By Brenda Germundson and Kerry Best

Can local governments improve the overall citizen experience, and at the same time increase workforce productivity? Yes, and cities are doing it now. Providing on-demand access to innovative services, whenever and wherever, opens up a whole new world to local government.

"We had a hard time meeting constituent and customer expectations," says Jorge Pazos, chief information officer, City of Melrose. "Melrose residents go home, and on the train they can open up their iPad, they can program what's going to be on their DVR that night, they can rearrange their Netflix queue, do banking, and pay bills, and then they come to municipal government, and it was like going back to the 1970s."

By adopting a cloud-based solution and strategy, local governments are fundamentally changing the way services are delivered and consumed. Tangible operational and financial benefits aren't just a bonus either -reducing costs and improving organizational agility make a big impact.

One such example involves the City of Melrose. Located in Massachusetts, the City of Melrose implemented a secure multitenant cloud that not only provides IT services to its own municipality, but can also host applications for neighboring communities. The move to cloud has allowed the city to reduce its data center footprint and even transform it into a potential source of revenue.

The time required to deploy applications went from several days or even weeks to a few hours or even minutes, and data management was improved.

"Due to the new system, the City of Melrose is looking at a 40 percent de-duplication rate on their production data, which translates into 40 percent less disk to be bought and 40 percent less data to be managed and archived," says Pazos.

The physical space required for the data center decreased as a result of virtualizing under the blade system, which resulted in less energy consumption as less air-conditioning was required.

"We did the math just the other day actually," says Pazos, "and we figured out that if we were to rack all of that stuff in the old-fashioned way, it wouldn't fit in the room, but now space is not an issue."

Finally, they are now able to effectively scale as new applications are added or as they expand services to new communities, which truly sets Melrose apart from other cities.

Are you interested in learning more about how Melrose and other local governments are using cloud solutions and strategies to transform their communities? Click here or on the image below to reserve your copy of our cloud resources for local government, as well as a copy of the complete compilation of this blog series when complete.

From the Cisco white paper: "Cloud and Local Government: The Business Value" (2013)

And stay tuned to the Cisco Government blog for the next installment of the cloud for local government blog series.

To read this blog in Spanish, click here.  For Portuguese, click here.