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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 The servers, storage, networking, security and data protection equipment and licensing all become outdated and are usually replaced in a cycle every three to five years.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...
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...
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...
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,...
One of the most frequent questions I hear revolves around the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. IT professionals are asking “Why shouldn’t I use all SaaS applications if I can eliminate the need for a data center, the hardware and all the tactical IT effort that goes along with it?” The answer to this question focuses around...
Partnering for Success Expedient offers the highest-performance technical solutions, in part because of an extremely reliable converged computing infrastructure built with Intel technology. Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) is a major focus for Expedient because it enables the automation of policies in each component of the computing and networking infrastructure. These capabilities facilitate on demand resource availability leading to faster...
