US Signal is a leading IT solutions provider offering secure, cutting-edge technology to organizations wanting to expand their IT capabilities. The company, based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, provides clients with co-location services, cloud hosting, disaster recovery, data protection — all through a fiber network. But its customers want more, and US Signal aims to provide just that.
While US Signal first offered customers a virtual private server platform for virtualization needs, the platform couldn’t keep up with growing customer demands. For example, clients couldn’t control resources on a per-VM basis or change the resources they were using — like CPU or RAM — when needed. These complications also made the platform difficult to manage and difficult to keep in compliance for highly-regulated industries.
Thankfully, US Signal had a card up its sleeve: it was a partner in the VMware Cloud Provider Program, which offers VMware vCloud Director. The vCloud Director cloud management platform helped US Signal to enable true multi-tenancy across its multiple data centers and help automate customer on-boarding and self-service through a single pane-of-glass. Best of all, US Signal could interweave its managed solutions into the director for better management and customer experience.
With vCloud Director, US Signal can delegate resources to meet customer demand. Larger clients can reserve both the resources they need now and the resources they may need in the future for scalability. Clients can also choose a pay-as-you-go model to allocate exactly what they’ll use. To sum: US Signal can now enable its customers to draw on the resources they need, when they need it, within a matter of minutes.
For US Signal, deploying vCloud Director was a massive success. It met customer self-service and security needs, accelerated on-boarding and helped drive company growth. In fact, US Signal’s advanced cloud platform now enables the organization to access larger customers needing bespoke service offerings. But that doesn’t mean US Signal is moving away from smaller clients either. In fact, its vCloud Director deployment has benefited its smaller Managed Service Provider clients the most.
“Our MSP customers may be smaller providers who don’t have the capital to purchase hardware, set up their own cloud and manage the equipment lifecycle,” Derrin Rummelt, Director of Cloud Engineering at US Signal said. “vCloud Director lets us provide them with a small amount of resources to start, and the agility to increase as their business grows — all with management from a single pane of glass.”
US Signal’s growth isn’t slowing down. The company is planning to launch a new dashboard that’ll enable its customers to see the breadth of offerings the company provides — from data backup and workload replication to networking and more — in one place with the flexibility provided by the vCloud API. We can’t wait to see what US Signal comes up with next.
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