Gallagher-Kaiser is a Michigan-based supplier of paint finishing systems, commercial HVAC and mechanical automotive systems. Since its establishment in 1952, Gallagher-Kaiser has remained a privately-owned company with a distinguished history of expertise within the industrial process industry. Operating from its offices in Troy, Michigan; Detroit, Michigan; and Monterrey, Mexico; Gallagher-Kaiser offers its customers broad and deep expertise across a wide array of markets. Today, Gallagher-Kaiser is the world’s top automotive paint finishing supplier providing leading automotive manufacturers and suppliers around the world with turnkey solutions to their toughest challenges. Performing everything from design conception to the management of complex paint finishing systems, Gallagher-Kaiser has repeatedly been recognized by General Motors as a Supplier of the Year.
Fast, targeted IT infrastructure, data continuity and restoration are essential to helping Gallagher-Kaiser’s engineers manage dozens of large-scale projects concurrently without interruption. The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), which publishes global standards to support harmonized business practices for automakers that must be met by manufacturers to work with American car makers, recently issued its first security and general computing controls guidelines to standardize Cyber Security Third Party Information Security Requirements (TPISR). Automotive industry suppliers that wish to continue serving original equipment manufacturers—like GM, Mercedes, Chrysler, Ford and BMW—must quickly prove their ability to comply.
Gallagher-Kaiser needed a data protection solution that would reliably perform, recover fast and pinpoint recovered work from any of its projects within a quarter of an hour’s window of time after an outage.
The new AIAG standards include recommendations from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) specific to compliance. Otava provides the secure, compliant hybrid cloud solutions demanded by clients in compliance-sensitive industries. By actively aggregating best-of-breed cloud companies and investing in people, tools, and processes, Otava’s global footprint continues to expand. The company provides its customers in highly regulated disciplines with a clear path to transformation through its effective solutions and broad portfolio of hybrid cloud, data protection, disaster recovery, security and colocation services, all championed by an exceptional support team. With its proven record of passing compliance audits with 100% success, Gallagher-Kaiser chose Otava as a natural fit to meet TPISR standards for security and availability.
Otava’s Cloud Backup, Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings deliver enterprise-grade solutions that simplify the complexity associated with planning, building and maintaining secondary and tertiary sites. Otava takes the complexity that comes with constructing, operating, testing and maintaining a disaster recovery infrastructure and makes it simple.
Otava created a custom solution for Gallagher-Kaiser utilizing a Zerto software platform to deliver continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. The solution meets Gallagher-Kaiser’s unique data protection need so it meets all of the requirements set forth by the team and the AIAG.
“Beyond meeting TPISR standards, one of my top priorities was finding a partner that was close enough to call upon when needed yet operating on a different power grid from our primary operations to mitigate outage risk,” said Rick Bertoncin, head of technology and security at Gallagher-Kaiser. “Otava was able to meet these criteria with an exceptionally collaborative development process, allowing our network engineers to articulate our requirements so they could help us find the right solution.”
The combination of Otava’s experience and the expertise of Zerto provides Gallagher-Kaiser with the data protection services essential to working with elite members of the automotive industry like GM. Gallagher-Kaiser engineers also now have off-site backup and can access their work remotely, easily find recovered work within a complex environment, and do so without negatively impacting performance for regular system users.
