The 2019 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (GartnerIOCS) was held at The Venetian in Las Vegas the week of December 9, 2019. Nearly 3,500 attendees, including members of the Expedient team, participated and learned about new trend analysis in cloud and IT infrastructure. The Expedient team regularly attends conferences in order to remain current with the role...
Nearly every cloud provider and data center hardware/software vendor these days promises lower IT management overhead, freeing up IT staff to work on more important projects. Are these providers really making IT simpler and more efficient? Let’s get specific by taking a closer look at a single use case - VMware-based Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC). How does EEC help...
More than 60,000 technology professionals descended upon 6 convention centers in Las Vegas for this year’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference to connect with peers and cloud experts, share knowledge, and learn best practices. Central Registration at AWS re:Invent 2019. Several team members from Expedient attended the week-long event to meet with partners and...
I recently attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCan North America 2019 in San Diego. The four-day conference was filled with keynotes, breakout sessions, and networking events focused around all things cloud native. Here are my key takeaways from the show: Security is an unsolved problem There were tons of security vendors at the show with a lot of overlap...
Shortly after we announced Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC) at VMworld 2018, 451 Research published its initial Market Insight report on the groundbreaking cloud, which noted that: “Companies like Expedient are at the coal face of enterprise and cloud right now, and pulling out the rewards therein. Early recognition of where the trends were headed and adoption of key new...
For a second consecutive year, I attended the Juniper NXTWORK 2019 conference in Las Vegas, NV, along with more than 1,000 other participants to discuss our business relationship with Juniper and learn about new technologies on the horizon. The convergence of security with the entire network infrastructure is a key focus of Juniper Networks’ forward-looking...
When IT disaster strikes every moment counts. Because of this, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions that automate total network failover and orchestrate application recovery will create a competitive advantage for your business. Push Button DR powered by Zerto is one such solution. As Expedient has offered DRaaS solutions to its clients since 2011, we were well aware...
Is your organization facing a server or data center hardware refresh in the next 18 months? If so, you may be considering purchasing replacement equipment to put in your primary internal data center or colocation facility. You may also be considering enterprise cloud infrastructure as an alternative. The most common reasons that organizations choose cloud may appeal to you: ...
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Security, Trust, Assurance and Risk (STAR) registry publicly increases trust among cloud service providers (CSPs). The CSA STAR Program encompasses key principles of transparency, rigorous auditing, and harmonization of standards. Expedient now demonstrates its adherence to security and privacy best practices through its registration with CSA STAR. CSPs registered with the CSA STAR Program...
This ExpertROI® Spotlight report by IDC provides a deep-dive analysis of the Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC) platform and explores the vision that Expedient shared with VMware to create a cloud services offering that enables businesses to leverage existing VMware investments and expertise. This shared vision and partnership created a unique cloud platform (EEC) that provides a much-needed alternative path...
Faster development, faster delivery, faster return… The value of cloud native approaches is indisputable in today’s always-on digital economy, but the path to successful implementation is unclear for businesses burdened with legacy IT environments and technical debt. As this challenge comes up frequently in conversations with clients and prospects, we decided to dig deeper into the subject with independent analyst...
We recently expanded our portfolio of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions to provide clients and prospects with more flexibility and choice when it comes to replication options for computing workloads. This diversified DRaaS approach is based on the reality that most organizations utilize myriad workloads that each require different levels of protection. Our multi-tiered approach also...
Gartner is a leading research and advisory company, equipping leaders and their teams in major business functions with the insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities today and tomorrow. Gartner IT Symposium / XPo™ 2019 highlights the breadth of advisory services the company offers. Gartner bills its IT Symposium/XPo™ 2019 as the world’s...
To take advantage of the inherent benefits of the Cloud (e.g. reduced IT costs, scalability, flexibility, availability), it has become commonplace to migrate legacy applications and business processes to the hyperscale cloud. While some organizations have found success with this strategy, moving to the hyperscale cloud has introduced new problems for many businesses, such as: IT Skills Gap – Running...
At VMworld 2019, VMware encouraged attendees to “Make Your Mark.” The Expedient team answered that call as the VMware Americas Cloud Partner of the Year with its first ever sponsorship of the event, an exhibition booth in the Solutions Exchange, multiple educational session presentations, client case studies, and technology testimonials. More than twenty Expedient team members traveled to San...
Can Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Simplify Mergers and Acquisitions? Mergers and acquisitions are common in most industries these days. While companies employ many different strategies to integrate newly acquired companies, we’ve found that the companies that leverage Information Technology (IT) as a strategic asset during the M&A process typically enjoy much smoother corporate integrations than those that don’t. We commonly...
