Month: June 2013

You already know that virtual desktops are web-based IT solutions that appear and perform just like locally-installed Windows desktop operating systems. You’re also aware that virtual desktops increase cost-efficiency, security, reliability, and manageability. But do you know why you should select IronOrbit as your hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provider? Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Our experience. We have more than 15 years’ experience providing hosted solutions. Our hosted VDI customers range from small businesses (accounting firms, physicians’ offices, and law firms) to 5,000-plus-user universities and government research labs.
2. Our partnerships. We maintain partnerships with all the leading VDI developers, including Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, and Wyse. Our virtual desktops were actually developed in close coordination with the Citrix VDI-in-a-Box development team.
3. Our dedicated servers. Only your hosted desktops will be present on your dedicated servers with an IronOrbit Hosted VDI. This ensures that there won’t be any other “tenants” on your server that could hog the CPU, RAM, or HDD or destabilize or decrease the security of the hardware.
4. Our flexibility. We support ANY number of users, ANY amount of storage space, and ANY Windows-compatible application with our hosted VDI solutions. We also give users the opportunity to choose between a Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktop experience.
5. Our other solutions. In addition to hosted VDI, we also offer hosted applications, Exchange hosting, hosted Microsoft SharePoint, hosted QuickBooks, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). You can host all of your solutions with IronOrbit rather than deal with multiple (sometimes incompatible) hosting companies and platforms.
6. Our reliability. We feel confident enough in our ability to prevent unplanned downtime to offer a 100% uptime guarantee.
7. Our support. We provide 24x7x365 North America-based technical support. Our technicians are available to assist you via telephone, email, or online chat. For our Latin American customers, we also have a number of fluent Spanish speakers on staff.
8. Our security. Our extensive Orbital Security System protects our hosted solutions with access control (physical security, firewalls, file encryption, audit trail, content filter, and IPS/IDS), anti-malware (antivirus, SPAM blocker, and antispyware), and data loss prevention (data backups and business continuity planning).
9. Our performance. Due to our Atomic Speed Technology-backed hosting architecture, our hosted VDIs perform at least as well as a locally-installed operating system and are as scalable as any public cloud solution.
10. Our cost-efficiency. We charge only a low, flat monthly fee for our hosted VDI—meaning not only the solution but also the technical support, security, Atomic Speed Technology, data backup, and bandwidth that come with it.

Start saving today by contacting an IronOrbit sales representative, or by visiting our website and signing up for a free 30 day trial!

Signing up for IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting isn’t just for businesses that already have a locally-installed version of QuickBooks and feel the need to switch to a more convenient and cost-efficient hosted deployment. IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks is of equal benefit to businesses that have never deployed any version of QuickBooks, too.

QuickBooks is a suite of popular and easy-to-use financial applications; it helps businesses to keep an eye on and analyze their expenses, invoices, bills, inventory, payroll, and taxes. There are four different versions of QuickBooks: Basic, Pro, Premier, and Enterprise. QuickBooks Pro is for small-and-medium-sized businesses that perform a lot of accounting tasks and/or process a lot of transactions (financial services firms and retailers, for example); QuickBooks Premier specializes in industry-specific (construction, manufacturing, nonprofit, professional services, and retail) accounting features; and QuickBooks Enterprise adds more advanced inventory management features and extra storage.

QuickBooks makes life easier for whoever does the accounting in an organization, but that isn’t all that it does. It also provides everyone in the organization with up-to-date financial data and projections. For example, QuickBooks can be used by owners and managers to evaluate the effectiveness of an ongoing marketing campaign or to gauge the success of a new product or service.

Despite all of QuickBooks’s unique and highly effective features, it’s also extremely easy to use. For example, Kathy Yakal of PC Magazine said in her review of QuickBooks Premier Edition 2013 that it was “the easiest [accounting software] overall to learn and master.”  TopTenREVIEWS, similarly, had this to say about QuickBooks Pro 2013: “It is the easiest-to-use accounting software we have tested and does not require formal accounting training to master.” According to Intuit, QuickBooks’s developer, the software had 3.7 million users in 2008 and currently controls 85% of the small business accounting software market.

Meanwhile, there are many reasons to select IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks over a locally-installed version of the software, including:

• Mobility. IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks can be accessed from anywhere with any web-enabled device (including not only desktops and laptops, but also tablets and smartphones like the iPad and iPhone).
• Security. IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks is protected by 24x7x365 security monitoring and diligently-managed access control and antivirus systems. In addition, we don’t force our clients to share a physical server; we host QuickBooks on private, single-tenant, dedicated servers only.
• Flexibility. We support all four versions of QuickBooks (upgrade or downgrade at any time), as well as all of the third-party add-ons and plugins other hosted solutions providers are not capable of supporting.
• Low, fixed costs. IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks cost only a low, flat monthly fee. They also don’t require the purchase of any on-site servers or the hiring of any on-site IT personnel.

