| | DECEMBER 202119CIOReviewInterestingly, it's in tackling this challenge Swanson's firm, VAST, has been carving a niche for itself. VAST is an Illinois-based firm that provides extensive leading-edge enterprise-level IT services and IT infrastructure and cloud management services. In the cloud space, VAST puts forth a comprehensive range of services and a platform to support enterprises on their cloud journey from end-to-end, right from the assessment and planning to migration and management. "No matter where the customer is in their cloud journey, we can guide them with the best practices that will improve ROI and mitigate security risks," asserts Swanson, president of VAST.Boasting a Vast Expertise in the Cost Containment SpaceNotably, VAST was founded by Donald M. Swanson, in 1989, an era when the term `cloud computing' itself had not yet been coined, but shared-resource computing technologies of the time were prevalent. Ever since, VAST has been working with enterprises to "squeeze more" out of their technology and infrastructure investments. "Earlier, we had been catering to cost containment measures for on-prem models and data centers, such as resource and usage monitoring, capacity planning, optimization and right-sizing of support and maintenance contracts" mentions Swanson. When server and storge virtualization became common place years later, the technologies were disruptive, allowed for much more efficient utilization of hardware resources, and were a foundational step towards the current model of public cloud. VAST's `vast' expertise became the guiding force for many companies to be at the leading edge of their infrastructure optimization. Today, VAST's 360-degree approach to cloud migration is enabling enterprises to migrate to the cloud seamlessly. On that front, VAST's approach starts with discovery and assessment that gathers in-depth data from the existing infrastructure of an enterprise. Leaning on that data, VAST provides a cloud readiness report to the enterprises, which guides the cloud model selection and evaluates its financial benefits, be it infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or software-as-a-service (SaaS). Further, VAST provides an all-inclusive roadmap as well that aids in choosing the cloud environment (public, private, and/or hybrid) that best suits their business needs. During this planning phase, the firm also evaluates all the `what-if' scenarios in an enterprise--the cost of cloud implementation, capacity and scalability of the environment, compliance profiling, dependency mapping, opportunities for application modernization, and much more. Going ahead, VAST devises a successful strategy that streamlines the entire migration process while minimizing the downtime and risks. In addition, VAST offers a cloud management service, VAST ViewTM, with a single pane of glass for cloud environments distributed across multiple public, private, and hybrid clouds through VAST ViewTM cloud management service. With VAST ViewTM, enterprises can view, monitor, and manage the cost, utilization, performance, configuration, and security of various cloud environments in a single console. VAST also boasts a high-touch support model backed by a completely domestic support team to facilitate its end-to-end approach. How the company is making a significant difference in the cloud cost management aspect can be best reflected from a recent client success story. An enterprise had hastened their migration of workloads from on-premise to the public cloud, AWS in this case. They started with their non-production workloads and crossed their intended budget with about 50 percent of their migration completed. "It was then that they called a timeout and engaged with us," says Swanson. VAST went in with a combination of different approaches to avoid overspending, including right-sizing their compute resources and instance types, implementing governance and usage policies for their development teams, and utilizing various vehicles for cost savings offered by the cloud provider. As a result, the client was able to continue migration to the cloud successfully with measured expenditure.With such success stories, VAST is at the forefront of the market today in aiding enterprises to effectively manage their expenditure during cloud adoption. As multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments are increasingly being embraced, VAST View'sTM all-in-one capabilities coupled with the VAST team's expansive expertise offer the ideal combination for enterprises in their cloud journey. "With VAST, clients can reap the benefits of the cloud space's lightning-fast speed innovation all while mitigating risk in the consequently evolving threat landscape." And Swanson concludes, "We believe where everything is headed is truly multi and hybrid cloud based. And full portability of workloads between clouds, public and private, will ultimately be realized. Additionally, the accessibility and aggregation of datasets that reside in different places will be key in the data-driven economy moving forward." Robert Swanson
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