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IT pro rethinks infrastructure from the ground up, ends up in clouds

04.04.2012
Mark Adams, vice president of IT at HireRight, is living the dream -- the chance to completely rethink the infrastructure for a $300 million software-as-a-service employment screening service company. While the nucleus of the 1,600 employee company has been around for 30+ years, a three year acquisition spree resulted in sprawl, leaving the company with 10 facilities, including company owned and collocation and disaster-recovery sites, some of them overseas. Now HireRight is three quarters of the way through a consolidation effort with a heavy emphasis on cloud. Adams gave an update on the company's modernization progress to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.

Where did you start with this consolidation effort?

We are a software-as-a-service company and we looked at our 10 data center footprint and asked ourselves "do we really need 10?" So we started thinking about, if we collapse to this, if we refresh that, if we could go with one Tier 1 storage vendor, what did all of that look like? And as we kept going we finally realized that for HireRight four data centers is the best. In this case, more is not more; less is more.

When did you start the process?

Just about two years ago. And it's still ongoing. We have two different kinds of clouds, a customer facing cloud which supports the software-as-a-service portals, and an internal back-office cloud for operations. So we looked at what's the next step for that? If we could consolidate everything down and go 100% virtual and introduce some of the flashier elements of -- dynamic processing, being able to move things around, if we could load up our blade servers with lots of memory -- what would that footprint look like? And in our case, it got pretty lean, pretty dense.