Host QuickBooks with IronOrbit by contacting one of our sales representatives at [email protected] or at (888) 753-5060 today!

IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions are more cost-effective than an on-site IT infrastructure of PC desktops and servers. Critically, businesses don’t have to purchase any on-site servers or hire any on-premise IT personnel with IronOrbit Desktop Hosting. Downtime and data loss are also less likely to occur with our Hosted Desktop Solutions than on-site IT infrastructures.

Unfortunately, some businesses fail to consider these and other hidden costs of a PC-based infrastructure when evaluating their IT options. They only consider the fact that a PC has an upfront cost of x amount and that hardware lasts an average of three to five years, and then compare that to the monthly costs of y amount of an IronOrbit Hosted Desktop multiplied by between 36 and 60 (months) to get a total cost of z.  The end result is that these businesses end up sticking with an on-site IT infrastructure because PCs are more familiar to them and there isn’t that much of a difference between x and z.

The value of x and z aren’t as similar if you consider the hidden costs of PCs, however:

• Server costs. A server is a necessary component of any on-site IT infrastructure. It provides authorized employees with access to business-critical files and applications. Unfortunately for businesses with on-site IT infrastructures, servers are also expensive to purchase and maintain. Each server will add several thousand dollars to the costs of a PC-based infrastructure. Meanwhile, we already include the costs of purchasing and maintaining our servers in our hosted desktops’ flat, monthly subscription rate.
• Maintenance costs. Most PCs need to be repaired or have a part replaced at some point during their lifecycle. Someone needs to be hired to take care of these repairs—either a $100/hour freelance IT repairman or a $50,000/year on-site IT specialist. IronOrbit Hosted Desktops, on the other hand, never have to be repaired, and our clients don’t have to repair or replace their end-user devices (desktops, laptops, thin clients, smartphones, or tablets) as much or as soon as they normally would because our servers handle 100% of the processing and storage requirements of our hosted desktops.
• Downtime and data loss. For every minute of unplanned infrastructure downtime, businesses lose $5,000. A single data breach incident costs businesses an average of $5.4 million.

Most on-site IT infrastructures are less secure and reliable than Ironorbit Hosted Desktops. We monitor our Hosted Desktops 24x7x365; secure them with firewalls, IPS/IDS, antivirus, SPAM blocker, and a content filter; and back them up daily. It’s beyond the IT budget of most companies to provide this level of protection for an on-site infrastructure. In any case, PCs are more decentralized than hosted desktops, and have to be secured and managed individually—a more costly and less effective form of oversight.

To reduce your IT costs and eliminate the hassles of IT infrastructure management, sign up for IronOrbit Desktop Hosting today. For more information on this subject, visit our hosted desktop pricing page or our hosted desktop costs page, or reach out to a helpful IronOrbit sales representative at [email protected] or (888) 753-5060.

Between meeting with clients, performing calculations, inputting data, and filling out and submitting forms, accountants usually don’t have the time to manage and maintain their IT infrastructure—even if their IT infrastructure amounts to no more than a single PC and a handful of applications. Recently, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants relaxed the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for small businesses, which should help to free up the schedules and reduce the workload of many accountants. However, signing up for cloud hosting from IronOrbit is still the best way for accountants to save time, stay focused, and maintain a reliable and secure IT infrastructure all at once.

IronOrbit Cloud Hosting Solutions aren’t just web-based applications and virtual desktops. Our staff of knowledgeable and experienced IT professionals manages, protects, and optimizes them around-the-clock; accountants don’t have to manage or maintain them at all. They don’t require the purchase of any on-site servers or the hiring of any on-premise IT personnel, either. Each IronOrbit Cloud Hosting Solution includes:

• 24x7x365 North America-based technical support (via phone, email, and online chat)
• Off-site data backups, performed daily
• Enterprise-level data security (firewall, antivirus, SPAM blocker, file encryption, IPS/IDS, and content filter)

Other advantages of selecting IronOrbit Cloud Hosting Solutions include:

