Diesel Direct hired VirtuStream to host its data and slightly upgraded versions of its software so employees could work from the same office using the same interfaces and workflow they always had.

The only difference was that the data and apps were all housed in a data center outside Washington, D.C. and replicated to another "This is not a company that's eager to pay for the latest and greatest IT if they didn't really need it, but they were willing to pay so that [redundancy]," Callow says. "If something happened at the headquarters, or to the VirtuStream's data center outside Washington, another in San Francisco could pick up the load and the company could keep invoicing."

From an operational IT perspective, the biggest benefit of signing up with VirtuStream is the rapid, repeatable changes in capacity VirtuStream allows its customers, Callow says.

Diesel Direct's business is bursty--doubling or tripling from one day to the next, changing with the flow of invoices.