ISSQUARED: Born to Rule the Managed Services World Date:   Thursday , February 11, 2016 Security is the apicalconcern of CIOs. Spending on security products & services outpaces all other IT expenditures.Gartner predicts that IT security spending will increase 8.2 percent in 2015 to reach $77 billion and the world will spend $101 billion on information security by 2018. But lack of related skills leads organizations to use security services firms that specialize in data protection, security risk management and security infrastructure management to address regulatory compliance demands and enhance their security postures. A significant portion of organizations are shifting existing resources away from the operational aspects of security technologies, such as security device administration and monitoring, toward mitigation and incident response. This new dynamic has given rise to significant growth throughout the globe for managed security services. This is where ISSQUARED is strongly positioned. The company is focused on simplifying IT complexity for customers. With infrastructure managed services, ISSQUARED provides customers with predictable, reliable and scalable solutions and services. Security & Identity Management in its Root Born in the soil of security and identity management, ISSQUARED brings years of experience implementing and managing large scale global identity and access management platforms. Strategic partnerships with security product firms such as Lieberman, Observeit, Okta, IBM, VMware and Microsoft, enables ISSQUARED to provide customers with a comprehensive strategy encompassing insider threat intelligence, privilege account management, database security, authentication and incident monitoring, hence allowing customers to focus on what they are expert in. The competition is fierce in the hyper-competitive market and one has to go against the largest traditional IT services providers. But with market evolving, it is evident that only nimble, strategic and cloud tech savvy vendors will survive in the technology services and management consulting space. And ISSQUARED is highly proficient in offering managed services with a focus on security, identity management, data center virtualization and cloud based security & cloud technologies. \"Together with true client partnership, where we focus on client\'s business needs, we aim to deliver the best solutions using best of breed technologies. It is important that delivered solutions are simple to manage,\" asserts Bala Ramaiah, President & CEO, ISSQUARED. Organizations are now embracing cloud due to its ability to reduce their capital investments in expensive hardware. Foreseeing tremendous opportunity in this space, ISSQUARED developed several offerings to help customers build architecture roadmaps to plan their migration to a cloud-based paradigm. \"We are just witnessing the start of a massive wave of cloud migration and investment in security, and we are well positioned to strategically partner with customers in the mid to enterprise space,\" explains Bala. Understanding the cloud paradigm and how IT will deliver value to companies over the next 5-10 years is fundamental to establishing a strategy that will help a company like ISSQUARED survive and thrive. Tired of traditional and complex IT, customers are seeking for simplistic solutions, thus focusing on working with managed service providers whose offerings are SLA based. Companies are focusing on having small core internal IT footprint (in terms of both people and capital investments) and building strategic relationships with managed services providers. ISSQUARED has been ahead of the curve on this trend, and its services have been focused on managed services from the very start. It continues to refine and tweak these models with time. \"We repeatedly see that traditional IT service providers are trying to tweak current service models and hold on to their legacy revenue models. The truth is that there is a tectonic change in the IT industry due to cloud technologies, security and high-end business analytics. Customers can impact change in their output through visibility and analytics, rather than focusing on building large, complex data centers of their own. New service delivery models need to embrace this change and we have grown up in this new environment. Being a new generation company allows us to thrive in this environment,\" adds Bala. ISSQUARED serves across industries including Biotech, Biopharmaceuticals and Construction to Marketing, BFSI and Healthcare analytics. Its ability to architect IT solutions in highly regulated environments, with a very good understanding of compliance, has helped it deliver cost effective architecture and solutions in a timely manner. On the other hand, ISSQUARED\'s experience in modernizing legacy IT infrastructure, setting up disaster recovery in the cloud and providing VDI solutions helps it deliver cost effective service offerings to the construction industry as well. The Journey Has Just Begun Having worked for years in enterprise environment, Bala saw tremendous