• Assisted migration. IronOrbit makes it easy for accountants to switch to our Cloud Hosting Solutions from their current IT infrastructure. As part of the setup process, our migration experts will help accountants transfer their data and licenses to our servers. To prevent the migration process from slowing down the accountants’ current IT infrastructure, we can schedule transfers for before or after the accountants’ normal business hours.
• Customized solutions. No other hosting provider has a more diverse lineup of hosted solutions than IronOrbit. Our offerings include Cloud Server Hosting, Hosted Desktop Solutions, QuickBooks Hosting, and Application Hosting. Each of these hosted solutions can also be customized according to how many users and how much processing power, storage capacity, and bandwidth are required by the accounting firm.
• Private servers. The servers of IronOrbit are single-tenant, dedicated servers. This ensures the privacy and security of the accountants’ data, and will help them comply with regulations such as GLBA and Sarbanes-Oxley.
• The world’s fastest hosted solutions. Our Cloud Hosting Solutions outperform locally-installed IT solutions, and it only takes a few seconds to deploy many of them. The unrivaled performance of our Cloud Hosting Solutions is due to Atomic Speed Technology, our custom-built, ultra-fast hosting architecture. To evaluate the speed of our Cloud Hosting Solutions for yourself, sign up for our free 30-day trial.

IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions are more cost-effective, secure, reliable, manageable, and scalable than on-site IT infrastructures. Businesses don’t have to purchase any on-site servers or hire any on-premise IT personnel—with IronOrbit Desktop Hosting, all they need to access their virtual hosted desktop solution are web-enabled devices such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones. IronOrbit protects our hosted desktops with Orbital Security, which involves a firewall, antivirus, antispyware, SPAM blocker, patch management, file encryption, IPS/IDS, and content filter. The features of our hosted desktops also include: managed daily backups, AST Speed Technology (a speed and scalability optimizer), 24x7x365 infrastructure maintenance and technical support, and our industry-best 100% uptime guarantee.

Contact one of our helpful sales representatives for a free demo to see our hosted desktops perform in real time, or sign up for a 30 day free trial to try them out yourself. If you’re looking for some hard data about the benefits of IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions, on the other hand, take a look at these metrics:

• Average overall cost reduction: 23%. According to a recent survey, businesses that switched to a hosted IT infrastructure lowered their IT costs by 23%.

• Average productivity gains from IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions: 54 min/day. According to a recent study of government workers, giving employees the ability to work from mobile devices added 54 minutes of productivity to each of their days. IronOrbit Hosted Desktops are web-based solutions that can be accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected device, including tablets and smartphones.

• Amount of unplanned downtime with IronOrbit Desktop Hosting: 0 min. CA Technologies estimated in 2011 that businesses around the world lose $26.5 billion in annual revenue from IT downtime. Another study found that downtime costs over $5,000 per minute. This means that hosting companies that offer 99.999% (5.2 minutes of downtime per year) or 99.99% (52 minutes of downtime per year) uptime guarantees consider it acceptable for their clients to lose $25,000 or $200,000 from IT downtime every year!

• Amount that IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solution users can expect to lose as a result of data breaches: $0. Data breaches cost about $5.4 million per incident or $188 per record. But IronOrbit users can expect thorough protection from malware and hackers with our Orbital Security System and 24x7x365 monitoring.

• Time IronOrbit users will spend managing the IT infrastructure of their hosted desktops: 0 min. IronOrbit builds, manages, and maintains the IT infrastructure of our hosted desktops. All users have to do is sign up and sign on.

• Total amount of users and storage space supported by IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions: Unlimited. Regardless of how many users or how much storage capacity you need, we can scale up our hosted desktops to support your IT requirements and preferences.

IronOrbit Virtual Desktops are web-based IT solutions that appear and perform just like a Windows desktop operating system.

The benefits of our virtual desktops include:

–They don’t require any on-site servers. You don’t have to purchase or maintain any on-site servers with a hosted VDI from IronOrbit. Your virtual desktops will be stored on the servers housed in our datacenters. The only hardware you’ll need to connect to your hosted desktop is a web-enabled device such as a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

-You can personalize them. With an IronOrbit Hosted VDI, each user is assigned his or her own virtual desktop. This virtual desktop will retain all of the user’s files, settings, and applications—just as if it were a locally-installed operating system.

-They are centralized. We host the virtual desktops of our hosted VDIs on a small number of interconnected servers. This way, they are more secure and easier and more cost-effective to manage.

