CHICAGO, Sept. 22, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Henry Ford museum is using Hostway Virtual Private Cloud, powered by Azure, to host the entire IT infrastructure and massive collection of digital assets associated with its critically-acclaimed website.
The Henry Ford, located in Dearborn, Michigan, houses artifacts from 300 years of American history. While it attracts more than 1.7 million visitors a year, an additional three million visit the Henry Ford online at www.thehenryford.org.
Since only five percent of The Henry Ford’s 26 million objects can be physically displayed, the website allows curators to digitize the objects that people can’t see at the museum. This broadens the educational mission of the facility and creates a richer experience for the visitor.
As an extension of the physical location, it was necessary that the website work flawlessly and in concert with the curatorial vision, design and mission of the staff, while providing a secure, flexible and familiar environment for the IT professionals managing the infrastructure.
“Hostway, along with Perficient Digital, helped engineer the entire infrastructure of our digital museum, enabling us to open our collection to the entire world via the Internet,” said Kevin Cubberly, director of Information Technology at The Henry Ford. “This is a business-critical application. We needed a Virtual Private Cloud on which we could spin up and spin down resources on demand. And as a current Microsoft customer, it was natural that we integrate with Microsoft Azure and that’s what Hostway delivered.”
Hostway has recently expanded its portfolio to include multiple landing zones – ranging from Virtual Private Cloud to Microsoft Azure Public Cloud – all wrapped in proven Hostway managed support. This allows IT organizations to select the best environment for their unique needs and application requirements.
“The Henry Ford Museum has an amazing collection of American History artifacts, and we’re honored to work with Perficient Digital to architect and implement a platform capable of exposing a larger percentage of the collection to a larger audience,” said John Enright, chief technology officer, Hostway. “Our Virtual Private Cloud platform is uniquely suited for exactly this type of workload, since it can be seamlessly scaled as both the audience and library content continue to grow, plus our team of Azure certified engineers are there at all times to ensure that the online visitor experience is just as stable and impactful as the in-person experience.”
Aziz Benmalek, vice president, worldwide Hosting and Cloud Services, Microsoft Corp. said, “The Henry Ford is an example of how organizations are migrating existing on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud for greater scalability and flexibility. With Azure, customers benefit from familiar toolsets, APIs and portals that make integration with their existing Microsoft environments easy and straightforward.”
A video showing how the Henry Ford teams with Hostway is available at https://www.hostway.com/videos/the-henry-ford-launches-with-private-cloud-video.php.
For more information on Hostway’s Virtual Private Cloud offerings, go to https://www.hostway.com/virtual-private-cloud.
About Hostway Services, Inc.
Hostway Services, Inc. is a leader in managed cloud infrastructure and application hosting solutions for asset-lite, mid-market and e-commerce focused organizations and the companies that serve them. Its team of engineers in North America and Europe deliver reliable, secure and scalable private cloud, managed server, and hybrid cloud hosting solutions to over 200,000 customers across six geographically diverse datacenters. Hostway’s core products include Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Web Hosting and Email and Applications.