iCES Corporation: ‘Systems Thinking’ Approach to Mitigate Defense Operational Challenges

The contracting IT budget in defense landscape is posturing genuine threat in the management of enormous data and cyber-security challenges. Though the market is filled with organizations providing efficient IT solutions for the defense sector, many of them fail in their endeavor due to lack of innovation quotient in their offerings. Known for its unique solutions and prolific experience, Tysons Corner, VA, headquartered iCES Corporation navigates technology space to offer comprehensive range of IT services that delivers operational and economical benefits to defense departments. The company proffers such offerings by embracing creative ways that include—migrating to open source software for cost reduction; adapting open architecture to eliminate vendor dependency; and using open standards to ensure interoperability. “Our holistic approach in executing these concepts enables our customers to gain inherently secure and scalable services,” delineates Edward Ghafari, President and CEO, iCES Corporation.

The company offers web and mobile based conferencing solutions to include the Defense Collaboration Service (DCS) that assists The Executive Department of U.S. Federal Government, Department of Defense (DoD) to communicate synchronously among both Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) and Secure Internet Protocol Routing Network (SIPRNet) networks. This resultantly empowers DoD to flexibly share both classified and unclassified information. The other abilities of DCS include session management, text messaging, application sharing/broadcasting, video transfer, voting/polling, and Instant Messaging (IM). Elaborating on DCS’s inception, Ghafari says, “Our DCS solution was developed as an open source replacement for government’s DCO (Defense Connect Online) which is based on Adobe Connect solution.” Working analogous to Adobe Connect and Cisco WebEx, DCS presents a minute exception that “government gets to control the code and service, and does not pay license fees.” Such authoritative power enables the government to examine the source code and ensure its security and performance. Besides data safety, DCS supports scalability by allowing DoD to add more hardware to the existing systems. Explicating more on solution, Ghafari states, “Our DCS solution can handle more than 10,000 concurrent users running on multiple servers and at multiple sites.”