In addition to these inherent benefits of IronOrbit Desktop Hosting, there are external technological and economic factors that tip the scales in favor of hosted VDIs as the ideal IT infrastructure. The top five reasons that businesses should select hosted VDIs as their next IT infrastructure are:

1. Your PCs may soon be obsolete… PC sales declined a record 14% from the year before in Q1 2013. Also, IDC predicts that tablets will pass PCs in sales by 2015. Though PCs aren’t going to disappear from the market any time soon, declining sales mean that manufacturers will be cutting back on support and R&D. Basing your IT infrastructure on devices with a diminishing shelf life isn’t a good idea.
2. …but the desktop OS is still a necessity. The desktop OS (or a virtual hosted desktop) is still the most effective and efficient way to get work done electronically. Vital programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and QuickBooks can’t be installed on Android and iOS mobile devices. (Though these programs can be accessed separately as hosted applications, with a virtual hosted desktop these applications can all be conveniently accessed from one place.)
3. The number of businesses using virtual desktops is rising. Gartner projects that the number of people using virtual hosted desktops will eventually rise to more than 49 million users. Meanwhile, Techaisle predicts that the amount that SMBs spend on VDIs will more than triple to $430 million by 2015, and VisionGain reports that more than 50% of US businesses are migrating or considering migrating to VDI in 2013. As with PCs but in reverse, the increase in the sales of VDIs will incite manufacturers and developers to invest more in support and R&D. These statistics also underline the fact that businesses need to sign up for desktop hosting now, before their competitors beat them to it.
4. Businesses need mobile IT. Mobility makes businesses more productive by letting employees work wherever and whenever they want. It also makes them more collaborative by allowing workers in different locations to share the same resources (files and applications). A hosted VDI is the perfect mobile IT infrastructure for businesses because it can be accessed from anywhere with any web-enabled device, yet it is also centralized, reliable, and secure.
5. Hosted VDIs are cost-effective. The economy rewards companies that are efficient and agile, so it’s important to minimize costs as much as possible. Fortunately, hosted VDIs are cost-effective because they don’t require you to purchase any on-site servers or hire any on-premise IT personnel; and they are better than on-site IT infrastructures at preventing data breaches and outages.

Contact IronOrbit to sign up for cloud hosting or desktop hosting today!

Over the years, IronOrbit has assisted hundreds of businesses in making the switch from paper-and-pencil bookkeeping or locally-installed accounting software to IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks. Switching to IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting won’t cost you a lot of time, money, or effort and won’t disrupt your current IT infrastructure.

Here’s what to expect from the shift to Hosted QuickBooks, depending on your current bookkeeping methods and what type of business you are:

• If you’re a paper-and-pencil bookkeeper. Even for people without much technical knowledge or experience, QuickBooks is a program that’s easy to learn and use. You can also print from IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks, so accountants that prefer to work with hard copies or that need to generate physical documents (receipts, invoices, checks, shipping labels, etc.) shouldn’t worry. Furthermore, QuickBooks is less time-consuming and mistake-prone than paper-and-pencil bookkeeping—it can perform advanced calculations and analyses in seconds that might take a person with a calculator several hours; it never makes mistakes; and its files are centrally stored and backed up daily, so its data can never be misplaced or accidentally destroyed.

• If you already use QuickBooks, but it’s a locally-installed version. One of the advantages of Hosted QuickBooks is that it can be accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected device. So instead of only being able to access your accounting applications at the office, as with a locally-installed QuickBooks, you can access your Hosted QuickBooks from places such as your home, a coffee shop, or a Wi-Fi-enabled airplane, and from devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Hosted QuickBooks also doesn’t require the purchase of any on-site servers. Furthermore, IronOrbit takes care of IT management by providing 24x7x365 technical support, around-the-clock performance monitoring, comprehensive Orbital Security, and managed data backups with its Hosted QuickBooks.

• If you’re a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Hosted QuickBooks lets CPAs work anywhere they want. With our fully-supported QuickBooks Hosting, IronOrbit takes care of IT management and lets CPAs focus on their work. Finally, CPAs can provide a customer with access to the Hosted QuickBooks and let the client input its own data, saving themselves the distraction and cost of multiple trips to the client’s office.

• If you’re a large business. The basic version of QuickBooks is designed primarily for CPAs and small businesses. However, there are also Pro, Premier, and Enterprise versions of QuickBooks. These versions of QuickBooks support a great number of simultaneous users and add features such as advanced reporting and inventory management. In addition to QuickBooks Hosting, IronOrbit offers QuickBooks ProHosting, QuickBooks Premier Hosting, and QuickBooks Enterprise Hosting.

Whether you’re a CPA, SMB, or a large company, sign up for hosted QuickBooks today by contacting an IronOrbit sales representative.

