Hong Kong is a densely populated city and most of the land is hilly terrain. Many buildings and roads have to be constructed along hillsides, resulting in a large number of steep man-made slopes. Under the influence of seasonal rainstorms, landslide has always been one of the most common natural hazards in Hong Kong.
Transitioning to Cloud-Based Landslide Monitoring
To better manage landslide risks, the Geotechnical Engineering Office (GEO) under the Civil Engineering and Development Department (CEDD) had developed Geotechnical Information Infrastructure (GInfo), which is a central information hub of all collected slope and geotechnical data pertinent to the management of landslide risk and geotechnical control in Hong Kong. To keep pace with technological advancement, GEO has recently revamped GInfo into a 3D mapping system and migrated it from on-premises servers to a more resilient cloud platform. This integrated web-based platform allows sharing of 3D data among Government departments and practitioners. It also allows general public to access to slope information and useful geospatial information.
To support GInfo, CEDD required a secure, scalable and cost-effective Cloud Solution capable of handling large data volumes and traffic while complying with government security and regulatory standards. CEDD also wanted to leverage cloud automation, monitoring and backup to improve system efficiency and reliability.
Streamlining Operations with Cloud Infrastructure
CEDD partnered with HKT to plan, execute and manage an AWS cloud infrastructure for GInfo. HKT utilized its extensive expertise in cloud migration, security and managed services to assist CEDD in achieving its objectives and overcoming challenges. The migrated GInfo platform is well protected against DDoS attacks by integrating Amazon CloudFront with AWS WAF. By moving on-premises databases to Amazon RDS and DynamoDB, CEDD can focus on core services since these managed databases simplify setup, operations and scaling in the cloud while providing high availability, performance and security for geospatial data storage. HKT also provides managed services, assisting CEDD with Amazon CloudWatch monitoring of cloud resources and responding appropriately to any issues.
CEDD will continue enhancing the Slope Safety Management System and preparing for extreme weather impacts to further reduce landslide fatalities in Hong Kong.