Most traditional IT infrastructure teams are faced with the necessity of periodically updating their hardware stack. It’s true whether they use colocation or in-house data centers. The servers, storage, networking, security and data protection equipment and licensing all become outdated and are usually replaced in a cycle every three to five years. Hardware refresh events are often the change events...
The 2018 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (GartnerIOCS) was held at the Venetian in Las Vegas in early December. Nearly 3,000 attendees, including members of the Expedient team, participated and learned about new trend analysis in cloud and IT infrastructure. Guided by the latest impartial Gartner research, and input from infrastructure & operations leaders from companies in...
Nearly 50,000 technology professionals descended upon 6 convention centers in Las Vegas for this year’s AWS re:Invent conference to connect with peers and cloud experts for collaboration and learning about Amazon Web Services (AWS). Several team members from Expedient attended the week-long event to meet with partners and customers. The team participated in a variety of educational events including keynotes,...
One of the oldest and most well-known sayings in IT is “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” The meaning is simple. Many IT leaders choose to play it safe when selecting vendors or products. By buying well-recognized brands, they feel that they are making a safe decision that won’t get them fired. Sadly, the same thinking is still prevalent...
As data growth accelerates, finding smart and efficient ways to store, manage, access, and secure business-critical data becomes increasingly important. While keeping pace with constant data growth, a file storage solution must support the evolving needs of your business while meeting the rising expectations of your enterprise users who expect powerful search functionality delivered through an easy-to-use, web-based...
What are the key decision points for selecting your cloud computing platform? It’s a trick question. Few organizations can adopt a single cloud platform to solve all their computing needs. Even small organizations who run pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments find themselves using multiple cloud platforms to deliver the applications they need to support their products and services to generate...
How to Mitigate Cybersecurity Risk As part of cybersecurity awareness month, IDG recently released its 2018 U.S. State of Cybercrime Study. The study underscored the reality that businesses of all sizes still struggle to effectively protect data and critical IT infrastructure from various cybersecurity threats – both external and internal. While most companies are steadily increasing the amount...
WHAT IS GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulation (effective May 2018) is a law designed to strengthen the data protection rights of individuals within the European Union (EU). GDPR applies not only to businesses located in the EU, but also to businesses that offer goods and services to individuals located in the EU. The expansive purview of the law...
Expedient Enterprise Cloud is VMware Cloud Verified! Expedient continues to be recognized as a leading provider of VMware-based cloud infrastructure. The company was recently named a VMware Cloud Verified partner, joining an exclusive group as one of just 8 infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers in the U.S to achieve this status. The designation signifies that Expedient customers...
More than 9,000 CIOs and IT leaders converged on Orlando, FL this week to attend Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 to improve IT strategy with knowledge gained from global business thought leaders and leading technology industry research. I’m happy to say, we weren’t disappointed! Throughout the week, several trends were ever-present including: Digital Transformation – Investment to exploit the unique...
Disaster recovery is usually a subset of activities around a larger business continuity initiative in an organization. For this article, we will describe disaster recovery, or DR, as the activities required to restore availability of the computing environment to the organization. IT teams inside organizations have been practicing DR for years, often by implementing do-it-yourself (DIY) DR in the form...
In a recent Gartner survey of risk, audit, and compliance executives, cloud computing ranked as the top risk concern. More specifically, these executives emphasized the potential of unauthorized access to sensitive or restricted information stored in the cloud, and the possibility that cloud-hosted data could be rendered inaccessible due to a service disruption on the cloud provider’s end. While...
Designing Expedient Enterprise Cloud September 2018 marks a milestone for Expedient. The release of Expedient Enterprise Cloud is the culmination of thousands of hours in evaluations, education, training, beta testing, product roadmap shaping, advisory boards, design sessions, and acceptance testing from Expedient Support and Delivery engineers. As I reflect on the past several years of work, I want...
In 2013, Pat Gelsinger walked on stage at a capacity VMworld general session and introduced a vision for the next evolution of virtualization: the Software-Defined Data Center. A model where infrastructure provisioning would be disaggregated from the underlying hardware and defined simply by code. At the time, most people in the packed Moscone Center had very little concept of...
We all know that recovery planning for disasters is an important task for organizations of all sizes and industries. This can be a time-consuming and complicated process, but many organizations do eventually create a plan that meets their recovery objectives. “Ahh, now we can sleep better at night!” these IT and business leaders tell themselves. The DR plan is...
Many IT strategists today are promoting the simplification of IT as a path to better business outcomes. The consensus among them is that complexity can hurt business. Siegel + Gale’s Global Simplicity Index says the world’s top 200 companies lose about 10% of their profits every year due to excess complexity. The SAP whitepaper “Leading Your Organization out of...
The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became effective May 25, 2018, and with it came a flurry of privacy policy notification updates from websites, other digital publishers, and more, all of whom are tasked with ensuring that any sensitive user data collected on EU residents – even as a sub-processor – is handled and processed according to...
IT strategy is more complex than ever, thanks to all the software as a service (SaaS), cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and multiple platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings available today. In the past few years, cloud-first strategies proliferated resulting in hybrid IT environments in which some computing workloads were outsourced and others were not. Reasons for a cloud-first strategy often included...
With a success strategy focused on organic growth, Expedient has expanded from two dozen employees and one data center in 2003 to now comprise nearly 300 employees and 11 data centers in seven cities, all of which offer award-winning infrastructure as a service and managed services. Our President & COO Shawn McGorry talked with the Pittsburgh Business Times about...
Off-balance-sheet operating lease financing is used by many companies to manage spend on IT infrastructure. Many companies use this vehicle, also known as an operating lease, to flatten IT infrastructure spend and minimize risk of asset ownership. But the leasing rules are changing. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board are eliminating off-balance sheet leases for...
The Healthcare Industry’s Requirements for a Cloud Service Provider While data security and availability is imperative for any organization, it is especially true for those in the healthcare industry, whose access to personally identifiable information (PII) such as birth dates and social security numbers requires strong data security measures – and can present security concerns and complexities as these...
On a recent episode of data center podcast The Hot Aisle, Mark Thiele of Apcera talked about the dangerous belief among some business leaders that IT is created to reduce the cost of IT. Sounds ridiculous, but it happens in so many organizations that this belief deserves more attention. Certainly, a good IT department has a responsibility for efficiency. But if...
Information technology organizations have been pursuing business-IT alignment for as long as businesses have used computers. Wikipedia defines business-IT alignment as: A dynamic state in which a business organization can use information technology to achieve business objectives – typically improved financial performance or marketplace competitiveness. Some definitions focus more on outcomes, like the ability of IT to produce business value,...
Celebrating Expedient Day in Pittsburgh! Customers, local dignitaries, and business leaders joined Expedient in Pittsburgh on January 25, 2018 for the public reveal of the Nova Place (formerly Allegheny Center Mall) data center expansion. Hundreds of guests enjoyed tours of the data center and even more joined us for food, drink, and networking with vendor partners – including Cloud...
When we meet with companies to discuss the value of migrating from traditional on-premises IT to cloud infrastructure, business stakeholders and financial teams are often skeptical. Historically, these stakeholders have viewed the IT budgets and project plans in terms of previous budgets and transactions. When companies previously bought hardware, software and implementation services, the shopping list was simple: Capital...
TIC Gums is using Expedient’s On-Site Private Cloud with Disaster Recovery as a Service to meet several business objectives, including the modernization and migration of its aging IT infrastructure and the creation and implementation of a disaster recovery plan and solution. By placing an Expedient private cloud point of delivery (POD) on-site at TIC Gums’ premises, TIC Gums is...
