Leveraging Data and Analytics @ Scale
Altus was rapidly growing and wanted to leverage large amounts of data from multiple departments to build scalable, elastic solutions that would increase both transparency and opportunities for the business. AHEAD designed, built, and implemented an AWS-hosted Analytics Hub environment with customizations and components including a RedShift data warehouse, automation of data pipelines, integrated security, fault tolerance, and redundancy.
Business Outcome
The client was able to identify operational efficiencies by having centralized and normalized data.
Streamlining Secure Infrastructure Access Through Automation
Lowes was looking to drive more automation through their enterprise, but ran into challenges with providing secure access to their infrastructure. Without a way to manage credentials, their enterprise automation strategy would always require manual intervention.AHEAD brought our experience with Hashicorp Vault to implement a solution where credentials could be securely accessed by automation toolsets, which removed a major blocker for Lowes team members.
Business Outcome
Lowes was able to reduce operational burden on their teams by automating regular tasks through secure methods.
Matured Security and Monitoring Through Managed Services
Singing River is a major healthcare provider in the Southern US. As a healthcare provider, they manage the healthcare data of hundreds of thousands of patients, and were acutely aware of the rise in ransomware attacks against organizations like theirs. As they looked at their internal capabilities to combat these attacks, they knew that they would need a strategic partner that could bring in 24×7 coverage and a team of experts to help them.AHEAD was brought in to assess Singing River’s security posture. Through a series of recommendations, we helped to mature their approach to security. We also provided a strategic Managed Security Service, where AHEAD’s 24×7 SOC monitors Singing Rivers systems for signs of attack, along with proactive weekly and monthly improvement sessions to help Singing River continue to enhance their information security.
Business Outcome
Reduced risk of cyber security threats, improved service quality for their security team, and a dramatically reduced mean time to respond to security events.
Greater Visibility and Reduced Downtime Through Intelligent Operations
MGIC set two goals for 2020: Increase their business agility through IT modernization to help them compete with new technology-forward players in their industry, and reduce their unplanned downtime which was directly impacting their reputation with partners and clients.MGIC worked with AHEAD to adopt our Intelligent Operations recommendations, and we implemented ServiceNow ITSM to help MGIC manage their changes and reduce unplanned downtime through tighter change controls. We also helped MGIC implement a set of modern monitoring toolsets to give their team greater visibility into their infrastructure health.
Business Outcome
MGIC has fewer customer impacting outages and more time can be spent on modernizing their application and infrastructure portfolio.
Automated, Faster Development
Cisco was under significant pressure to accelerate its internal software development cycles and simplify its software release processes. Facing competitive pressure from technology companies that were providing SaaS software solutions, Cisco needed a way to give their internal development teams access to new tools and development environments quickly.AHEAD brought our expertise around containers, automation, and modern application development pipelines to provide a solution which automated the deployment of development environments and helped their internal teams leverage containers to speed the release of new code and features.
Business Outcome
Cisco can push new features to market faster than before, reducing their development cycle time and giving them the ability to be more responsive to their customer demands.
Cost Savings Through Cloud Optimization
PTC had a $20 million dollar annual run rate in AWS. Acquisitions had created significant cloud sprawl and a lack of governance left them with little control over their cloud spend. Their legacy cloud partner had little incentive to help PTC reduce their cloud spend. AHEAD provided a unique offering to help PTC save revenue, helping them optimize their resource consumption and realizing over 15% savings in the first month.
Business Outcome
Cost savings through resource optimization.
Multi-Partner Data Center Refresh
As a result of a critical outage, Rush University Systems for Health (RUSH) sought to refresh their entire data center from the ground up. As a component of the refresh, the Rush team also wanted to update its networking components from ACI to NSX. RUSH brought in AHEAD team to navigate the complicated multi-partner landscape, including VMware, Cisco, Dell, and IBM.
Business Outcome
Refresh delivered within the hospital’s prescribed timeline
VxRail and vRealize Roadmap and Implementation
Genuine Parts Company sought a simpler and more streamlined process for fulfilling IT requests. AHEAD created an infrastructure automation roadmap, including VxRail Hyperconverged infrastructure and vRealize Automation (vRA), integrated it with software for extensibility, and built a ServiceNow service catalog to simplify the end user experience.
Business Outcome
Much faster VM provisioning and repairs.
Platform for Merger & Acquisition Integration
Northside Hospital is an extensive network of state-of-the-art facilities in Atlanta and Northeast Georgia. In late 2019, Northside and Gwinnett Health System completed plans to combine operations. AHEAD helped integrate their Exchange environments, implement ServiceNow into both companies, and modernize both companies’ Isilon storage environments.
Business Outcome
Improved standardization and scalability; faster service delivery to the business
Virtualization and Automation of Oracle ERP Environment
This tier one automotive supplier wanted a more resilient architecture and higher availability underpinning its Oracle ERP suite. We created a migration factory to move their application from Oracle VM to Oracle on VMware in a Vblock previously implemented by AHEAD.
Additionally, we integrated the environment with ServiceNow, VMware, and Ansible to produce an optimal provisioning solution.
Business Outcome
Drastic reduction in server provisioning and disaster recovery processes
ServiceNow CMDB Restructuring
As a leading health system with approximately 17,000 beds, CHS has been a longtime ServiceNow user, but experienced challenges with platform adoption due to data cleanliness issues. AHEAD restructured the CMDB first by cleaning excess listings and data, then by developing and implementing a new naming protocol for assets. We also implemented discovery modules and integration of third-party tools to maintain proper CMDB hygiene going forward.
Business Outcome
Improved efficiency in monitoring and management of IT.
Using Automation to Reduce Provisioning Time
Rockwell’s mission is to improve the quality of it customers’ lives by making the world more productive and sustainable. But the IT organization at Rockwell was having difficulty deploying temporary environments, with virtual environments taking far too long to reach its customers. The firm partnered with AHEAD on a hybrid cloud solution, including VMware vRealize Suite adapted using automation and orchestration for Windows and Linux. The resulting environment could much more readily respond to customer demands.
Business Outcome
Dramatic reduction in provisioning of new business services.
