Hohman Plating has been delivering precision metal finishing and coating solutions from Dayton, Ohio since 1918. Over a century of manufacturing experience means operational continuity isn’t just a preference — it’s a requirement.

As Hohman’s business grew, so did the demand on its infrastructure. Critical manufacturing applications were running on aging server hardware that was approaching end-of-life. Maintenance complexity was increasing, security requirements were evolving, and the infrastructure had no sustainable long-term path. A refresh was inevitable. The question was how to do it without an extended disruption to production.

The Objective

Move critical manufacturing workloads off aging on-premises virtual infrastructure and into a secure, low-latency private cloud environment — without major disruptions to day-to-day operations or introducing unnecessary risk during the transition.

The Challenge

Hohman’s infrastructure situation is common in manufacturing: systems build up over time, running reliably enough, but without a sustainable long-term path forward. The server environment was headed toward end-of-life, and the cost and complexity of an on-premises hardware refresh wasn’t the direction Hohman wanted to go.

Hohman also evaluated the public cloud, but ultimately that was set aside. Latency requirements, licensing complexity, security considerations, and unpredictable long-term costs made a fully public cloud approach impractical for the workloads involved.

What Hohman needed wasn’t just a new place to run virtual machines. They needed an infrastructure partner who understood the needs of a manufacturing operation — predictable costs, strong security, low-latency connectivity, and support from a team already familiar with what’s running and why it matters.

The Solution

DataYard partnered with Hohman Plating to migrate critical manufacturing workloads into DataYard’s VIP private cloud platform. From the start, the migration strategy was built around operational continuity — systems transitioned without long-term disruptions to the manufacturing floor.

The initial engagement covered cloud hosting, infrastructure management, backup services, secure migration support, compute and storage resources, and Microsoft licensing management.

Following the successful migration, the relationship expanded. DataYard deployed fiber internet connectivity to Hohman facilities via a diverse carrier and active traffic balancing between providers, so a single carrier outage wouldn’t take operations offline.
Additional work included domain controller rebuilds, line-of-business system modernization, expanded disaster recovery services, and long-term storage consulting.

Security was addressed at multiple layers: next-generation hosted firewall policies, encrypted tunnels between on-premises systems and DataYard infrastructure, and 24x7x365 monitoring and management by DataYard engineers.

The Result

Hohman Plating now runs the majority of their manufacturing systems on DataYard’s private cloud infrastructure platform, built with the reliability, security, and low-latency performance manufacturing workloads require, without going through a disruptive migration process to get there.

The organization shed its dependence on aging hardware, simplified ongoing infrastructure management, and strengthened its security posture. Redundant fiber connectivity distributes traffic across providers during normal operations and automatically fails over if a carrier goes down. Backup and disaster recovery systems are regularly tested. And the team supporting the environment came in already familiar with the operational requirements of the business.

For a company that’s been running since 1918, the objective wasn’t modernization for its own sake. It was to create an infrastructure foundation built for long-term reliability and security.