Juvare scales critical emergency management applications on Azure, boosts disaster response, resiliency

“Resilient emergency management and response solutions are a top priority for our clients,” says Bryan Kaplan, Chief Information Officer at Juvare. “Juvare uses Microsoft Azure to quickly and reliably ramp up operations and scale workloads to meet global client demand.”

In response to increased demand for its technology solutions and the growth of its global presence, Juvare migrated its application workloads to the Azure cloud platform—and hasn’t looked back. Now, Juvare can scale capacity up and down as needed for its business-critical web applications during times of unpredictable demand to meet the unique requirements of its global client base. 

“Many of our clients have data residency and compliance requirements that we can only address with cloud infrastructure located where those clients operate,” says Kaplan. That made the Azure global infrastructure particularly appealing to Juvare because it offers the most geographies worldwide. “We deliver solutions in four different Azure geography pairs—soon five. By moving workloads to Azure, we can scale up solutions to meet client demands and provide service to clients in whatever global region they need to meet data residency and compliance requirements,” continues Kaplan. 

The company invested in resiliency on behalf of its clients through Azure availability zones and Azure Site Recovery capabilities. With Azure Site Recovery, Juvare can rely on fast, automated disaster recovery and seamless failover testing, which helps the company maintain operational continuity. By deploying application workloads across multiple Azure regions, Juvare can reliably scale service availability to accommodate unexpected infrastructure events and help its clients manage emergency incidents with minimal disruption. 

High-availability design helps Juvare clients sound the alarm with confidence

Juvare’s flagship product, WebEOC, is a streamlined emergency management software as a service (SaaS) solution. It’s used by organizations around the world for critical communications, situational awareness, and operational continuity, which helps empower incident command and response teams during all phases of emergencies. 

Juvare clients use WebEOC’s built-in customization tools and open API to adapt the software to their unique needs and collaborate with agencies requesting access to critical systems and data. By shifting WebEOC workloads to Azure, Juvare makes it easier for its clients to interact seamlessly with most third-party emergency management systems. Because Azure regions offer low-latency network architecture, WebEOC workloads run closer to where clients respond to emergencies and are optimized to respond to large-scale global disasters. 

Whether a client is in the United States or Australia, Juvare needs to provide WebEOC users with the same capacity to manage emergency operations rapidly and without service disruptions. Juvare knows its flagship application is up to the task with high-availability design capabilities like virtual machine resource pool clustering in Azure and services like Azure SQL Database, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Key Vault.

Juvare monitors the health of its global network by drawing real-time performance metrics from the Azure portal. Monitoring usage, traffic, and virtual resource pools helps Juvare proactively identify and respond to usage trends. 

“The beauty of Azure is the simplicity of scaling,” says Walter Sheldon, System Engineer at Juvare. “Previously, it was a major undertaking if we wanted to scale up database capacity. With Azure autoscaling and automated load-balancing capabilities, when we start picking up load, we can quickly rescale our infrastructure and services without downtime.”

Flexible databases for better disaster response

Faced with the risks of operating in volatile and fluid emergency environments, Juvare’s clients trust WebEOC to help them confidently respond to emergencies. At the onset of a natural disaster response, WebEOC usage spikes. Users sign into the WebEOC console, create new incidents, and start to push notifications that mobilize the network of emergency managers, first responders, and disaster response professionals who form the incident command structure.

Juvare responds immediately and automatically to these spikes, spreading requests for more virtual resources across multiple instances. Failed instances are prevented from receiving requests for more capacity. With WebEOC, incident command teams can quickly delegate information on a resilient and responsive network. As more users start sharing data across agencies, business sectors, and geographic boundaries around the clock, Juvare has cloud-based tools to respond. 

Before migrating to Azure, the company found it challenging to predict workload capacity and scale unpredictable client usage across multiple on-premises databases. Juvare migrated its Microsoft SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL Database and can now move a database in and out of an elastic pool for optimal cost and performance flexibility using the Elastic Database feature of SQL Database.

“We couldn’t scale up database infrastructure without some sort of outage with the other cloud providers,” says Kaplan. “We run Azure SQL Database on the back end for WebEOC because of the unique innovations not available from the competition.”

Juvare can use elastic pools to scale multiple databases with unpredictable usage demand, move databases to share transactions and storage space, and eliminate dedicated hardware. The goal of an elastic pool is to ensure that a database gets the performance resources it needs when it needs them. 

“Even if a client is actively managing an incident that takes out their network and they’re unable to contact us directly, we get details from Azure Monitor via Datadog, so we can see changes in real time and respond,” says Sheldon. “We can automatically scale up more virtual machines and monitor how quickly databases grow before reaching maximum capacity.”

Juvare uses Azure SQL Database to achieve better economies of scale and help optimize global workflows. Now, it can mitigate the threat of a client lacking adequate resources during peak usage. And when the situation calls for it, Juvare can scale back to help control costs and manage resources more efficiently. Juvare uses Azure Data Factory—a fully managed, serverless data integration service—to visualize integrated data with built-in, maintenance-free connectors at no added cost, thereby unlocking business insights that drive innovation.

Juvare spins up more global opportunities

Juvare provides reliable, on-demand capacity and products that meet the unique demands of emergency management operations. By shifting its workloads to Azure, the company gained an agile, scalable, and cost-effective platform as a service environment. The move also frees Juvare to deliver more value to clients through faster innovation and better uptime. With the right Azure services in place and plenty more it can adopt as needed, Juvare is focused on developing innovative, cloud-first applications and features that empower communities with more resilient response technology.  

“We’re currently in discussions to deliver WebEOC solutions across additional regions. That’s a testament to how we’ve streamlined our operations with Azure and can quickly spin up solutions around the globe for our clients and partners,” says Kaplan. “It’s an advantage that we can’t get from the other cloud providers.”

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