IronOrbit Virtual Desktops, web-based solutions that appear and perform just like Windows desktop operating systems, benefit companies of all types and sizes with their cost-efficiency, anywhere-availability, flexibility, security, and ease-of-use. They don’t require the purchase of any on-site servers or the hiring of any on-premise IT personnel. Users can access and utilize them from any Internet-connected device, including low-cost hardware such as refurbished desktop PCs and thin clients. IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions are centralized onto a small number of interconnected servers, which makes them easier to manage, monitor, and secure than desktop PCs. We back our Virtual Desktop Solutions with around-the-clock performance monitoring, 24x7x365 technical support, Orbital Security (which includes firewalls, antivirus, SPAM blocker, patch management, and IPS/IDS), and managed data backups.

In addition to these universal benefits of IronOrbit Virtual Desktop Solutions, there are also some advantages of Hosted Desktop Solutions that depend on a business’s type and size:

• Self-employed/home office. With a virtual desktop, a self-employed person can utilize Windows applications from any Internet-enabled location—coffee shops, fast food restaurants, libraries, etc.—without having to lug around a laptop. A hosted desktop will also save self-employed people money by extending the lifespan of their existing PC (IronOrbit Hosted Desktop Solutions are server-side processed, so the age or condition of the user’s device doesn’t matter) and/or by keeping them from ever having to purchase a PC at all (users can access their hosted desktop from a tablet or smartphone).

• Small businesses. Hosted desktops, by extending the lifespan of IT hardware and eliminating the need for small businesses to maintain an on-site IT infrastructure, significantly reduce small businesses’ IT costs. IronOrbit Virtual Desktop Solutions also don’t require any technical expertise in order to access or utilize them, so small businesses can focus on their work and not have to waste of their resources on IT management.

• Startups. A quick deployment, a scalable architecture, and no long term investments are the three things that the IT infrastructure of a startup needs to have. That’s because startups need to be able to release their products quickly and beat competitors and copycats to the market. They also need an IT infrastructure that can expand its processing power and storage capacity without having to be extensively reconstructed and customized. IronOrbit Virtual Desktop Solutions, fortunately, can be deployed in a matter of minutes; are fully-scalable; and don’t require any long-term investments.

To start benefiting from IronOrbit Desktop Hosting or to learn how your specific business can benefit from signing up for IronOrbit Hosted Desktops and Application Hosting, contact an IronOrbit sales representative today.

The most significant barrier for companies that want to switch to hosted QuickBooks isn’t cost or a lack of confidence in hosting technologies—it’s that they often don’t know where to start. For example, it can be difficult to find a hosting provider that has the flexibility, cost-efficiency, and supportiveness to be able to be trusted with a business-critical application. Most businesses are also unsure about how to transfer data and software licenses from the old infrastructure to the new one.

The best way for businesses to switch to hosted QuickBooks is by signing up for QuickBooks Hosting from IronOrbit.

Advantages of companies selecting IronOrbit as their accounting application hosting provider include:

• Fully-managed. We support each IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks solution with around-the-clock monitoring, 24x7x365 technical support, managed backups, Orbital Security, and Atomic Speed Technology.

• Flexibility. IronOrbit hosts the full desktop versions QuickBooks—so users can access the same features on an IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks as on a QuickBooks program installed on the hard drive of their device. In addition, we can host any version of QuickBooks—including Basic, Pro, Premier, and Enterprise—as well as other accounting software such as Sage 50, Account Edge, and Dac Easy.

• Low, predictable costs. Businesses only have to pay a low, flat monthly fee for their IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks.

• Assisted setup. IronOrbit can design and build businesses’ hosted QuickBooks according to their exact specifications (the amount of users, CPU, RAM, long term storage, and bandwidth they need, for example). We can also help businesses transfer data and licenses from existing on-site deployments of QuickBooks for a small additional fee.

It’s extremely easy and cost-efficient to switch to Hosted QuickBooks with IronOrbit. All it takes is four simple steps:

1. Contact an IronOrbit sales representative at [email protected] or  (888) 753-5060. He or she can answer any questions you may have about the technology or IronOrbit (its methods, facilities, staff, etc.).
2. Tell the IronOrbit representative the particular software you want to host and the amount of users and IT resources
   (CPU, RAM, long term storage, and bandwidth) you need. It’ll only take us a few minutes to generate a personalized quote for you.
3. After the QuickBooks hosting solution has been deployed, it’s time to transfer over the data or software licenses from your existing QuickBooks deployment (if applicable). IronOrbit will coordinate the migration process so that it has minimal effect on the performance of your existing IT infrastructure.
4. Once everything is deployed, log on to your IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks with any Internet-connected device. You’re ready to start using your hosted solution!