While many companies sell cloud services to track and manage customers, Aquent's staffing business is based on providing better services, so the company's software development team decided to port its existing system and looked to host it on an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud.

To reduce latency and ensure maximum availability, Aquent maintained databases in colocation facilities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Yet, the company feared that data maintained in those systems would quickly become fragmented, says Bolick.

"If you were in your office in Hong Kong, and you needed to find a resource for a specialty in Hong Kong, you would have to search the database in Sydney, but also the databases in New York and London," says Bolick.

The company hired technology-services firm Distributed Logic of Woburn, Mass. to create a solution, a multi-master database replication system that could synchronize data between the three operational databases.