opportunity in demystifying the complexity as well as providing clients and CIOs with reliable, scalable and predictable services. Hence he quit his traditional job to start ISSQUARED in 2010. With a few strategic technology architecture consulting opportunities to begin with, Bala was able to bootstrap the company into a managed services provider, with a capability to provide services to Fortune500 clients. Subsequently he was joined by other ex-colleagues and friends - Ganesh Ramaiah (heads the International Operations, BPO/KPO), Jagan Jata(heads Consulting &Managed Services), Suchinth Kumar (in-charge of business & corporate development), John Charles (heads Cloud Services), and Iqbal Karar (works on sales & strategic account planning). While the journey was full of challenges, ISSQUARED was committed to grow rapidly but without compromising on quality. The company\'s hiring process ensures that a highly talented and diverse team is built. Today, ISSQUARED\'s team is structured with senior level talent that lead individual areas. These folks in turn mentor other team members who are given lead roles based on their performance and skills. \"People work here because they want to and share a passion for technology and simplifying services for customers. We keep people motivated by giving autonomy to individuals, and there is a deep sense of team work and sense of purpose,\" explains Bala. Sticking to its \'No Compromise\' policy, on several occasions, Bala has passed-on business opportunities due to lack of proper skill. However, the dark clouds have now vanished and ISSQUARED is quite excited about the next few months as Q1 2016 will see the release of a product that the company has been very focused on - something it is very passionate about, and years in the making through design, development and testing. Leveraging its deep experience in managing diverse infrastructure components, it is bringing to market a product (Enterprise Information Management System) that provides seamless visibility and analytics in the IT infrastructure space. \"Think of this as a one-stop dashboard that combines people, IT assets and processes - something that is still lacking in the infrastructure space,\" says a proud Bala. The product provides an integrated view of IT in an organization by creating and managing logical connections and dependencies across infra and process components through well defined workflows along with seamless and efficient lifecycle management for identities, assets, risks and processes apart from several other benefits. The Growth Ahead ISSQUARED currently plans to continue to invest in its strategic information security related partnerships with security software firms, enhance its cloud focused managed service offerings, increase its marketing and sales investments, expand its current delivery centers from Los Angeles and Hyderabad to additional sites like UK and Dubai, and expand with additional service offerings including Security Operations Center (SOC) and Network Operations Center (NOC). 2016 will witness an altogether new ISSQUARED as the company is determined to grow rapidly and invest further in people, technology and services, and may look for an external round of funding to accomplish it. \"We may also look at strategic mergers/partnerships in order to drive growth, should the correct opportunity present itself,\" concludes Bala. Panel Key Management Bala Ramaiah, President & CEO Bitten by entrepreneurial bug since childhood, Bala eventually formed his dream company ISSQUARED. As the engine of the organization, he translated his years of rich experience in IT infrastructure management, architecture and security to set clear goals for his company. Prior to this, Bala held leadership roles at Exodus Communications and Amgen. Case Study Oltmans Construction Co., a full service general contracting company, was looking to upgrade and migrate their datacenter to the latest generation highly scalable architecture, enabling them to have a robust and flexible IT foundation to continue to help drive their growth and innovation in the construction industry. ISSQUARED helped them achieve this goal with no impact to business and upgrade was \'Non-event\' for the end users at Oltmans. The new solutions deployed will help Oltmans to introduce newer technologies, and also support extension to support secure remote user access and virtual desktops. This opened up a number of options that were previously limited to solutions based on physical hardware. Offerings: 1.Managed Services - Infrastructure Managed Service, Identity and Access Management/Identity Provisioning, Cloud Strategy and Architecture, &DR Recovery as a services 2.Security Services - Single sign-on & multi-factor authentication, Privileged Identity Management, Insider Threat Intelligence, &Security event and incident management Industry Serving: Biotech, Biopharmaceuticals, and Construction to Marketing, Banking & Finance, and Healthcare analytics Clients: Oltmans Construction, Promoshop, Rooster Biotech, Raintree Oncology, &several Fortune 500 clients