This spring, Expedient launched Expedient CTRL , a continually curated technology stack and platform that makes it easier for customers to accelerate their digital transformation efforts with a multi-cloud approach. Expedient CTRL delivers extreme flexibility while simultaneously enabling IT to centralize control across on-premises, private cloud, and hyperscale environments.
We recently spoke with Bryan Smith, senior vice president and strategy officer at Expedient, to learn more about how the platform works. We also explored the company’s vision for multi-cloud infrastructure, as well as its efforts to make the cloud different, smarter, safer, and simplified for clients.
“It’s hard to believe that Amazon EC2 was released 15 years ago or that digital transformation has been a key focus of companies for so many years,” said Smith. “From the beginning, companies wanted to get to the cloud to accelerate the speed and flexibility of their operations and simplify IT. Unfortunately, many moved solely to a hyperscale environment and plateaued because only 15% or 20% of their applications worked well in that environment. And others still needed to maintain on-premises systems.”
Smith’s team created the Expedient CTRL service to address this reality. At its core it gives clients one platform that enables them to manage any combination of clouds and on-premises platforms with ease, while putting the right workloads in the right cloud – all while staying true to Expedient’s efforts to make the cloud different, smarter, safer, and simplified.
“By different we mean we are providing the stack, expertise, and services clients need to make to move to a cloud operating model in a realistic and impactful way – in short, let’s complete the digital transformation you set out to do,” says Smith. “To cloud smarter, we apply everything we’ve learned in numerous transformations and give our clients easy access to quality information they need to make a good decisions the first time.”
Expedient completes an analysis and inventory of every new client’s existing IT environment. This is then mapped out to provide a detailed plan of what the optimum deployment looks like. This includes various hyperscale clouds, what needs to be kept on-premises, and what makes the most sense to put on the Expedient Enterprise Cloud, a VMware-powered cloud available in public, private, and on-premises environments.
“We initially see a lot of clients that want to refactor all of their applications to a hyperscale environment that might take years and cost millions, but we can alternatively take a few of the applications that get a ton of value from refactoring and move them to the right hyperscale cloud, and then take the remainder to our VMware-powered cloud, the Expedient Cloud,” Smith says. “For large organizations, this Cloud Different approach of combining hyperscale with an Expedient enterprise cloud can cut the migration time down by up to 75% and significantly reduce the cost of their cloud operations.
Notably, the Expedient Cloud and Expedient CTRL are both based on VMware technologies, including ESXi, vCenter, vCloud Director, NSX, vSAN, and vCenter Server Appliance.
VMware is ‘the natural choice’
“VMware is proven and trusted, and is the natural choice for practically everything clients have difficulty with in hyperscale environments, which are the vast majority of applications and workloads today,” says Smith. “The Expedient Cloud is our core service and it’s completely VMware Cloud Verified. We were also exceptionally proud to be previously named VMware’s Americas Regional Cloud Partner of the Year.”
Smith points out that using VMware technologies reflects the final two elements of the company’s tagline and abilities of the Expedient CTRL – making the cloud safer and simplified.
Expedient CTRL makes the cloud safer by combining all of the best-of-breed security solutions IT leaders need to centralize control and protect their multi-cloud networks on one, integrated technology stack. Part of the Expedient CTRL platform, the Expedient Security CTRL Suite, delivers protection for any workload in any environment, offers push-button DR and total network failover, and provides a consistent user experience while addressing everything from data breaches to ransomware.
The platform also contributes to performance. Enhanced data management is delivered through multi-cloud file and object storage. And any equipment that needs to stay physical can be colocated in the same facility as the Expedient Enterprise Cloud with zero latency, and interact with hyperscale deployments across our redundant 100GBps network backbone. In this way, clients can interoperate with all of the generational layers of technology they might have as one cohesive system.
Costs are also predictable. The majority of Expedient’s services are at a fixed monthly fee and Expedient doesn’t charge ingress or egress fees to their cloud services. This applies not only to its data centers, but also to clients’ distributed locations.
Expedient makes the cloud simpler in much the same way. All components of the CTRL platform can be viewed and controlled through a single console and co-managed as clients wish.
“What we see and what we’ve addressed with Expedient CTRL is that digital transformation doesn’t mean organizations making compromises to move everything into a hyperscale environment or a particular cloud, or alternatively to stick with keeping everything on-premises,” Smith says. “Our VMware-powered cloud, the Expedient Enterprise Cloud, and the Expedient CTRL platform that supports it, enable our clients to achieve a real digital transformation on their terms by putting the right workload in the right location without increasing complexity. And wasn’t that the goal all along?”
Learn more about Expedient and its partnership with VMware here.
Success stories from Expedient’s clients can be found at: https://expedient.com/why-expedient/success-stories/. And explore the full expanse of Expedient CTRL Mult-Cloud Univeral Services at: Original Post>