Evans Distribution Systems was founded in 1929 as the Central Detroit Warehouse Company and has evolved into a full-service, third-party logistics provider offering warehousing, transportation, fulfillment, value-added and staffing solutions. Its customers are in the automotive, manufacturing, food and beverage, consumer goods and chemical industries. The company employs more than 600 associates and operates more than two million square feet of space in Michigan and across the US. Operating around the clock across multiple time zones, Evans needs its data always available and protected.

Evans Distribution Systems holds large contracts with organizations that ship products seasonally, so reliable application performance is most critical during its busiest shipping season. Planning ahead for that peak, IT Director Dr. Michael Franklin wanted to proactively ensure that the company's systems would not experience any issues or downtime.

The company's existing data center cloud provider did not offer dedicated support, and the Evans IT department was resource constrained. With a lean team and no dedicated support from its provider, Evans could not leave the availability of its shipping production, billing and other critical internal systems to chance through the peak.

The immediate need was a disaster recovery solution that had been successfully tested before the high season began. That requirement, combined with the lack of dedicated support, drove Dr. Franklin and his team to seek a new partner and to migrate to a new cloud-based IT platform ahead of the busiest months.

Evans Distribution Systems selected OTAVA's secure and compliant virtual private cloud hosting platform to protect its data and keep its systems running without disruption through its busiest shipping season and year round. OTAVA's hybrid cloud solutions are fully managed by its team of experts, giving Evans confidence that it can avoid costly disruption while its own staff focus on serving customers.

In addition to the compliant virtual cloud service, the Evans environment includes OTAVA Cloud Backup and OTAVA Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), providing failover and recovery for 20 servers running shipping production, billing operations and other critical internal systems.

To ensure success during the busiest distribution months, OTAVA implemented its documented, tested and proven disaster recovery service before Evans' most demanding season began. The fully managed solution met Evans' needs for rapid recovery, flexibility and testing availability. "Evans is an established and well-respected logistics provider that is admired for its innovation," said Brad Cheedle, CEO of OTAVA. "They recognized that migrating to a new cloud-based IT platform would ensure their critical workloads would be highly available and recoverable, even in the event of a disaster, ahead of their busiest shipping season."

With the migration complete, the Evans team relies on OTAVA's engineers and support staff to manage the cloud environment and data recovery services, acting as an extension of its IT team for a business that operates around the clock and in multiple time zones.

• Failover and recovery in place for 20 servers running shipping production, billing operations and other critical internal systems
• Documented, tested and proven disaster recovery service implemented before the peak shipping season
• Reliable data protection for shipping operations with optimal uptime and availability
• Internal data center staff freed to focus on other needs of the business while OTAVA manages the cloud environment
• Immediate needs met quickly and cost effectively, with sustainable management going forward
• Round-the-clock operations across multiple time zones supported by OTAVA as an extension of the IT team