Rackspace revealed Thursday that it has entered an agreement with Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) to host its web presence in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. MNAO’s websites and the MyMazda social app for Android and iOS attract 2.1 million unique visitors each month.

The car maker migrated its services to Rackspace because its previous provider, a “large outsourcing” firm that was unnamed, failed to handle traffic spikes effectively. MNAO was forced to spend extra on dedicated gear to avoid diminishing returns from ad campaigns.

Mazda eliminated this economic pain point by deploying a VMware-based private cloud environment that integrates with dedicated servers hosted by Rackspace. The custom implementation delivers improved SLAs and includes Rackspace Critical Application Services, a so-called early warning platform that utilizes sensory data to provide users with deep visibility into system health.

Rackspace boasts that its solutions helped Mazda sail through a 50 percent traffic spike that followed its recent ad campaign on CNN.

“We are excited to work with the Mazda team to help them manage the health and effectiveness of its applications and rich-media offering,” wrote Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates. “Better application performance means better business performance – it’s a simple equation. With Rackspace’s 100% network uptime and Fanatical Support, Critical Application Services gives Mazda access to analytics and data metrics for its sites internationally.”

The cloud provider’s latest customer victory represents a notable milestone in the rise of the Industrial Internet, a term coined by GE to describe the gathering and analysis of machine data. Solutions like Rackspace Critical Application Services will continue to gain traction as connected devices – including smartphones, cars and jets – become increasingly automated and data-driven. Discussing the role of storage in the automation of consumer products and the future of self-driven cars, Engates states:

“Everything will have a connection to cloud services, as the cloud is the back end that makes it all possible.  Almost every consumer product and service will soon be connected to the cloud – the power meter in your home that’s connected to the smart grid,  the camera with streaming photos, or the WiFi in your car.   All of these devices  will constantly stream to the Internet and store data in the cloud.  And it goes beyond traditional consumer electronic products. The connection to the cloud will be industrial products in the workplace, the appliances in our home, and the cars in our garage.  A car manufacturer can now know how you drive, where you go, and what music you like. It can think ahead for you based on your habits and make smarter suggestions for you ahead of time. Eventually, the connection to the cloud will make possible the self-driving car as the data required for such a capability will certainly be stored and retrieved from the cloud, and much of it in real time. Companies like Tesla are already making heavy use of the cloud to provide their customers an always-on connection to the company for maintenance, battery alerts, and analytics about the fleet so the product can improve over time.”