IronOrbit: A Paradigm Shift in Cloud Services

Alexander Saca, CEO

There is no contending the game-changing potential of cloud. With a market heading toward $191 billion by 2020, the cloud is the organizational bedrock driving digital businesses. Yet moving the entire business IT to the cloud is a feat easier said than done. Organizations are constantly daunted by data security and control issues that cloud poses, not to mention that any disruption in connectivity and speed can cause major setbacks for companies that depend on the cloud for computational services. In such times what organizations need is a completely secure and scalable cloud service, the very basis of what IronOrbit stands for.

As a cloud hosting company that provides an all-in-one integrated cloud infrastructure model alongside best-in-class managed services, IronOrbit is breaking all barriers in traditional cloud approaches. With IronOrbit, organizations across the board can finally put an end to all their 'cloud woes' and expect secure and reliable access to all businesses data and applications from anywhere. CIO Applications got together for an engaging discourse with Alexander Saca, CEO of IronOrbit to get a better vision of his company that is bringing a marked shift in cloud computing.

Can you throw some light on the inception of the company and how it all began?

Back in 1997, we started as a company called SACA Technologies, a managed IT services provider. Soon we began offering data hosting and data center services, so in a way we were offering cloud services even before it was officially called the cloud! After a point, however, we noticed that our clients were becoming more mobile, and there was a subsequent need for their desktops and network to become more mobile, not just their files or emails.

So in 2005, we introduced onthenetOffice, an all-inclusive, hosted network, which combined desktops, applications, and servers into a single hosted solution. This allowed clients to not only access their data and applications from anywhere and any device, but it was also much faster, secure, and reliable than their local network. What’s more is that every time we introduced clients to our all-in-one solution, their reaction was 'this is the magic bullet we have been waiting for.'

But IronOrbit wasn't going to stop at that.

Given our inclination to be leading-edge, in 2014, we further enhanced onthenetOffice, expanded our cloud footprint, and built IronOrbit—the most robust cloud desktop platform on the market.

Today, IronOrbit has carved a niche for itself as the premier supplier of cloud-hosted IT infrastructure. On that note, can you give us a brief idea about your solutions portfolio?

As mentioned, our primary offering is an end-to-end cloud solution that combines a business’s entire existing IT, whether desktops, servers, and applications into a single solution, and all this at a flat monthly fee.

For organizations looking to improve performance and remote working, IronOrbit's hosted desktops and application hosting services ensure complete uptime and real-time collaboration from anywhere in the world at superior speed. Our solutions are designed to get an organization's desktops and applications up and running in seconds, and we also cover complete support services from maintenance to repairs.

We’re constantly updating both our hardware and software offerings to ensure that our clients always have the latest and greatest in technology

Taking desktop hosting to the next level is our expansive desktop-as-a-service that covers all backend responsibilities such as storage, backup, security, upgrades and much more. Over the years, our next-gen services have won over prestigious universities, prominent businesses, and federal governments. For instance, we worked with Kaviza, a provider of desktop virtualization solutions to develop their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure-in-a-box technology. This product made quite a splash and later Kaviza was acquired by Citrix.

Another compelling offering is our Office 365 for Business with Orbital Support bundles that include all the migration, configuration, and IT support a business can possibly need. Our team comprises a large number of certified Microsoft experts who are available round-the-clock, 24/7/365. Apart from being a Microsoft partner, we are also certified with all the major cloud providers.

What would you say are some of the top challenges that CIOs face with the cloud these days and how can your all-in-one solution help?

Over the recent years, we have seen business owners, CTOs, and CIOs become more focused on two primary areas of the cloud: security and control.

The biggest skepticism surrounding IT and cloud globally has always been security, and at IronOrbit we have gone through great lengths to ensure a client's applications are fully secured at all times. Our multilayer approach includes advanced threat detection firewalls, IDS/ IPS, network and OS level antivirus, two-factor authentication, 24x7x365 security monitoring, all the way to physical security at our Tier 4 data centers.

For administrators looking for complete visibility into their cloud infrastructure, we have built an online portal from the ground up that gives clients the control they demand.

Platforms like AWS and Azure are great, but firms spend countless hours learning how to use and maintain them. We make things simple by setting up the backend for our clients and offering them a single pane of glass view. Administrators have full administrative rights and can view and change any aspect of their infrastructure.

Given your state-of-the-art cloud services, IronOrbit's clientele comprises some of the biggest names in the industry. Could you tell us about some of them?

We’ve worked with UCLA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Northwestern University, and American Red Cross among a host of other well-known organizations.

With our latest big deployment, we empowered a prominent architectural firm to run AutoCAD from their cloud desktops. The client had been looking and looking for a company that could deliver cloud-based CAD desktops with local workstation-like performance, and they could never find one—until they came across IronOrbit.

After in-depth R&D, we built the quintessential cloud-based CAD desktop. The firm could do away with their $3,000 workstations and high-powered graphics card, and are now running AutoCAD from anywhere with cloud—even from their iPads!

What’s the future looking like for IronOrbit? Any big plans in store?

For one, we are constantly updating both our hardware and software offerings to ensure that our clients always have the latest and greatest in technology. We also recently expanded our data center footprint into Dallas, TX, giving us even closer proximity to our clients. We recently upgraded all of our clients to full flash-based arrays backed with the latest in computing power and graphics processors. We’re currently scaling our global operations teams, data centers, and online portal to support our projected growth in 2019.