Our journey to the cloud: the Artmotion story

Artmotion, co-founded by Mateo Meier, has been around for almost two decades now, but it wasn’t always a cloud security company. 

Over the years, the business has evolved with technology, and the demands of the marketplace to serve various medium to large multinational corporations, including leading Fortune 500 companies, based in over 30 countries.

If we look back, 20 years ago, the internet had approximately 304 million users. Fast-forward to 2020, and we now have over 4.6 billion users (or 58.7% of the planet’s population) with a plethora of unique demands. 

Meier started his entrepreneurial journey in his 20s while he was attending university. At that time, he started his first company to help pay his tuition fees. That turned out to be the first in a long line of successful businesses.

In 2001, Artmotion started as a traditional shared hosting provider renting one server from IBM. Shared hosting refers to shared web hosting services where several websites share a server connected to the internet. 

This approach helped customers reduce their hosting expenses by sharing server maintenance costs and more with other clients. In 2003, the company acquired Cyberhost, a competitor, and doubled in size with this merger.

We moved our setup from IBM’s data centers to Switzerland, where all data has been stored ever since. Soon, with the changing needs of the client base, the company outgrew the shared hosting business model and evolved into a dedicated hosting services provider. 

Dedicating hosting allows organizations to rent the entire server that’s housed in a data center. In this scenario, Artmotion provided the server equipment and handled the administration, maintenance, and security services. 

Unlike shared hosting, this arrangement is more flexible and adaptable for clients as they have complete control over their server. They can also scale their resources up or down based on demand and make changes without physically updating components.

In 2011, Artmotion entered into a joint venture with EveryWare and purchased a stake in the company. Around 2010, almost 80% of the revenue was generated by physical servers (non cloud services). Today, 75% of the revenue is driven by cloud services.

By 2012, the company started morphing into a cloud security services provider. This approach helped fortify security protocols within the cloud. 

For example, this helped better secure digital assets through military-grade encryption at the storage level. Extra layers of security were also added through network separation, customer segmentation, and more. 

Cloud computing has seen exponential growth as it helps enterprises retire on-premise legacy systems and leverage high-performance database servers used by multinationals, cost-effectively. According to research, the cloud computing market was worth about $24.65 billion in 2010. By the end of this year, it’s estimated to be worth as much as $150 billion.

Today, Artmotion maintains a strong presence in two state-of-the-art data centers located in the city of Zürich. Our office is located in the town of Zug, also known as "Crypto Valley." 

To learn more about Artmotion and our multi-cloud security services, request a commitment-free call back now.