CloudFirst Helps Cook Brothers Fire on All Cylinders with CloudFirst Cloud Solutions

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Cook Brothers is one of the premier suppliers of truck parts in the Northeast United States. The company offers a complete line of products and services to the industry, from full-service driveline facilities to vehicle leasing. It’s a one-stop destination for parts, hose manufacturing and repair, as well as flywheel resurfacing, cables, industrial supplies and numerous other vital industry services. Cook Brothers serves state and local departments of public works and municipalities from coast to coast, as well as security companies.

THE CHALLENGE

As a major supplier of goods and services to the transportation industry, Cook Brothers is a data-driven company. Management relies heavily on having its systems and apps working at full capacity 24/7, always on and constantly accessible and protected against unplanned outages, along with the ability to scale when required. Company management explained to CloudFirst that as it was relying on an older Operating System, components were unreliable and had to be constantly refreshed. Its infrastructure lacked sufficient redundancies in the event of an outage. They also needed higher resiliency for business-critical applications. To maintain business continuity, Cook Brothers needed to remedy its current situation whereby its systems were housed at a single location, putting them at serious risk for downtime or data loss in the event of a disaster. In short, they needed reliability of the IBM i infrastructure, and a solid plan for protecting its vital data.

THE SOLUTION

Enter CloudFirst, which understood the company’s needs immediately and set out to formulate a multi-pronged solution. CloudFirst went the extra mile to fully discover the system needs of Cook Brothers today, and down the road. CloudFirst Cloud Solutions were paramount among the recommendations; along with upgraded communications and connectivity services to prepare Cook Brothers for cloud migration. With vast experience in transportation management, the CloudFirst team designed a secure migration strategy with built-in user testing. ezHost was implemented, as well as a built-in disaster recovery strategy with cloud backup.

THE RESULTS

Since migrating its systems to the CloudFirst Cloud, Cook Brothers has not only seen a measurable increase in performance and efficiencies, but a tangible savings in costs and time related to routine system maintenance and bottleneck management. They will spend less over a 5-7-year period had they opted for capital acquisition. The company will save considerably in the areas of communications equipment and CTO reduction for ancillary infrastructure services provided by CloudFirst. And their systems will be better protected. Company management sums up the successful experience: “For three years CloudFirst’s service has worked perfectly and provided 100% service uptime to Cook Brothers.”