Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen) is the government agency responsible for national and county public roads in Norway. Its remit includes the construction and maintenance of the road network, as well as vehicle inspection, driver training and road safety. With a vision to create a more intelligent, safe and connected transportation ecosystem, the agency wanted to modernize its IT infrastructure to support innovative initiatives like intelligent transport systems and expanded public data access.
Bridging the gap between legacy IT and modern demands
Like many government agencies, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration was challenged by outdated legacy IT systems and processes. Its traditional Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based approach, siloed teams and fragmented IT led to unacceptably long lead times for new services, hindering the agency’s ability to respond quickly to the evolving needs of the Norwegian public and the transportation infrastructure. As a result, the agency was facing a growing need to deliver IT infrastructure that matches the speed and agility of public cloud providers while delivering it with requirements such as security, resiliency, cost effectiveness and architectural control that private clouds provide.
“We worked in silos, had long change processes and long service delivery times. We realized we needed to change and work more like a public cloud provider,” says Ketil Bårdsnes, team leader for central infrastructure, Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
Modernizing operations with VMware Cloud Foundation
Bårdsnes and his team started to explore options to achieve a cloud-like operating model, accelerate service delivery and automate key processes. Having already used VMware solutions for many years, selecting the Broadcom private cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation, was a logical next step. It enabled the organization to offer comparable services and experiences to public cloud providers, but with the added control and security of an on-premises environment.
“We had to transform our on-premises infrastructure delivery to resemble a cloud-like approach. This is why we have adopted VMware Cloud Foundation,” says Benny Markussen, an IT infrastructure architect at the agency.
With the deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation, the agency took the opportunity to boost agility by transitioning from traditional ITIL processes to autonomous teams responsible for delivering new services.
Automation and accelerated service delivery
Since deploying VMware Cloud Foundation, Norwegian Public Roads Administration is now able to automate infrastructure provisioning and management. This has significantly reduced service delivery times by more than 50% as well as supported the rapid deployment of new applications and services, including those related to intelligent transport systems.
The solution has enabled the introduction of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), empowering application teams to provision IT resources on demand as per their needs, further accelerating development and deployment cycles. Bårdsnes’ team also offers Kubernetes as a service–running containerized workloads using both Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service–enabling more frequent and agile application updates, which are key to supporting the agency’s expanding use of modern, cloud native applications.
The automation and operations capabilities extend beyond infrastructure provisioning. “VMware Cloud Foundation has introduced automation at all levels, freeing up significant time. We can automate application deployments, including associated firewall configurations. Our internal customers are provided with dashboards to monitor the health and metrics of their applications, enhancing transparency and control,” says Bårdsnes.
Building a smarter future with data
Norwegian Public Roads Administration collects vast amounts of data from IoT and edge devices and uses this data to improve operations and services. VMware Cloud Foundation provides the robust and scalable platform needed to support these data-intensive initiatives. The solution will also support the agency’s plans to make the data publicly available to create valuable new services. For example, real-time traffic data could be used by commuters while anonymized historical data could be used by urban planners.
“We collect a lot of data and want to start applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to our data analytics. VMware Cloud Foundation provides the ideal platform to support these advanced analytics workloads and make them available in a simple and consumable way,” says Markussen.
Norwegian Public Roads Administration’s journey with VMware Cloud Foundation is ongoing. Looking ahead, the agency plans to continue developing self-service solutions and expanding its use of VMware based technologies that not only allow for the benefits of both public and private cloud, but also give it the ability to move workloads between environments seamlessly. It has laid a strong foundation for future innovation and is now better equipped to leverage data, embrace new technologies and deliver valuable transportation services to the public.
