Piab bypasses barriers to strategic IT

Alleviating the complexity of IT infrastructure, iland says that Piab is leveraging iland’s Enterprise Cloud Services and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service offerings in order to focus on strategic IT initiatives that help grow and protect the company. Piab is known for its innovative industrial automation solutions that dramatically improve the productivity of factories around the world, and its IT team plays a critical role in ensuring its own corporate user base maintains the highest levels of efficiency to drive business forward.

“Our competitive advantage from an IT perspective does not come from running servers,” said Greg Anderson, CIO of Piab. “We stay ahead by refining business processes and finding tools and applications that make our users more productive. With iland’s enterprise cloud and disaster recovery services, we can focus less on making sure things are running and more on strategic IT initiatives. We looked at multiple vendors and iland was the best fit—everything from services to pricing.”

Established in 1951, Piab specialises in the creation of cutting-edge vacuum solutions that improve the efficiency and working environments for many of the world’s largest manufacturers. Based in Täby, Sweden, it is a global organisation with subsidiaries and distributors in more than 50 countries. Facing significant business growth, the IT team refused to waste resources on procuring and managing additional hardware infrastructure. Instead, they turned to iland to manage its move to the cloud for both production and disaster recovery.

Increased efficiency and performance of IT systems and processes
Like many companies today, Piab faced procedural, performance, cost and security issues with maintaining its own hardware infrastructure. The company was using its own servers at a co-location data centre in Stockholm, but any time a hard drive failed or the IT team needed to add RAM or storage, a staff member had to physically drive to the location more than 30 minutes away. Then, they had to deal with security procedures and equipment delivery in and out of the data centre. Faced with the prospect of purchasing all new hardware infrastructure, Anderson took a more strategic step and tapped into iland’s enterprise cloud to host its entire production environment.

“The biggest benefit of moving to iland’s cloud is that we are able to dynamically adjust our environment at any time,” Anderson said. “The fact that we don’t have to maintain any sort of hardware or deal with hardware system failures makes life a lot easier. And, iland’s ECS portal enables us to not only see what’s going on in our cloud, but gives us the ability to control and manage our resources and costs on a global scale.”

Established robust disaster recovery plan with Cloud-to-Cloud backup
Piab also set out to improve its business continuity capabilities, as the IT team struggled with its existing software solution that required significant infrastructure resources and did not ensure recovery time objectives because it was too difficult to test. The company again turned to iland to help plan and implement a robust disaster recovery plan that could safeguard against downtime.

With iland Disaster Recovery Services Powered by Zerto, Piab can run regular tests to ensure the company’s resources are protected in a real disaster and that employees will have access to the systems and data they need. Now, Piab is confident it will meet a Recovery Point Objective of between 5 and 60 minutes, depending on the application.

“We were looking for something really simple, reliable and familiar,” Anderson said. “The best thing about iland and Zerto’s DR solution is that when we need to switch over, we’re basically just switching tunnels from one location to another. It’s really easy.”

“We pride ourselves in working directly with customers to ensure they are able to fully harness the benefits of cloud,” said Lilac Schoenbeck, VP of product management and marketing at iland. “Piab’s success exemplifies how strategic cloud implementation – from production systems to disaster recovery – can help streamline processes and alleviate technical burdens so that IT can take a more proactive role in achieving overall business objectives.”

"We use iland's enterprise cloud to run our full production environment,” said Anderson. “The solution allows us to forget about the hassles associated with maintaining a data centre while at the same time providing us with a cost efficient, dynamically scalable and reliable solution. The Cloud2Cloud Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service allows me to sleep better knowing we have a fully managed solution in place if needed.”