Vapour Cloud powers new co-location service for Zest4

Unified Communications specialist Zest4 has migrated its on-premise estate to a co-location facility in Manchester, thanks to a new collaboration with Elland-based Vapour Cloud.

The relationship began when the Cheshire-headquartered firm commenced its search for a partner to deliver a private network service that would underpin its critical systems. As the preferred wholesale provider of 8x8 cloud voice and with growth plans on the horizon, Zest4 sought a new secure location with high resilience, to house its four servers off-site.

Familiar with Vapour’s industry reputation, the team went on to invest in co-location using one of Vapour’s five ISO27001 accredited data centres, plus two managed circuits, high bandwidth connectivity both to the internet and back to the core, and private access into Vapour’s Veeam backup.

The result is a robust disaster recovery strategy, coupled with 99.99% uptime, that will future-proof the business moving forwards.

Commenting on the collaboration, Zest4’s head of technology Stephen Ridgway said: “As we strive to support a growing number of partners – and deliver even more functionality to our base – it is crucial that our organisation is never held back by uptime constraints. Likewise, as a company with a keen eye on the future, we need to devise and roll out robust disaster recovery plans that will safeguard our business continuity should the unexpected happen.

“The move to a secure, private data centre made perfect sense, and the Vapour wrap – complete with connectivity, co-location and backup – fulfilled our requirements entirely.”

Tim Mercer, CEO of Vapour Cloud, added: “We’ve invested more than £2m in our ultra-resilient MPLS networks to date, and by interconnecting with all the Tier 1 carriers we power connectivity for the full breadth of multichannel, business-critical applications.

“The fact that these networks are owned, run and managed by our own engineers, gives organisations such as Zest4 the peace of mind that they are protected by a resilient, SLA-focused solution.”

Founded in 2013, Zest4 employs 40 staff and serves more than 350 partners throughout the UK.