Founded in 1874 as American District Telegraph, ADT pioneered telegraph technology to create the world’s first burglar alarm systems. Fast-forward nearly 150 years, and ADT continues to innovate, now partnering with VMware to embrace the full capabilities of cloud technology to optimize the company’s operational efficiency. With its market-defining reputation for innovation, ADT exemplifies how organizations modernize for continuous success in the fiercely competitive home security and smart home solutions sector.
Over the past decade, as ADT expanded from traditional security services to create a sophisticated ecosystem of smart home automation, the company recognized its digital infrastructure needed a comprehensive IT transformation to enable it to support a rapidly growing business and continually evolving portfolio of innovative solutions.
ADT began its IT modernization journey using VMware vSphere enterprise solutions to virtualize 95 percent of its server infrastructure. This large-scale shift from bare-metal systems to speedier, efficient virtualized servers boosted system and service deployment times and spurred an agile operational model for on-premises data centers. With its surge in data and product innovation, ADT found its on-premises systems taxed to capacity.
Transcending the Limits of On-Premises Infrastructure
To transcend the limitations of its data center IT platforms, ADT strategically chose to adopt a hybrid, multi-cloud approach. By forging partnerships with major players in the industry—Google, Microsoft, AWS and Oracle—ADT foresaw the substantial benefits of this approach, including enabling the company to deliver services closer to customers, improve response times, and provide life-critical services with unmatched efficiency.
To maintain robust and reliable service levels, ADT worked with VMware Professional Services to leverage Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution, and VMware Cloud on AWS. These interdependent relationships enabled ADT to seamlessly transition its VMware vSphere workloads to each cloud platform.
To navigate this transition, ADT worked with VMware Professional Services. Using VMware Cloud solutions, ADT pivoted its vSphere applications to the cloud environment without reengineering workloads, enabling a successful transition to Google Cloud VMware Engine, Azure VMware Solution and VMware Cloud on AWS.
Multi-cloud Security and Geographic Agility Edge Services Closer to Customers
To ensure security and reliability across multiple clouds, ADT implemented VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer to bolster its network security, ensuring high redundancy levels and business continuity. VMware Cloud solutions also streamlined resource provisioning and slashed asset delivery times to pave the way for more agile business operations. For network security, ADT employed the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer, which allowed for workload distribution across multiple clouds and virtualization of firewalls. This added a solid layer of security to the IT environment, ensuring high redundancy levels and business continuity.
This multi-cloud approach enabled ADT to transform its IT operations. The geographic agility offered by a hybrid, multi-cloud platform allowed the company to provide services closer to customers to improve response times and support life-critical services. The flexible infrastructure facilitated efficient resource allocation and scalability, optimizing operations and performance.
The integration of VMware Cloud solutions significantly reduced asset delivery times and streamlined the provisioning of resources, yielding a more efficient structure and the ability to prioritize applications and customer delivery.
Empowering Business Units to Drive IT Capacity Consumption
In the near future, ADT plans to transition about 80 percent of its IT assets to the cloud, while preserving on-premises systems that ensure life safety system redundancy and compliance with regulatory requirements. This strategy will allow ADT to empower different business units to drive IT capacity consumption and construct innovative new applications in cloud native environments.
Embracing a hybrid, multi-cloud approach, ADT addressed capacity management problems while boosting operational efficiency and bringing services closer to their clients. Working with VMware, ADT crafted a seamless and efficient cloud environment, effectively laying a robust technological groundwork for future innovations.
By integrating the transformative power of virtualization and the potential of the cloud, ADT and VMware have demonstrated how embracing digital transformation can lead to enhanced service delivery and improved customer satisfaction. This profound journey testifies to the transformative power of virtualization and underscores the promising potential of embracing a future made possible by the cloud.