Online Tech expands Midwestern reach with Kansas City acquisition

Online Tech, an Ann Arbor company providing cloud, backup, and disaster recovery services to a variety of clients, is reaching into new markets and diversifying its data centers with the April 19 acquisition of Kansas City, Mo.-based Echo Cloud.

The Ann Arbor company began talks about an acquisition in January but needed several weeks to walk Echo Cloud’s clients through the transition. Online Tech CEO Yan Ness says making the acquisition a seamless process for Echo Cloud’s clients was important.

Ness says the acquisition made sense for both sides for a number of reasons. Ness says the main advantage for Online Tech is that it gets access to a new market in the Kansas City area, as well as Echo Cloud’s “robust” data management product.

The advantage for former Echo Cloud customers is that Online Tech has a much broader range of products to offer Kansas City clients, including data hosting that is compliant with health care and credit industry standards of security. Echo Cloud’s existing clients will now be able to access their accounts through Online Tech’s portal.

With the addition of Echo Cloud’s two Kansas City-area data centers, Online Tech now has seven data centers spread across Missouri, Indiana, and Michigan, and that geographical diversity is another big advantage.

“When you’re doing disaster recovery, companies want some distance between centers, so they’ll be on two different power systems and experiencing two different weather systems,” Ness says.

Companies can store their data on one system in one of the company’s Great Lakes data centers and have a secondary system in Kansas City, or vice versa.

“When they’re located a good chunk of miles away from each other, there’s confidence that you can handle a lot of different kinds of disasters,” Ness says.

Sarah Rigg is a freelance writer and editor in Ypsilanti Township. You may reach her at sarahrigg1@gmail.com.