Case Study
An established, leading provider of brand marketing solutions and supply chain services traditionally kept its IT systems colocated on its own hardware. Over the years, the do-it-yourself approach required a significant investment in time and resources.
For ongoing technical support, the business worked with an IT services company that had also partnered with Otava to supplement its expertise and resources for this company and others.
The company’s hardware was aging and required substantial capital and resources to modernize and maintain. The total cost of ownership, including hardware maintenance, data center equipment maintenance, server acquisition, resource investment and more, was becoming increasingly high.
Because the marketing solutions firm delivers high volumes of important products for its customers through its supply chain, including PPE during the pandemic, it needed greater efficiency, productivity and reliability from its critical systems. As such, it worked with its IT partner to make the decision to move its production environment from colocation to Otava’s secure and compliant virtual private cloud and backup solutions.
The cloud migration was successfully underway when the company experienced a company-owned server failure over a weekend in a secondary location that was not part of the initial migration plans. Unfortunately, this physical host had been running client-facing, mission critical marketing applications, so the unexpected hardware failure needed to be backed up immediately and moved to the cloud or it would have caused extensive downtime for mission critical applications their clients relied on, due to the fact that they did not have an easy or fast recovery plan.
Immediately, the IT support firm reached out to Otava to discuss the situation and request adding fast backup and migration to the cloud for this additional physical host. Right away, Otava’s support team engaged to quickly and easily complete the backup and restoration process. Otava first ported data from all impacted servers onto Otava-owned hardware for stabilization. Otava engineers then migrated data from 13 impacted client-owned servers into the Otava Cloud. In completing the cut over, Otava used a migration tool to accelerate data transfer time. No longer on aging hardware, the company is now running smoothly in Otava’s fully managed cloud infrastructure environment.
The complete solution included moving more than 40 servers to Otava’s virtual private cloud environment in the first phase. The IT partner is managing the execution of cloud backups on its client’s behalf, while Otava manages the cloud and backup infrastructure. Otava also ensures an ongoing stable and healthy environment by providing management for the networking stack including antivirus, security and backend VMware platforms.
By partnering with Otava, the IT support firm and its client were able to quickly restore its failed servers that had been running critical application data within hours, saving the company from the potential of significant impact. By swiftly migrating into Otava’s cloud environment in a time of need, the IT partner was able to back up the data from the failed server over the weekend so that by the start of the work week, it was up and running for clients.
The reliability, flexibility and scalability of Otava’s cloud solution frees up the company’s IT partner to focus on other priorities. For example, it no longer needs to spend its time checking if firmware has been updated, or firewalls have been patched, instead it can tackle new initiatives, such as application development. With its critical workloads running in the cloud, the IT firm and its client gain valuable efficiency, productivity and reliability.
Otava caters to all types of service provider partners with a range of options including white labelling and reselling models. In this case, Otava partnered directly with the IT firm’s client to meet their unique needs. Otava’s focus on security and compliance supports the partner in its mission to provide protection for its customers hosting their critical systems in Otava’s secure cloud environment. Predictable pricing and integrated billing is simple and straightforward. And because no investment in infrastructure is needed, the company can confidently move forward, focusing on scaling its business and serving customers
Otava provides the secure, compliant hybrid cloud solutions demanded by service providers, channel partners and enterprise clients in compliance-sensitive industries. By actively aggregating best-of-breed cloud companies and investing in people, tools, and processes, Otava’s global footprint continues to expand. The company provides its customers in highly regulated disciplines with a clear path to transformation through its effective solutions and broad portfolio of hybrid cloud, data protection, disaster recovery, security and colocation services, all championed by an exceptional support team. Learn more at www.otava.com.
