Month: December 2013

Collaboration software is a type of program that attempts to improve levels of communication and coordination between coworkers with features such as email, file sharing, task management, contact management, instant messaging, wikis, social networking, VoIP, and video conferencing.

The benefits of collaboration software are that it gives coworkers other ways to communicate with each other besides email and telephones; lets managers formally assign tasks to their underlings and monitor their progress; and establishes a centralized repository for all of a company’s files and contacts.

As a whole, collaboration software reduces mistakes and confusion; makes files easier to find and access; and makes businesses more efficient and productive.

The collaboration software most commonly selected by businesses include:

• Microsoft SharePoint. Microsoft SharePoint is probably the most widely used collaboration platform. Its strengths are its flexibility, its simplicity, and cost-efficiency. It works best as a centralized document management system, though its project management and messaging features are also extensive.
• Microsoft Lync. Compared to Microsoft SharePoint, which is focused more on documents and projects, Microsoft Lync is focused more on communication. For example, the features of Lync include instant messaging, VoIP, video conferencing, and contact management. The businesses that benefit the most from Lync are ones with a large number of employees or that have a lot of employees that work remotely, who need more ways of communicating than just email or telephone.
• Microsoft Exchange. Exchange is more traditionally viewed as an enterprise-level email solution than as collaboration software, but it has plenty of project management (task management, shared calendars, etc.) and contact management features, too. Exchange doesn’t have a centralized file repository like SharePoint does, so it works best as a collaboration solution for teams that prefer to communicate via email and that don’t have that many documents.
• IBM Notes and IBM Sametime. IBM Notes and IBM Sametime are basically IBM’s versions of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Lync, respectively. One advantage that Notes has over SharePoint is the fact that it’s also an email client. On the other hand, it’s easier to customize SharePoint and integrate it with other applications. Meanwhile, IBM argues that Sametime is less expensive, has more features (chat logs, screen captures, spell checker, and 1080p video conferencing), and has a simpler back-end infrastructure than Lync. Others prefer Lync for its more unified interface and because it does a better job of conserving bandwidth.

The best way to deploy these collaboration solutions is to host them with IronOrbit. The advantages of IronOrbit Application Hosting include:

• Anywhere-accessibility. IronOrbit Hosted Applications (SharePoint Hosting, QuickBooks Hosting, etc.) are web-based and can be accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected computer, tablet, or smartphone. This ensures that employees are able to access their collaboration solutions regardless of whether they’re at the office or not, and gives everyone in an organization (including offsite contractors and employees that work primarily at a company’s branch office or from home) the ability to access the same centralized collaboration solution.
• Security, backups, and support are included. IronOrbit Hosted Applications are protected with Orbital Security (firewalls, IDS/IPS, antivirus, and spam and content filter), are backed up a regular basis, and come with 24x7x365 all-inclusive technical support.
• Speed and reliability. IronOrbit Application Hosting solutions are as fast and responsive as locally-installed applications and are backed with a 100% uptime guarantee—so employees always have access to their files, contacts, and project information stored in the collaboration solution.

Sign up for our Collaboration Application Hosting solutions by contacting us at (888) 753-5060 or [email protected] today!

IronOrbit Hosted Applications are fast, secure, reliable, scalable, anywhere-accessible, and cost-efficient.

Reasons, why businesses should select IronOrbit Hosted Applications over the alternatives, include:

Our Hosted Applications are customizable

We can host any application, including software customized with plugins or add-ons and programs that are only compatible with outdated or non-standard operating systems such as Windows XP and Linux.

Other aspects of our Hosted Applications that can be customized include the number of users, the amount of storage space, authentication methods, and security and access policies.

Our Application Hosting solutions are also scalable, so it’s possible to add any amount of users or storage space to them at any time, even after they’ve already been deployed.

Our Hosted Applications come with enterprise-level security and support

We include more security, support, and disaster recovery features with our Hosted Applications than any other hosting provider.

All IronOrbit Managed Applications come with Orbital Security (which includes not only firewalls, gateway antivirus, and content filtering, but also 24x7x365 alarm monitoring at our datacenters), 24x7x365 all-inclusive technical support, and managed data backups. These services are included in the low, flat monthly fee that we charge for our Hosted Applications.

In contrast, many of our competitors charge extra for these high-level services, while others don’t offer them at all. In addition, though it’s actually pretty common for hosting providers to offer 24x7x365 technical support, it isn’t the same kind of in-depth, personalized, or all-inclusive technical support that IronOrbit provides (our technicians are all CompTIA A+ certified, fluent in either English or both English and Spanish, and will provide technical support for a business’s entire IT infrastructure, even with hardware like scanners, printers, and monitors that have only an indirect connection to our solutions).

We host our solutions on dedicated servers

All of our Application Hosting solutions are provided with their own private physical server or servers. Therefore, our Hosted Applications deployments don’t have to share the same physical server with other deployments, as in a multitenant environment.

Generally, applications hosted on a dedicated (or single-tenant) server are more secure, reliable, and powerful, because with a dedicated server access is more limited and the application is provided with more stable and a larger amount of processing and storage resources.

Our Application Hosting solutions are as fast and responsive as locally-installed software

Though the hosted applications of other companies are noticeably slower and less responsive than locally-installed applications, IronOrbit Hosted Applications perform as well as or better than on-premise software.

