SNAP Retailer LocatorSNAP Retailer LocatorJonathan Benett – IT Program Manager

Shelly Pierce – SNAP Program Manager

USDA Food and Nutrition Service

January 20, 2011

SNAP OverviewSNAP Overview

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Formerly known as the Food Stamp Program

More than 43 million participants

Over 216,000 Retailers accept SNAP benefits

Retailer Locator Business CaseRetailer Locator Business Case

Make it easy for participants to find retailers

We are providing information to the public that was previously unavailable and doing so on demand 24x7

We are increasing the transparency of the FNS mission

Retailer Locator FactsRetailer Locator Facts

SNAP RL was the first federal application to be hosted in the portion of the Amazon Cloud managed by ESRI

Largest Retailer Locator on the Internet

Built using ESRI ArcGIS Server Enterprise Advanced 10 and FLEX API

Usage◦

Averaging more than 20k visitors per month◦

93% increase in monthly traffic since July

AWS Cloud BenefitsAWS Cloud Benefits

Quick ramp up to accommodate surges in traffic usage on demand◦

Initial uncertainty to the number of people who would be accessing the site given 41 million on the program and thousands of state eligibility workers◦

Launch highlighted by Secretary Vilsack during his National Nutrition Conference keynote address along with first lady Michele Obama, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and HHS Secretary.◦

Key component of “We Welcome SNAP Benefits” media event.

Cost SavingsCost Savings

FNS saved money and resources that would have been used to purchase new servers, support operations and maintenance ◦

Estimated $250k - $350k to build, host, and maintain similar environment internally◦

Actual cost included modest setup fee and minimal monthly hosting fees

Implementation & MaintenanceImplementation & Maintenance

Implementation was very smooth!◦

After the application was created, it was staged in a test environment where FNS performed extensive UAT◦

After successful testing and a few bug fixes it was placed into the production AWS Cloud environment

Monthly maintenance◦

Each month, FNS transfers an update file of all the new and removed retailers to Production

Cloud ConsiderationsCloud Considerations

Security and privacy were two top concerns when considering hosting in the cloud◦

FNS has no PII or sensitive data hosted in the cloud◦

By hosting in the AWS Cloud (and not in our data center) we are increasing the security of our core applications

The biggest challenge thus far has been around monitoring and usage statistics reporting

By publishing our data through a consumable web service we will provide the capability to integrate our data with other applications