The Municipal Government of Santiago de Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, serves 2.2 million residents with data-driven public services in healthcare, education, property management, and payments. As part of a cloud-enabled strategy to strengthen public service delivery, the city aimed to break through more than five years of stalled modernization and accelerate the delivery of agile, uninterrupted services that directly benefit citizens.

The city needed to modernize an aging VMware infrastructure that had increased operational costs, slowed service deployment, and limited innovation. A core requirement was to migrate to AWS without disrupting operations while maintaining 75% of existing workloads on VMware preserving stability for critical systems citizens depend on, while unlocking the scalability and agility of the cloud to improve service quality and responsiveness.

The migration needed completion in weeks, not months, while preserving VMware workloads, complying with Colombian public sector regulations, and avoiding service interruptions for essential programs.

It coincided with the peak demand of the annual property tax payment process, one of the city’s most important revenue collection events where downtime would directly affect thousands of residents’ ability to make payments and access municipal benefits.

The solution also had to enable hybrid cloud operations to simplify future modernization, ensuring ongoing improvements in citizen-facing services.

Zero downtime for public services, including uninterrupted execution of the property tax payment process at peak demand, healthcare platforms, and education systems. The IT team can now provision new workloads in under 24 hours, improving responsiveness to citizen needs. The hybrid-ready setup accelerates the rollout of new public programs, enhancing accessibility and reliability for 2.2 million residents.

• 3 weeks to complete migration, recovering from a 5-year delay in modernization.
• Kept 75% of mission-critical workloads on VMware—avoiding refactoring and enabling a three-week cutover with zero citizen-facing downtime.
• Deployment time for new public services reduced by over 85% (from multiple weeks to <24 hours), accelerating citizen access to critical platforms in health, education, and tax services.
• Operational cost reduction of 25% in infrastructure management, enabling reinvestment in modernization initiatives to deliver better solutions and enhance the citizen experience.
• Improved system availability to 99.99% during peak public service demand, ensuring uninterrupted access for more than 150,000 residents during the property tax payment period.
• <3 ms network latency via Direct Connect, enhancing the performance of online portals and applications used daily by residents.