Bring Your Own Use Case: Cloud Verified Provider Faction Offers Flexible Cloud Options

Companies are increasingly adopting multiple and hybrid clouds to improve IT performance and deliver value to the business. However, this approach can also escalate complexity, raising challenges around connectivity, storage, integration, and infrastructure resource needs.

That’s why having a multi-cloud strategy is important.

“It’s not just about de-risking issues, cost avoidance, or avoiding vendor lock-in,” says Sean Charnock, CEO of Faction, an international managed services provider, with headquarters in Denver. “A well-thought-out multi-cloud strategy helps companies succeed because it simultaneously unlocks innovation across every cloud.”

That includes being able to take advantage of services that consistently and flawlessly operate across multiple clouds. VMware validates providers that offer these services with the Cloud Verified distinction, helping companies move to the cloud with confidence.

Faction is a strong example. It operates nine data centers — all VMware Cloud Verified — across the U.S., as well as in London and most recently in Frankfurt, Germany.

“The services that earned Faction the Cloud Verified distinction are foundational and critical because we use them as the control-plane infrastructure for everything we do,” says Matt Wallace, CTO of Faction. “The VMware Cloud Verified stack is the base layer on top of which everything else lives.”

For example, Faction Cloud Control Volumes, based on VMware technology, is a cloud-attached storage platform that works seamlessly with any public cloud. Its patented Layer 2 connectivity offers low-latency and high-performance throughput. The platform enables customers to “take a data lake or other volume of storage and present it to multiple clouds at the same time, so you could use that data from multiple clouds without having to copy or move or synchronize the data,” Wallace says.

Faction drew on its prior work building bare-metal private clouds and its long-standing partnership with VMware to offer customers this cloud storage platform.

“We made it a priority to capitalize on the significant intellectual property we developed around cloud connectivity to enable customers to bring their networks into our cloud environments without having to make any changes to their network architecture,” Wallace adds.

The company attributes its rapidly expanding customer base to two key differentiators – the flexibility of its networking services and the freedom it gives customers to determine their needs. Charnock calls it a “bring your own use case” approach, acknowledging that each company is unique.

“Faction offers the building blocks — compute, networking, storage resources — and helps customers select the right combinations to meet their unique requirements, then provides them with a fully managed service. Faction is one of a handful of worldwide providers that have earned the VMware Master Services Competency in Datacenter Virtualization and VMware Cloud on AWS, and we leverage this specialized expertise to help our customers bridge the gap between on-premises environments and the cloud,” he says.

Wallace adds: “We’ve worked to become the Swiss Army knife that enables a safer, faster, more predictable move to the private and public cloud. We don’t push customers to specific hardware platforms. That’s one of the many reasons our platform serves as a steppingstone from which enterprises can adopt a public, hybrid, or multi-cloud approach at the pace that works best for them.”

Flexibility, combined with the ability to scale as needed without being locked into one cloud model, is critical for the long haul, says Charnock.

“We’re kind of like a safety net, making sure companies get the best of what’s available without overpaying and without operational complexity,” he says.

“Enterprises no longer have to settle for innovation from just one cloud,” Charnock adds. “We help customers be part of the multi-cloud innovation cycle. And we bring the VMware ecosystem with us, enabling that pool of integrated innovation across multiple cloud providers. That’s pretty powerful.”

Learn more about Faction and its partnership with VMware here.