Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA)
Bus
Vontas Cloud
Vontas OnRoute for CAD/AVL
Vontas OnSite for Yard Mangagement
Automated Fare Collection
“By moving to the Cloud, COTA was able to offload many of the security concerns and other network administration tasks for their Vontas software suite. We had challenges with frequent interruption to service with patching. Now patching is nearly seamless to the agency.”
Jeremy Bartlett
Project Manager, ITS, COTA
Background
The Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) has been supporting transit riders of Ohio since 1974, providing nearly 12 million passenger trips annually across a 562 square mile service area with approximately 3,000 active transit stops and serving Central Ohio for over 50 years. In mid-2023, COTA was looking to upgrade their CAD/AVL software solution to take advantage of new features and migrate the Vontas OnRoute CAD/AVL, OnSite Yard Manager, and Automated Fare Collection Systems to the Cloud, a solution hosted by Vontas, aimed to reduce the agency local IT workload. Vontas has partnered with Microsoft to deploy products to Azure for the cloud solution. This improves availability, scalability, and accessibility of applications, security, and compliance, and most importantly, supports modernized solutions such as COTA’s planned LinkUs transportation and growth initiative.
Challenges
As COTA looks to the future, they plan for at least 50 electric vehicles in the fleet by 2025 and must manage state-of-charge. They also struggled with operating a data center to support the many software applications that help sustain COTA’s sizable operations. Large data center operations also require a robust Cyber Security Team to address the ever-evolving threat landscape and a team of system admins to manage and implement the recurring software patches, which results in a heavy workload for any IT department. Finally, COTA was on a legacy version of OnRoute, and they were eager to take advantage of the new features in version 23.
Solution
As part of the CAD/AVL upgrade project, COTA added the capability to manage State-of-Charge (SOC) on their electric buses and create rules using Intelligent Decision Support (IDS) within the OnRoute software to alert dispatchers when SOC drops below a pre-set level automatically. Other new capabilities include enhanced predictions for real-time vehicle tracking and the ability to create Shuttle service workpieces for events such as the Red, White & Boom fireworks celebration for Independence Day.
“By moving to the Cloud, COTA was also able to offload many of the security concerns and other network administration tasks for their Vontas software suite,” says Jeremy Bartlett, COTA Product Manager ITS. “We had challenges with frequent interruption to service with patching. Now patching is nearly seamless to the agency.” Having Vontas handle their OnRoute quarterly patches and the continual Microsoft ™ patches means a more robust system with near-zero downtime.
Another benefit to the COTA team is that they no longer worry about “touching” each workstation to deploy patches, as the Azure Cloud architecture allows these updates to be done within the hosted environment. Also, one of the solutions in use is Azure Virtual Desktop, which now allows agency staff to log in and work from anywhere they have Internet access. In addition to easier updates, this feature also adds significant value to the agency’s business continuity strategy.
The cloud-hosted environment provides COTA peace of mind from a security and business continuity standpoint. With Azure, they get a 24/7 Network Operations Center and up-to-date security protocols that sync with industry best practices. Vontas and COTA created a robust network architecture using IPSec tunnels to securely connect their facilities and vehicles to Azure. Finally, by deploying Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, business continuity responsibility largely shifts to Vontas, and downtime is nearly non-existent. Azure includes several cost-effective, highly available, and secure services, such as Azure Site Recovery, which allows the agency to replicate their workloads to a secondary Azure Region. This allows the agency to fail over their Vontas products and move them to another physical location so they can focus on their business instead of supporting local infrastructure.
Results
This project included upgrading to the latest version of OnRoute and moving OnSite and OnBoard from on-premises to the Vontas Cloud. A project of this magnitude can be very time-consuming because it impacts so many areas of COTA’s business and so many of COTA’s stakeholders. Despite this, the COTA and Vontas teams completed this upgrade and Cloud migration within six months, with minimal issues and no impact on business operations.
“As COTA now looks forward again, we are looking to implement Vontas OnRoute Supervisor,” according to Jeremy Bartlett, COTA’s Product Manager ITS, “We will also develop more of a SaaS model, 3-5 years down the road for managing our software applications.” Vontas is in sync with these goals as we continue to modernize our OnTransit system architecture to support our many customers best as we drive into the future together.