Most businesses rarely perform all of their processes in-house anymore. Today’s economy requires flexibility and high specialization. With specialization, companies adapt more quickly to changes in their specific market. At the same time, it gives stability and focus to employees, resulting in more knowledgeable and efficient personnel. However, without perfect coordination between the multiple companies of a supply chain, many of the benefits of specialization disappear.
To achieve high levels of coordination and synchronization, companies have turned to collaboration technologies such as supply chain management software, project management software, and enterprise resource planning software. These programs let the companies share collaborative documents (blueprints, product designs, advertising concepts, etc.) and maintain consistent schedules and records. On-site deployment of these technologies can be difficult and complicated, however. Integrating several different on-premise systems requires costly and extensive customization. The alternative—where one of the companies hosts the software internally and gives the other businesses conditional access to it—can also be tricky. With this arrangement, the host company has to give its business partners access to its internal network. On-site hosting also raises questions about cost-sharing and ownership. Should all the companies in the partnership pay to obtain, install, and manage the hardware and software of the hosted application? Which company “owns” the data, ultimately? How should the host company be held accountable for breaches and data loss incidents?
To avoid the issues of access, cost, and ownership altogether, companies should host their collaboration technologies in the cloud. With cloud-hosted software, none of the companies in the partnership have to deal with configuring firewalls, purchasing and maintaining hardware, or protecting data. The partnership’s software and files will reside in the data centers of a third-party hosting company. The company that hosted the on-site program will not have to compromise the security of its internal network. Everyone in the partnership will have equal access to and ownership over the data.
Even more beneficial to the business partnership would be to host its collaboration software in an IronOrbit Private Cloud. Our Virtual Desktops are a perfect IT infrastructure for partnerships for the following reasons:
–Flexibility. The IronOrbit Virtual Desktops can be packaged with any supply chain management, project management, or enterprise resource planning application. These hosted apps will appear to users as icons in the operating system of their Hosted Desktops.
–Security. IronOrbit’s knowledgeable and experienced technicians will monitor your Virtual Desktops for malware and suspicious network activity. With our 24x7x365 availability, we can respond to any data breach at any time. The centralization of our Hosted Desktops also allows us to maintain a comprehensive audit trail (important for regulatory compliance) and to filter for spam and other dangerous content. Furthermore, infected Virtual Desktops can be isolated and deleted easily. The IronOrbit Desktops can also be configured to prevent the outward transfer of files, preventing unscrupulous partners from stealing or misplacing sensitive data.
–Cost-efficiency. You don’t have to purchase any additional hardware with IronOrbit Virtual Desktops. You only need a web-enabled device such as a laptop, netbook, thin client, tablet, or smartphone to access your files and applications. You also only have to pay for the amount of concurrent Hosted Desktops that you need, not the total number of Desktops. Instead of “assigning” desktops, our state-of-the-art infrastructure maintains the files and settings of every user and implants them in an empty virtual machine whenever the corresponding user logs in.
–Availability. IronOrbit Virtual Desktops can be accessed via the Internet from anywhere in the world. And, unlike on-site hosted software, they have been optimized for use by mobile devices. Business partners cannot only access their Virtual Desktops from any office on earth, but also from coffee shops, construction sites, the road, or anywhere else they can get a signal.
Improve the security, consistency, and availability of your infrastructure and get better synchronized with your business partners with Private Cloud solutions from IronOrbit.