Leading Outdoor Advertiser, Lamar, Displays Good Choice for Venyu's Colocation Services

BATON ROUGE, LA--(Marketwired - Feb 10, 2015) - Venyu, a leader in business continuity, cloud-based virtualization, and battle-tested data recovery, today announced that Lamar Advertising has selected the company's enterprise-class colocation services. The colocation services allow Lamar to safeguard data assets while reducing IT facility maintenance and operational costs. Full Lamar case study can be viewed here.

Headquartered in Baton Rouge, LA, Lamar Advertising is the nation's leading out-of-home advertising company, providing solutions in the form of billboards, digital, transit and highway logo signs. The company boasts a wide corporate reach with more than 200 locations across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Its network provides clients with local market insight and solutions on a national scale.

Lamar initially ran its Tier-1 applications (including Website, email Active Directory, and file servers) from a small in-house data center located within the Baton Rouge facility. When Hurricane Katrina brought its 174 MPH winds to the region in August 2005, the threat of power outage and IT downtime became too much for the company's decision makers to contend with.

"While we didn't go down at the time, the hurricane certainly caused us to take stock in our disaster recovery and backup plans. Running an IT facility is not our core competency; we knew a colocation provider with the expertise to protect our data assets was necessary," said Peter Dunn, Director of Communications and Services, Lamar Advertising.

Lamar embarked on a search to find the right IT outsourcing partner. However, many were initially ruled out because their operations were too remote and the company felt more comfortable with a local provider. Other potential data hosting facilities lacked the required infrastructure security or could not guarantee the State would assume their diesel fuel delivery needed to maintain data center generators, in emergency situations. That's when Lamar turned to Venyu.

Continued Dunn, "With Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, we really dodged a bullet. The sheer threat to our core infrastructure going down brought home the need to better address our disaster recovery and data backup plans. We quickly realized the need to move our servers into a secure location and selected Venyu's colocation services."

Venyu's colocation hosting is a flexible solution giving organizations like Lamar the space, connectivity and security required for core servers. The company delivers a wide array of rack, network, and hardware configurations - and even helps with equipment procurement and installation. Venyu's commercial-grade data center facilities are designed with industry-leading physical and network security protection, disaster recovery as well as a wide range of environmental controls including smoke detection, fire suppression and redundant cooling controls.

"Our commercial-grade data centers are specifically designed to ensure our customers' IT assets stay safe and remain operational," said Scott Thompson, CEO, Venyu. "Once customers experience our secure, battle-tested facilities, many begin transitioning other services to a full cloud-based solution."

Venyu now provides Lamar with a private network connection to their hosted SQL servers, logical systems and Active Directory servers while also managing their power, space and cooling needs. Venyu now facilitates data from Lamar's 200 locations -- including maintaining data to and from 2,000 digital boards around the country.

"Venyu enables us to focus on more strategic business initiatives, instead of running and maintaining IT facilities. Now we can put our attention on what we do best - premium advertising," concluded Dunn.

About Venyu
Venyu is a premier provider of data center, managed hosting, cloud, virtualization and data protection solutions. By leveraging Venyu's portfolio of innovative, ROI-focused solutions, including VenyuCloud and RestartIT, within secure, highly available data centers, organizations can reduce IT costs while increasing security and scalability. For more information about Venyu and its industry-leading offerings, please visit www.venyu.com. Your Data Made Invincible™.