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...
Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a service hyperscale cloud digital transformation IT LeadershipFor 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...
Cloud Computing DevOpsThe 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,...
Security and Compliance Disaster Recovery managed services risk managementBackups 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...
Disaster Recovery managed servicesHyperscale 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...
private cloud hybrid cloud Multi-cloud hyperscale cloud VMware Expedient Enterprise CloudHyperscale 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...
Infrastructure as a service public cloud hybrid cloud Multi-cloud hyperscale cloudKubernetes (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...
containers digital transformation VMware Kubernetes DevOpsThe 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...
Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a service VMware Expedient Enterprise Cloud digital transformation DevOpsChoosing 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...
Cloud Computing VMwareThe 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...
IT LeadershipUser 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) –...
Disaster Recovery Infrastructure Availability