ADT: Furthering home automation and security with IT transformation

ADT, a leading provider of safe, smart and sustainable solutions for people, homes and businesses, has helped keep people and property safe for 148 years. More recently, the company began using cloud services to scale up its offerings and serve an ever-increasing number of customers.

The company chose to work with Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider, as well as VMware and several other Google Cloud partners—including NetApp, Palo Alto Networks, NETSCOUT, and Hashicorp—to streamline infrastructure sourcing and procurement and drive digital transformation.

Shifting virtualized infrastructure into the cloud

Although ADT was fully automated and 97 percent virtualized on-premises with a successful customer self-service portal, capacity management was always challenging. With large capital expenditures happening every three to five years and decreased spending over time, the company felt constrained when it came to delivering new services and streamlining its IT environment.

"ADT decided to take an enterprise approach to cloud and move into a cloud-first strategy using Google Cloud," says Bingham. "We looked at our hundreds of applications, some of which are off the shelf and others developed in-house, to understand where we want to spend our time and money as we moved into the cloud."

In all, ADT decided that it wanted to transform roughly 25 percent of its apps to support exponential growth and improve operations using cloud-based tools. With a robust virtualization strategy in place, it first targeted a new disaster recovery (DR) environment in Google Cloud VMware Engine to achieve on-demand capacity if a disaster occurs. Google Cloud VMware Engine is a native Google Cloud service that enables organizations to seamlessly migrate and run their VMware-based applications within Google Cloud without changing applications, tools, or processes or having to retrain staff.

Google Cloud VMware Engine proved to be the right choice for ADT given its:

• Ease of deployment, with one-click simplicity for spinning up new environments.
• Interoperability and portability between on-premises and cloud environments.
• Reduced maintenance work through a managed service.
• Access to native Google Cloud services such as BigQuery.

Additionally, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides enough storage capacity to handle the storage replication process as a failover, and enables an on-demand cost model to add hosts to meet capacity requirements without large upfront costs.

"The ability to avoid large capital outlays while having capacity on demand for key workloads was a major reason why we wanted to move to Google Cloud," says Bingham. "When COVID-19 hit and we adapted to work from home, we suddenly needed to scale up our virtual desktop environments to support about 20,000 employees. By using Google Cloud VMware Engine, we leveraged existing environments and extended them into Google Cloud, giving us the on-demand capacity to support remote work at scale in just 10 days."

The company is now shifting more of its applications from on-premises data centers to the cloud by further leveraging Google Cloud VMware Engine, helping to consolidate data centers and avoid sprawl.

"The ability to increase capacity with automated scripting, as well as private and cross-connected networks, has been a huge advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine," says Bingham. "Standing up a Google Cloud VMware Engine environment is extremely easy and more streamlined than I've seen in nearly 20 years. Google Cloud VMware Engine is one of the most successful products we use within Google Cloud."

Leveraging a rich product and partner ecosystem

ADT uses a range of Google Cloud products and leverages several partners to optimize its IT. For example, the company has transformed its analytics workloads using BigQuery, dramatically increasing its compute power while reducing costs.

Before BigQuery, ADT's business units were constrained when trying to run analytics because of cost restrictions around compute power. Now, BigQuery provides accelerated query times at a similar cost with unlimited compute power.

Using Google Cloud VMware Engine, the company has migrated many preferred data analysis and visualization tools to Google Cloud. This, alongside its use of BigQuery, meant a more seamless experience for business units and the ability to run their analytics engines 20 to 30-times faster than before.

"BigQuery has given us a true single source of truth across ADT," says Bingham. "Queries that used to take an hour or two a day, and some an entire day, are now completed in seconds, while BigQuery has also centralized our data management structure by decommissioning smaller data warehouses."

Further, ADT replaced its legacy token-based process for running applications with Cloud Functions, reducing its spend by 76% annually. ADT also uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to power its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, with 15 clusters running on the service.

To cover other needs, ADT has tapped into Google Cloud Marketplace for on-demand technologies and services from as many as seven Google Cloud partners. Google Cloud Marketplace provides ADT with streamlined procurement, centralized and simplified billing, and access to an ever-growing tapestry of Google Cloud partners.

For instance, Palo Alto Networks provides firewall and visibility solutions to give ADT maximum control over its systems and data. NETSCOUT has been especially helpful in offering private service connections between Google Cloud and Google Cloud VMware Engine environments, adding even more granular tracking of data at rest and in motion.

As ADT has a lot of unstructured data including blueprints for buildings as part of permitting procedures and records for materials, it uses NetApp for its document repository system. This gives ADT a central location for the types of files employees across the enterprise might need for on-site projects like installing and uninstalling equipment.

Finally, ADT uses Terraform by HashiCorp for all of its Google Cloud enterprise deployments and is looking into further connections between Terraform and Google Cloud VMware Engine for the future.

All of these partners combine to give ADT a more advanced, cloud-powered IT framework that can stand up new environments and provision hardware in under two hours rather than a few weeks.

"Our transformation on Google Cloud and its partners has been wide-reaching at ADT," says Bingham. "We're migrating data centers from on-premises to Google Cloud in under 90 days, achieving greater agility in our application development and management, reducing spend, and continuing to innovate. Our company mission is to connect and protect what matters most, and we are better prepared to do that today because of our IT transformation."

A foundation built on security and trust

ADT continues to explore more avenues to improve IT efficiency, operational capabilities, and more within Google Cloud. Much of this has been the direct result of a long-standing relationship with Google Cloud that includes collaborating on the development of products and services together. Positive experiences with products, services, and partners have opened the door to further optimizations across ADT.

"The biggest reason we chose Google Cloud as our preferred cloud provider is the strong relationship between Google Cloud and us," says Bingham. "When you're building a house, you don't create two roofs—you create one. ADT and Google Cloud have so many great synergies."