For transportation and logistics businesses, data centers provide the underpinning for critical daily operations.

Challenge
In good times and bad, transportation and logistics oriented enterprises, such as regional and long-distance truckers, air freight firms, shipping lines, rail carriers, vehicle rental companies, and third-party logistics providers, just keep rolling along. All of these businesses rely on data centers to ensure continuous and friction-free operations across borders and under all types of business and environmental conditions.

For transportation and logistics businesses, data centers provide the underpinning for critical daily operations. IT systems are used to optimize schedules and routes, match loads and drivers with specific vehicles, minimize the likelihood of accidents and breakdowns, ensure the on-time delivery of damage-free goods, and support many other tasks.

Uptime is crucial for transportation and logistics companies, since even brief service outages can wreak havoc on finely tuned delivery schedules and vehicle coordination strategies. In today's highly challenging business world, industry players are also facing keen pressure from customers to keep prices down and provide service standards that meet or exceed levels set by competitors.

Databases sit at the heart of most transportation and logistics processes, helping users create and manage complex schedules, set vehicle and load allocations, supervise inventories, and organize business and regulatory documents. Databases also feed the analytical tools industry players rely on to remain productive and competitive. Meanwhile, a growing number of transportation and logistics enterprises are turning to wireless monitoring and radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies to track the progress of vehicles and shipments, ensuring just-in-time (JIT) deliveries to customers and the efficient utilization of transportation resources. Sophisticated databases, analytical applications, and tracking services mandate the use of powerful servers and storage technologies, ultra-reliable network services, and never-fail power and environmental support systems.

The server and storage device consolidation created by virtualization is helping transportation and logistics companies boost efficiency and cut costs by allowing greater asset utilization. Meanwhile, cloud computing promises even more efficiencies and savings by enabling adopters to shift business activities to a database-as-a-service model.

Solution
A 24x7 industry requires a data center partner that operates on the same type of schedule, providing continuous support and service. As a specialist serving mission-critical enterprises of all sizes, IO provides the engineering, redundancy, and network services that enterprises in the ultra-competitive transportation and logistics industry need to ensure customer satisfaction and long-term business success. IO provides highly relaible and cost-effective data center services and offers a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Learn more on how IO can help.