Evaluate your organization's needs

Users' needs are the primary determining factor in how your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment should be designed. The ArcGIS Architecture Center has detailed information about system patterns and practices to help you design a system to meet those needs. The sections below highlight some of the most important business needs you should evaluate when planning your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment.

User workflows

The work that people will use ArcGIS Enterprise to complete will inform the capabilities you will need to implement. For example, a base deployment can support mapping, feature analysis, and application hosting. But additional capabilities such as raster analysis or specialized tools for maritime mapping may require additional server roles or server extensions.

Different workflows might also require different licensing. You need to make sure that your organization is has the right number and type of licenses for the work that users need to complete.

System scale

ArcGIS Enterprise can scale to handle a very large number of user requests for maps, apps, and services. The greater the scale of requests, the more computational resources will be required to handle the request load, which affects the design of your deployment. You should anticipate and accommodate user needs through both architectural design and service configuration.

The scale of requests may also affect where you deploy your system. You may need to deploy ArcGIS Enterprise in the cloud to take advantage of highly scalable cloud services and more rapidly deployable cloud virtual machines. For maximum scalability, you may even need to deploy ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes.

Uptime requirements

For some organizations, ArcGIS Enterprise could be unavailable for an entire afternoon with little consequence. For others, it would be catastrophic to be unavailable for even 15 minutes. Determine the proper outage requirements and business dependencies for your ArcGIS Enterprise organization.

The greater the cost of downtime, the more important it is to invest in resiliency. You will need a strategy to minimize data loss and downtime, which might include a need to configure ArcGIS Enterprise to be highly available. Using tiered environments for development, staging, and production enables comprehensive testing of changes that can impact ArcGIS Enterprise.

Uptime requirements also affect when and how you apply configuration changes that require downtime to the organization, such as patches or upgrades. Determine an appropriate frequency and duration for these windows to meet your needs for system maintenance while minimizing disruption to operations. Communicate these maintainence windows with users to manage their availability expectations.

Security posture

Different organizations have different security policies for protecting their systems. Your organization's policies may affect the ArcGIS accounts you use, and how you allow communication over the ports required by ArcGIS Enterprise. Those policies will also affect your implementation of security best practices for Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Data Store.

Resource availability

The ability to fulfill your other organizational needs depends on the resources you have. The people, machines, and budget you have available will affect the size and complexity of the system that you are able to deploy.