Swedish logistics company Skandiatransport has signed an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud contract with Proact. The copmany believes this will free up its IT staff and allow them to focus fully on the needs of the business.

Skandiatransport reassessed its in-house data strategy, following what it perceived as rapid technical development in the field of data centres and IT.

Skandiatransport’s investment in new business systems, which made significantly more stringent demands in terms of uptime, was a crucial factor in this decision. Any IT downtime in excess of a few hours was deemed to be unacceptable and the existing infrastructure was incapable of meeting this requirement.

Heavy duty applications

Skandiatransport also deals with with advanced integration with customer IT systems. There was a need for reinforcement here, with demands for greater effort on the part of its IT specialists.

Helena Engström, chief project officer at Skandiatransport said “We wanted to shift the emphasis from operations to our applications, enabling our IT specialists to work with the things we should be best at and where we add the greatest value – to provide a strong resource for customers.”

The company made a decision to hand over operations to a supplier with the resources and knowledge needed to manage the Skandiatransport data centre in order to fit current requirements, with access to the latest technology. It carried out extensive evaluation work and accepted proposals from various suppliers.

Agreed service levels

“Proact has demonstrated a lot of commitment to and interest in supplying us with a solution which meets our precise requirements. A secure, professional IT infrastructure will now be supplied to us as a service, with an agreed service level,” explained Engström.

Skandiatransport chose Proact’s offer of IaaS - a private cloud service offering capacity for servers, storage, networks and operations at a predefined price. IaaS provides enormous flexibility in terms of expansion and data centre adaptation as required without requiring capital investments.

Dan Mårtensson, regional manager at Proact siad: “We are seeing strong movement among small and medium-sized organisations towards phasing out their own IT operations and switching instead to a service where they can receive some of the benefits of scale offered by a partner strong in resources.

”With IaaS, the customer reaps the rewards of an adaptable infrastructure while also enjoying greater security thanks to professional operations and support.”  

Proact solutions cover all elements of data storage, including virtualisation, network functions and security, and the company has more than 3 500 successful projects behind it, along with vast information volumes which are managed at the Proact data centre. The Proact Group has more than 660 employees and conducts business across the whole of Europe and the United States of America.