Persistent Volume Options for K8s Storage Kubernetes was originally developed as a platform for stateless applications with persistent data stored elsewhere. As the project matured, many organizations wanted to also begin leveraging it for their stateful applications and so persistent volume management was added. At first, this was generally provisioned using cloud-provider-specific interfaces that linked directly to underlying block...
VMworld is back in the Bay and the Expedient team is busier than ever! This year we have 5 sessions, booth duties with awesome Expedient demos focusing on our Enterprise Cloud product, multi-cloud management product, Push Button DR (DRaaS), and Backup as a Service, a Cube interview with our partner Cohesity, and an EcoCast with ActualTech Media....
The cloud provider landscape is complex and constantly evolving. To meet the performance demands of legacy compute workloads and to control cloud costs, many businesses are opting for hosted enterprise clouds instead of the mainstream hyperscale options provided by AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. During our recent webinar, I was joined by Carl Brooks, Analyst with 451 research,...
How strategic is your IT team? Ask two questions to get a sense of your strategic value: Ask the employees in your organization whether they feel like Information Technology makes the organization run more effectively. As an IT professional, ask yourself whether your IT team helps your organization get the most out of its critical business applications. If...
For years, IT infrastructure provisioning was a manual process. This made sense when deploying a new server meant placing a purchase order, waiting for gear to arrive, racking the new gear, and then finally applying a bespoke configuration to support a new workload. However, now that most workloads are moving to the cloud, new VMs can be provisioned in...
The Business Case for Organizational Resilience More than 3,500 IT risk and security professionals congregated outside of Washington, D.C., recently to attend the 2019 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit to gain the latest insights on evolving security trends and the ever-changing threat landscape. I was among the team from Expedient who were there to meet with vendors,...
Backups and Disaster Recovery: What’s the Difference? Modern IT departments need to be able to protect their mission-critical data and quickly respond in the event of a problem in their environment. This capability hinges on maintaining a strategy for both backups and disaster recovery. These two capabilities are often conflated with each other but this blog post will...
Hyperscale vs. Enterprise Cloud This is the second installment of a two-part blog post on the difference between “smart” and “dumb” applications. Part 2 covers the characteristics of “dumb applications” that are best suited to run on “smart hardware.” To learn more about “smart applications” (aka cloud native applications) running on “dumb hardware,” read Part 1. Dumb...
Hyperscale vs. Enterprise Cloud While many think buying cloud services is as easy as choosing between AWS or Azure, educated buyers explore all the options – both hyperscale and enterprise clouds - and choose the environment that will maximize application performance while optimizing cloud spend. Often, this best-of-breed approach leads to complex multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments that...
Kubernetes (k8s) is quickly becoming the de facto standard for container orchestration because it provides an effective framework to operate applications built using microservices architecture. Also known as application “containerization,” this approach enables development teams to be more agile, employ continuous delivery practices, and ultimately bring new business applications to market faster. k8s streamlines the management of containerized applications at...
The Business Case for Turnkey Infrastructure as a Service Just about everyone in IT has used VMware’s vSphere to build and/or operate an on-premise or colocated cluster at some point or another. vSphere enables you to take a group of hosts, form them into a cluster, and run virtual machines on top. vCenter server provides some great features like...
Choosing the Right Cloud Migration Strategy There are several different ways to migrate workloads to the cloud. As with everything in life, each approach has its own pros and cons, and works best in certain scenarios. The strategies described below are based on my experience in migrating client workloads to the Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC), which is a...
The Importance of Community Involvement With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio...
User Error/accidental deletion, system corruption, hardware failure, ransomware infection, malicious employees… your business faces internal and external security threats every day. Having the right IT tools in place and the knowledge to leverage them effectively is critical to your ability to mitigate these threats effectively and ensure continuous business operations and data protection. For example, point-in-time recovery (PITR) –...
Most of the C-Suite professionals I meet with these days have moved away from the old “IT as a cost center” talk and more towards “IT as a business enabler” thinking. But C-Suite and IT leaders’ actions don’t always match up with words. From my perspective, here are the most common forms of incentivizing the wrong IT behaviors that...
Three Pillars to Communication Your Vision With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central...
I attended Dell Technologies / World 2019 this past week. Held in Las Vegas, the show hosted its largest list of attendees yet. I’m told that nearly 15,000 people attended the conference to learn about the combined innovations at the family of companies that includes DellEMC, VMware, RSA, Pivotal, Secureworks, Virtustream, and Boomi. Expedient is a DellEMC Platinum Partner...
