Latisys, a leading international provider of hybrid cloud hosting and data center solutions, has made an IT infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) agreement with Emerald Expositions.

Previously owned by the Nielsen Company, Emerald had served as Nielsen's trade show division until it was acquired by Onex Partners in 2013 to form Emerald Expositions.

The acquisition included certain requirements and deadlines for establishing Emerald as an independent business -- including the complete separation of its IT infrastructure from Nielsen.

Focused on rapid business growth, both organically and via acquisitions, the new Emerald Expositions needed a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure that can easily synthesize and accommodate new and disparate IT environments.

Following a thorough evaluation of leading IaaS providers, Emerald chose Latisys for its ability to rapidly move and re-establish Emerald's systems as part of a comprehensive IT infrastructure solution built upon Latisys' enterprise-grade and compliant Cloud-enabled Systems Infrastructure (CESI) and delivered from Latisys' ultra-secure data center in Irvine, Ca.

In a matter of weeks, Latisys was supporting all of Emerald's backend systems and powering Emerald's trade show and exposition services for large corporate clients.

Latisys also serves as the backbone for Emerald's enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The company will add resiliency by deploying Latisys' Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution from Latisys' data center in Ashburn, Va.

"Emerald Expositions was created literally overnight with an immediate need to establish a highly secure, high performance IT infrastructure to power our critical backend systems," said Bill Charles, Chief Information Officer, Emerald Expositions. "Latisys was instrumental in getting our systems up and into production -- enabling us to rapidly move our applications from the previous environment onto the Latisys platform in a way that was completely seamless and transparent to our customers."

With security as a priority, Latisys engages external audit firms to perform assessments in support of customers' diverse compliance requirements.

These accredited examinations span SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI DSS and HIPAA, affirming Latisys' commitment to meet the highest standards for availability and security.

"Emerald Expositions is a high-growth enterprise that requires a combination of performance, flexibility and speed to market," said Pete Stevenson, CEO, Latisys. "Latisys is committed to serving as an extension of Emerald's IT team, and they can count on both our infrastructure and our team of experts to deliver."

With high-density data centers located in every U.S. time zone, Latisys' national reach enables multi-site redundancy, managed backup and secure disaster recovery including cloud-based DR solutions.

Latisys' Tier III facilities are designed for the business continuity of mission-critical operations, offering the power densities, cooling, backbone network and managed services with an eye toward reducing capital expenditures for storage and ongoing maintenance.