As a leading brand commerce and digital marketing firm, Acquity Group needs the freedom to devote its time to its roster of Fortune 1000 Global Brands clients. Still, Acquity Group customers demand scalability and security, and it is imperative that Chicago-based Acquity Group remains as innovative as possible while maximizing its infrastructure.
Acquity Group already leverages a wide array of Rackspace’s product portfolio, including dedicated, cloud and hybrid hosting – more than 250 devices in all. It relies on Rackspace Advisory Services, a team of senior IT strategists, to create custom cloud strategies and solutions that allow Acquity Group to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. Advisory Services lets Acquity Group maximize the efficiency of its infrastructure while keeping client information locked down and secure.
“Advisory Services has always been absolutely necessary for us,” said Kevin Ellenwood, Acquity Group’s vice president of national technical services. “We’ve always relied on having people that understand our business, that understand data center needs and necessities, and that are smarter than us in those areas.”
Recently, Rackspace Advisory Services helped Acquity Group build out a storage strategy to leverage its NetApp NAS device more efficiently, which involved using the NAS appliance as a media files repository for a client’s migration to Adobe CQ – a specific request from a high profile client. With Advisory Services’ help, Acquity Group was able to use its NAS appliance to save the client a significant sum of money. This innovative approach reduced the amount of disk requirement for large enterprise customers by more than 80 percent while making Acquity Group more competitive in the Adobe CQ space.
Acquity Group also depends on its Managed Virtualization environment to keep client information secure, and engaged Rackspace Advisory Services to build its virtualization strategy. Managed Virtualization lets Acquity Group customize its environment to suit its security needs, and the virtualization environment allows the company to uphold a high security standard even when handling massive data loads.
“We’ve met our security requirements within our virtualized solution,” Ellenwood said. “We can make certain security guarantees…We are running large brands in our environment right now, whether it’s in our content or commerce platform. Like all global platforms, we are getting attacks on a daily basis, yet we’ve never had a breach, and we’ve always been able to react in a timely matter to any type of issue that has come up. Our Rackspace team is on top of it and our security team is on top of it.”
Ellenwood recalled one major client’s IPO, where security was of the utmost importance.
“We were running their investor-relations data on our system,” he said. “We were hammered with attacks, because if you can disrupt something of that size and get on the news, that’s a big win for people that are looking to do this type of thing. Even though we’ve had attacks, we’ve had zero outages, zero downtime, and a very reactive team. All of that comes from spending an awful lot of time with my team, working with our Rackspace team, working with Rackspace Advisory Services, and leveraging that relationship.”
Layered on top of Acquity Group’s solutions, Ellenwood said, is Rackspace’s trademark Fanatical Support. Together, Rackspace Advisory Services and Acquity Group team up to enable Acquity Group to better support clients and offer innovation and security. Rackspace provides Acquity Group the freedom to focus on customers without worrying about infrastructure. Acquity Group also has the confidence to try new, innovative things because it has the support of Rackpace.
“Our mission is not that different, from a support perspective,” Ellenwood said. “It’s unacceptable for us to have any type of outage, and quite frankly, our team at Rackspace has the same attitude. That’s why we’re here. I expect that from our service providers, and we’re on the same page.”