Last month, I traveled to San Francisco for one of the largest Information Security exhibitions of the year – the RSA Conference (RSAC). As a technologist, I always look forward to attending events like RSAC because they provide me with the opportunity to learn about hundreds of emerging technology solutions and gain an updated perspective on the trends driving...
Your software applications are the tools that enable your information technology to meet critical business requirements. What applications you choose influences staff productivity, cost management, flexibility in customer service, business transformation, and more. And, for a growing number of companies, the list of applications used in the business, also known as the application portfolio, can provide strategic competitive advantage in...
Expedient is VMware’s Americas Cloud Partner of the Year! At VMware’s 2019 Partner Leadership Summit, Expedient was named VMware’s 2018 Americas Regional Cloud Partner of the Year. Expedient was honored alongside other VMware partners from around the world during the 2018 VMware Partner Innovation Award ceremony, which recognizes partner excellence in using VMware technology to drive digital transformation...
Clients utilizing Expedient Enterprise Cloud (EEC) to run virtual machines (VMs) can now leverage the same pool of compute resources to run Kubernetes environments thanks to the Container Service Extension (CSE) to vCloud Director v9.5. CSE enables custom VM templates for quick cluster deployment, which eliminates the need to manually log into servers and run individual commands when making...
What Are Key Leadership Attributes? With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program....
What Are Key Leadership Attributes? With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio...
Does your organization’s IT infrastructure look something like this? If so, you’re not alone. Many of the organizations we meet with have applications spread across multiple platforms including on-premises, remote offices, colocation facilities, software-as-a-service (SaaS), hyperscale clouds like AWS and Azure, and enterprise clouds that operate similarly to their in-house environments. Put another way, management...
With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is a peer group that...
With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program – Central Ohio IT Leaders.org – in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I’ve learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is a peer group that...
With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program - Central Ohio IT Leaders.org - in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I have learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is...
With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program - Central Ohio IT Leaders.org - in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I have learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is...
Most of the organizations we meet with tell us that their IT complexity continues to increase. Infrastructure teams that continue to purchase and operate data center servers, storage and network infrastructure have dozens of choices at the beginning of each hardware refresh cycle. System software choices like hypervisors, management add-ons, automation, monitoring and predictive analytics are too numerous to...
Service Organization Control (SOC) reports for the time period between October 31, 2107 and September 30, 2018 are now available for interested clients. SOC reports act as an attest standard to provide clear evidence to Expedient clients that a third-party has verified that our business processes are being followed. All our current SOC reports are considered to be “Type II,”...
With a great deal of help, I put together an IT leadership development program - Central Ohio IT Leaders.org - in 2017 for aspiring CIOs in Central Ohio. The following message is my effort to share what I have learned from the tremendous CIO guest speakers that have presented as part of the program. Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is...
The cloud game is complex, constantly evolving, and competitive. And while it seems like the names AWS and Azure have become almost synonymous with cloud, nearly all cloud pundits agree that the cloud landscape really requires two types of clouds: an Enterprise Cloud, where the applications need to have hardware redundancy, and an Application Cloud, where the applications have redundancy...
Launched in 2017, Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is a peer group that meets monthly to network, discuss ideas, learn from experienced speakers, and establish collaborative relationships with the goal of nurturing the next generation of Columbus IT leadership. Several times throughout the year, the peer group will host CIO guest speakers to discuss various aspects of IT leadership. The...
Launched in 2017, Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is a peer group that meets monthly to network, discuss ideas, learn from experienced speakers, and establish collaborative relationships with the goal of nurturing the next generation of Columbus IT leadership. Several times throughout the year, the peer group will host CIO guest speakers to discuss various aspects of IT leadership. The...
Launched in 2017, Central Ohio IT Leaders.org is a peer group that meets monthly to network, discuss ideas, learn from experienced speakers, and establish collaborative relationships with the goal of nurturing the next generation of Columbus IT leadership. Several times throughout the year, the peer group will host CIO guest speakers to discuss various aspects of IT leadership. The...
For years, IT infrastructure teams have been designing, building, and maintaining a wide spectrum of disaster recovery (DR) solutions to recover critical information systems after an outage. Many of these do-it-yourself disaster recovery (DIYDR) approaches carry hidden risks that come to light at the worst possible time. Perhaps the biggest problem with a DIYDR approach is that it often gives...
Executives from three major vendor partner companies presented perspective on their organization’s relationship with Expedient at our 2018 end-of-year company meeting. Participants included: Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Dell Technologies Vice President of Product Management, Cloud Software Business Unit for VMware Senior Director, Specialist Systems Engineering for Juniper Networks Each presentation showcased the...
