The Ever-Improving Online Services and Security of L.A.'s City Websites

Cloud-hosted LAcity.org went live in January, and since then the city of Los Angeles’ government has set about improving site functionality—particularly where it comes to digital citizen engagement and service delivery.

With nearly 4 million residents scattered across 469 square miles, enough to fill the Rose Bowl 100 times over, reaching decentralized users through their mobile devices is key.

The city government was no stranger to the Great Recession, losing 40 percent of its municipal workforce since 2008—it currently stands around 40,000 employees—so it was forced to make smart choices about which platform to invest in for maximum citizen reach.

“Cities want to convert you into some service, so it’s all about personalizing the visit and putting that in context based on what you’ve just visited to offer the next thing for you to do,” Todd Akers, Acquia public sector vice president, told Route Fifty in an interview. “Many of them will use products from us to capture info and have a profile kept about you with a tag if you’re anonymous that knows exactly who you are based on your IP or previous visits.”

The Boston-based software-as-a-service company implemented Los Angeles’ Drupal platform—a low cost, open-source replacement for the city’s 10-plus-year-old content management system.

LAcity.org is about 60 percent faster and has witnessed a 26 percent traffic increase, around 60 percent from mobile. The city also uses the platform to manage services like ticketing and towing, trash collection and water and sewer.

Major websites like the Department of Transportation’s were migrated as fast as possible with Acquia training city employees how to do the remainder.

“You don’t want to move old content into a new format, so it’s a great opportunity to clean house by review—a lengthy but important effort,” said Ted Ross, Los Angeles Information Technology Agency general manager. “Certain things can’t be replicated in a mobile responsive environment.”

Current efforts include email campaigns and integration of the city’s 311 customer relationship management system, as quite a few sites are still not on the central platform.

Because cities like Los Angeles continually offer more services over the Web, pattern matching helps them drive users paying their water bill on the platform toward restaurants or a Chamber of Commerce event they might like.

The more personalized environments a city provides, the longer they’ll keep citizens engaged while increasing the likelihood they’ll return. More services make sites “stickier,” said Chris Stone, Acquia products and development senior vice president.

“There’s a huge shift toward how do you as a user get your control back on the Web,” he said. “Drupal allows you to generate trusted content, and you can opt in and out of those environments—giving more control back to you.”

But that doesn’t do local government much good if its sites are always down, which is where Amazon Web Services cloud-hosting comes in. Migration to the cloud improves uptime.

At a recent Los Angeles Innovation & Performance Commission meeting, a large number of attendees began streaming on the platform causing a performance decline. Acquia noticed the degradation immediately and solved the issues within minutes, where once the site would’ve gone down.

Similarly, during the Bay Area Rapid Transit strike in October 2013, the San Francisco regional rail network’s website saw 10 times the traffic, but because it was sitting in the cloud, it scaled and never went down.

“Public transit is religion out there, so if that goes down while you’re on strike you’ve got an issue,” Ross said. “Your website is as important a platform as any other in a disaster, and we’re in earthquake country.”

Ross is the first to admit government websites generally are “not great,” which is why Los Angeles is committed to improving cybersecurity to be “best in class” in edition to all its other platform enhancements.

The city is in the process of making all its websites hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) with encryption, as well as adding extra authentication.

“As you make sites high profile you open them up as prime targets for attack,” Akers said.

There hasn’t been a widespread citizen outcry for local government to secure their digital assets, Ross said, but from “a small minority of very vocal resident experts.”

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s second executive directive, months after entering office, developed cybersecurity protocols. The directive operationalized a Cyber Intrusion Command Center in early 2014 for 24/7 detection of network breaches across all departments.

“If someone is attacking LAX, the whole city knows and can coordinate a defense response,” Ross said. “We’re a high-value target being the second-largest city in the country.”

Los Angeles works with the FBI, Secret Service and federal Homeland Security and Defense departments for “a much deeper bench” to secure water and power infrastructure, he added.

Every week, the city encounters cyberattacks that departments with security teams, including the Los Angeles Police Department, discuss.

Acquia recently partnered with security-as-a-service provider CloudFlare, a relative newcomer on the distributed denial of service (DDoS) scene, to power its Cloud Edge web application firewall. Before that, Acquia would recommend third parties for protection against bot attacks and hackers.

Bots comprise most cyberattacks on the city’s websites, so Acquia is working to track them, analyze them and predict future attacks. Scanning technology is also in the works to flag potential site vulnerabilities.

“I don’t think the city of Los Angeles is attacked by China,” Stone said. “From a bot perspective, it’s all about keeping public services online.”