Cloud Computing

As information technology enters the new world of online services delivery, known in the industry as “cloud computing”, we are pleased to announce we are firmly ahead of the game with a complete set of offerings ranging from co-located hosting to fully outsourced business applications and virtual desktop infrastructures. Please review the following services section of our website and contact us today to find out how we can help your business “move to the cloud” and in doing so realize real productive benefits and cost effective reductions.

Colocation & Hosting

Orchid IT are able to provide a full range of privately hosted services from offsite digital storage, replication of existing on-premise servers or re-location of existing servers including telephony based phone servers (PBX) offsite to a highly secure data center facility here in the UK. Please contact your partner manager for more details.

24 hour manned secure facility with “N+1” failover
Fully redundant power provision
Direct “back bone” access to the internet via one of the UKs leading ISPs ensuring high speed delivery of hosted services
Any “rackmountable” server or telephone PBX can be migrated and hosted offsite
Complete range of internet connectivity solutions including leased line and point to point Ethernet links from your office location(s) to the datacenter can be provided for ultra high speed access
Highly competitive rates for “per U” equipment hosting and “per GB” data storage
Experienced consulting and implementation services – we do the work for you from initial project management through to solution delivery

Office 365

Office 365 is a suite of common IT applications for business, delivered via the cloud. The suite comprises of Exchange for corporate email, SharePoint for an intranet, document management and collaboration, Lync for secure communications and presence and Office Web Apps - browser delivered versions of traditionally client-installed versions of Microsoft Office comprising of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

There are numerous benefits to using Office 365 in a small business:

No capital outlay required to implement and start using powerful business productivity tools
Minimal implementation required – no servers to build or configure
Significantly lower total cost of ownership compared to running on premise servers to deliver the same applications
Future versions of applications are included automatically – no major software upgrades need to take place in future
Complete integration with local IT services such as Active Directory
Migration of existing on premise IT services such as email will be completely taken care of by an Orchid Cloud engineer – to be quoted for separately

Let's take a look at some of the individual components of Office 365 and how they can benefit your small business:

Exchange – email

Microsoft Exchange has long since been the most common server based business application in use for most businesses. Providing a feature-rich suite of functions and combined with a powerful rules mechanism, an on premise Exchange server has almost been the de facto standard for the delivery of emails in to and out from an organisation.

Exchange is now available as part of the Office 365 suite in the cloud. Each user benefits from a substantial 25Gb mailbox and email is protected by Microsoft's ForeFront technologies. A rolling 30 day backup is also included as part of the service as well as a licence of Outlook Anywhere, a fully operative web browser version of Microsoft Outlook which enables access of email data on any PC with an internet connection.

Email from Microsoft's Office 365 cloud services can also be viewed as before on a PC or Mac running Outlook as well as smartphone and tablet devices such as Blackberry's and iPad's.

SharePoint - document management & collaboration

SharePoint is a vital tool for managing an organisation's ever growing document needs, developing a company intranet and sharing and collaborating on information and projects.

With an easy to use interface offering point-and-click access to enable the implementation of powerful web parts or plug-in type applications within a SharePoint site, development and customisation of specific business IT processes are made possible.

Orchid Cloud can offer a full range of consultancy and customisation services around SharePoint – please contact us to discuss further.

Lync - voice, video & instant messaging

Microsoft Lync enables organisations to enhance communications across the workforce by enabling the following features:

Instant messaging, provided through an included Lync desktop client, enables users on the system to determine each others availability through a number of different statuses such as online, away or busy. Conversations can be stored and retrieved at a later date through Outlook 2010.
Voice & video interaction – communicate remotely over your data network through PC's using webcam's, built in microphones or through external plug in USB handsets/headsets.

Dynamics CRM Online

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business-critical application in any organization and Dynamics CRM Online is an off-premise service that not only delivers detailed records about clients and suppliers, it also provides full data and visual integration with other adopted Microsoft platforms such as Outlook and Sharepoint.

Virtualisation

Virtualisation has long been a buzz word in the IT industry and is becoming more mainstream by the day. Virtualisation is the process of creating a live snapshot or image of an actual physical server (hardware, operating system and applications) and allows the newly-created virtual machine to be run alongside other virtual machines on a consolidated physical hardware platform. Typically, a traditional physical server only utilizes a small fraction of the computing (memory/CPU) resource available to it whereas under a virtual environment, specific processing resources can be allocated to individual virtual machines based on capacity requirements. Orchid IT can deliver all types of virtualisation services from basic 2 server consolidations to major server farm re-structuring. Virtualisation allows for the following:

Accurately plan for future IT capacity without overspend
Make better use of existing expensive IT resources
Run legacy servers on brand new warranted hardware with simple migration but without risk
Virtualised machines can be stored on a central storage platform (SAN) and delivered across a multitude of physical server based resources enabling business continuity in the event of hardware failure

VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

The complexities of running and relying on a traditional desktop/laptop client based infrastructure are well known to IT managers and system administrators. Inherently prone to hardware failure, loss of data and in cases, a major cause of business downtime, the PC, or “fat client” as it is sometimes referred to, is not only an unreliable business IT interface but it is also one that can be extremely difficult to administer.

A VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) changes all this by enabling the virtualisation of existing desktop/laptop PCs and delivering them over a LAN or WAN network to either an existing PC or thin client device. New workstation images can be created instantly using common operating systems such as Windows 7, Vista or XP and delivered directly from a central storage solution via a server processing resource or direct from a server – no processing power is directly required from the workstation which in itself can be a considerable cost saving. In the event of thin/fat client hardware failure, no work will be lost and the affected user will be able to logon to their virtualized desktop via another device.

Data loss will be minimized due to the virtualized desktop images being able to be backed up to multiple storage devices and administration of all desktop machines can be handled by a single central admin console.

For more information on our hosted desktop offerings, please contact your Orchid IT partner manager.