“We don’t trust the cloud, because it’s not us”), he thinks the cloud is the future for cities. Just as it makes more sense to go to the surgeon who’s done 150 similar operations, “you want a really experienced person doing your security. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they get attacked every day and they’re good at it.

“I think once everybody’s [using the cloud], they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s so obvious.’”

Rachel Kaufman is Next City's senior editor, responsible for our daily journalism. She was a longtime Next City freelance writer and editor before coming on staff full-time. She has covered transportation, sustainability, science and tech. Her writing has appeared in Inc., National Geographic News, Scientific American and other outlets.

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