Countless municipalities are growing at an exponential rate. The City of Pearland, for example, has seen its community grow from 37,000 citizens to 122,000 citizens over the past two decades. And the Houston suburb is not alone.

With populations booming, there is tremendous pressure to digitize existing processes, develop new citizen services, and scale IT infrastructure to meet increased demand. These pressures have only increased in the wake of COVID-19, as more citizens and staff are reliant on municipal infrastructure and services than ever before.

Meeting these needs is extremely challenging. With limited resources, municipalities don't have the luxury of throwing more people and money at the problem. As cliche as it may sound, they need to find ways to do more with less.

That starts with foundational infrastructure, which must be easy to manage, effortless to scale, and able to accommodate a wide variety of on-premises and cloud-based services.

Pearland and other municipalities are taking advantage of hyperconverged platforms like Cisco HyperFlex. With server, storage, and network components fully integrated, it helps eliminate technology silos and complexity. It can be managed by a single generalist instead of a team of specialists. And it is easily scaled as populations and services grow.

"Making the transition from traditional infrastructure to Cisco HyperFlex has been a great journey for us," said Daniel McGhinnis, CIO of Pearland. "We now have a simplified management platform, on-demand scalability, and better visibility of our data center environment. Most importantly, we have the flexibility we need to support all of the city's operations, 24