Customer Overview

Advanced Solutions, a DXC Technology company, was formed in 2004 and employs about 500 staff to support the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia and other public sector customers with IT and business process solutions. For government agencies and services to continue operating efficiently and effectively, it is essential that the IT resources that they require are provided quickly and accurately.

Key Pain Points

All IT organizations are acutely familiar with the wide range of pain points and obstacles that can stand in the way of delivering resources to empower their businesses to move with speed and agility. One of the most common hindrances to IT, and therefore business agility is painfully slow provisioning processes, which can take weeks just to provision an application. The most common bottleneck within these processes is provisioning networking and security services. This is a key pain point for Advanced Solutions, but one that VMware is helping them solve with the VMware NSX Data Center network virtualization platform.

Dan Deane, Solutions Lead at Advanced Solutions says, “The key IT pain points that VMware solutions are helping us solve are around networking and provisioning.”

New Use Cases

Advanced Solutions was already a user of NSX Data Center for vSphere, but some new initiatives and use cases led them to choose to deploy NSX-T Data Center.

Dan Says, “Our primary reasons for deploying NSX-T were in support of a next generation SDN platform. We traditionally have been an NSX for vSphere customer, but with NSX-T we can begin looking at how we can provide broad data center networking and security not only for vSphere workloads, but for other hypervisors and physical workloads. On top of that, we’ve recently deployed PAS (Pivotal Application Service) and PKS. From an operational delivery point of view, it becomes very compelling.”

This highlights a fundamental benefit of the NSX-T Data Center platform: extension of consistent networking and security policies across heterogeneous hypervisors, clouds, and application frameworks (VMs, containers, bare metal). In addition to this, NSX-T is embedded into PKS, bringing enterprise-grade networking and security to what is already an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform. The extension of networking and security policy to containers takes the concept of micro-segmentation to a new level,,  bringing the software-defined, policy-driven ability to secure individual workloads down to individual containers and microservices.

“The benefits we’re realizing from NSX-T are in the container management space. We’ve just recently deployed PAS and PKS, and we’re waiting to see that level of security that, customers want when they do microservices and containers from the platform, so it’s great. What we can do today that we couldn’t do before is micro-segmentation for containerized workloads,” Dan says.

Closing Thoughts

These new and expanded use cases, based on customer demands, are enabling Advanced Solutions to delivery IT resources for traditional and containerized applications that drive business value and empower their customers to move with speed and agility as they continue their journeys of digital transformation.

“These new technologies are allowing us to help our customers digitally transform and enable their business and application services to mature,” Dan says.