That’s because we use intuitive, trend-based disk I/O caching and packet prioritization technologies (among other components of our SMX Speed Technology™ -based hosting architecture) to maximize the performance and minimize the network latency of our Hosted Applications.

To see for yourself what separates IronOrbit Application Hosting from the competition, fill out this brief form or contact us at [email protected] or (888) 753-5060 for a FREE demo!

IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks is a fully-managed web-based version of QuickBooks.

Instead of being installed on an onsite PC workstation or server, IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks is deployed on the servers in our datacenters. It is monitored, maintained, protected, and backed up on a continuous basis by our technicians.

IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks can be accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected computer, thin client, tablet, or smartphone.

The Benefits of Opting for QuickBooks Hosting with IronOrbit include:

• It doesn’t require the purchase or maintenance of any onsite servers
• It comes standard with 24x7x365 technical support; a PCI DSS-, SOX-, and GLBA-compliant IT security system; managed data backups; and a 100% uptime guarantee
• Even with the support, security, and backup services included, IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting solutions cost only a low, flat monthly fee

There are no downsides to switching to IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting from a locally-installed version of QuickBooks because:

• IronOrbit can host any version of QuickBooks, including QuickBooks Accountant, QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Enterprise.

• The versions of QuickBooks that IronOrbit host are the same as the ones that businesses would install on the hard drives of employees’ PCs or on terminal servers—so IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks has all of the same features and capabilities as a locally-installed version of QuickBooks, including the ability to support add-ons or plugins like these.

• In addition, companies that already have software licenses for their locally-installed versions of QuickBooks can simply transfer these licenses to their IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks deployment—it’s not necessary for them to purchase new QuickBooks software licenses when switching to IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting, and we don’t charge any upgrade or conversion fees for the transferring of the licenses.

• The actual process of switching from an onsite QuickBooks deployment to IronOrbit Hosted QuickBooks is fast (we can migrate any onsite IT solution to the cloud within 30 days, guaranteed), easy (our engineers take care of everything, migrating businesses’ onsite data to our servers and setting up and deploying the solution), cost-effective (we charge only a small, one-time fee for our setup process), and non-disruptive (businesses will be able to access their onsite version of QuickBooks throughout the setup process, and we will only migrate data outside of a company’s normal business hours to keep from slowing down the company’s network and infrastructure).

To switch to IronOrbit QuickBooks Hosting, contact one of our helpful sales representatives at [email protected] or (888) 753-5060 today! Also, our Application Hosting platform supports any application, so feel free to contact IronOrbit if you’re interested in switching any of your locally-installed applications besides QuickBooks to the cloud as well.

For the most part, cloud computing (which IronOrbit Hosted Desktops and Hosted IT Infrastructures are examples of) is a “green” technology because it consolidates many inefficient onsite IT infrastructures into a much smaller number of efficient datacenters.

The efficiency of cloud computing datacenters isn’t just a matter of economy of scale—servers in cloud computing datacenters are much more efficient than onsite servers because they’re able to process and store the IT solutions of multiple businesses at the same time.

Businesses can use virtualization to maximize the resource utilization of their onsite servers, too, but it’s rare for the IT requirements of a business and the IT resources of physical servers to match up exactly (more likely than not, the company will end up with two physical servers, one with an efficient 80 percent server utilization rate and another with an inefficient 5-10 percent server utilization rate).

Because servers in a cloud computing datacenter are more efficient than onsite servers, less total servers end up being used to satisfy clients’ IT requirements than if the clients had set up thousands of independent onsite IT infrastructures; and less servers mean less energy usage and e-waste.

The environmental benefits of cloud computing were recently confirmed in a report from Harvard University, Imperial College, and Reading University, “The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy: a Focus on Cloud Computing.” According to a summary of the report by Graeme Philipson of the Green IT Review, the researchers estimated that cloud computing “has the potential to save over $2.2 billion…from a reduction in energy consumption and reduced global environmental damage.”

In addition, cloud computing—again according to Philipson’s interpretation of the report— reduces greenhouse gasses by 95 percent compared to onsite datacenters, and could potentially reduce energy consumption by 11.2 TWh and CO₂ emissions by 4.5 metric tons if adopted by 80% of organizations in the 11 countries in the study (including Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, and the UK).

Businesses that switch from an onsite IT infrastructure to IronOrbit solutions such as Hosted Desktops and Application Hosting can therefore expect to reduce their energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and e-waste.

By signing up for our solutions, businesses reduce the amount of hardware they have to purchase, supply with energy, and eventually have to throw away and replace (our solutions can be accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected device, so businesses don’t have to purchase any onsite servers or PC workstations), and they reduce the amount of people that have to show up at their office (our solutions are managed, maintained, and supported 24x7x365 by our technicians and don’t require businesses to hire any additional IT personnel, and can be accessed from home), which cuts energy usage and emissions associated by precluding those people from driving to work and using electricity at the office.

To switch to a more eco-friendly IT infrastructure today, businesses should contact IronOrbit at [email protected] or (888) 753-5060 and sign up for our Hosted Desktops, Hosted IT Infrastructures, or Application Hosting solutions.