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Introduction to ArcGIS Enterprise

ArcGIS Enterprise is the foundational software system for GIS, powering mapping and visualization, analytics, and data management. It is the backbone for running the Esri suite of applications and custom applications. ArcGIS Enterprise is integrated with ArcGIS Pro for mapping and authoring and connects with ArcGIS Online to share content between systems.

Collaboration and flexibility are central to ArcGIS Enterprise, allowing you to organize and share your work on any device, anywhere, at any time.

ArcGIS Enterprise allows you to control your deployment. It can be run on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Kubernetes, and it supports small single-machine deployments as well as large multimachine deployments in the following:

  • Public cloud infrastructure
  • Private cloud infrastructure
  • On-premises infrastructure using physical or virtualized hardware

This flexibility unlocks advanced capabilities to support your organization's needs, such as tracking real-time data, performing big data analysis, raster analytics, hosting image services, and data science workflows. Your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment can also be connected or disconnected from the open internet and can be configured to prevent data loss and downtime in the event of disaster.

Base deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise

Software components

The four components of ArcGIS Enterprise work together to provide comprehensive functionality for web mapping, image exploitation, real-time data handling, large-volume batch analysis, and spatial data science:

  • ArcGIS Server powers mapping and analysis in your GIS, including several specialized server roles, and scales dynamically to support traffic.
  • The ArcGIS Enterprise portal is the central hub where users create, share, and manage maps, apps, and spatial data and share them with collaborators.
  • ArcGIS Data Store provides data storage for the hosting server used with your deployment.
  • ArcGIS Web Adaptor integrates ArcGIS Server and Portal for ArcGIS with your existing web servers and your organization's security infrastructure.

A base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment is the minimum setup, combining all four ArcGIS Enterprise components. See Base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment for details.

After the base deployment is installed, you can begin using ArcGIS Enterprise, or configure additional capabilities.

ArcGIS Enterprise licensing

ArcGIS Enterprise is licensed per user and by system capacity. Users are licensed based on user types, providing secure access to information and content creation capabilities. See User types, roles, and privileges for detailed information on user types and capabilities.

ArcGIS Enterprise server roles

ArcGIS Enterprise can be licensed in a variety of roles, depending on the capabilities you want to enable for your deployment. ArcGIS Enterprise server licensing roles define the capabilities of each ArcGIS Enterprise server machine or site. For a full description of options, see ArcGIS Enterprise server roles.