SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Global Storm IT has gone international. Last January, the company made its reach truly global when company founder, president and CEO Kirby Marshall opened a branch office in Austin, Texas.

Global Storm IT vice president and operations manager Tom Naugler, left and company founder, president and CEO Kirby Marshall in the company's Yellowknife office. Naugler has been with Marshall from Global Storm IT's earliest days. The company now has operations in Austin, Texas thanks to a four-year relationship forged with with a UK supplier of specialized computer hardware. - Walter Strong/NNSL photo

Global Storm, LLC, as it is known in the States, was incorporated to handle growing sales and service contracts south of the border for a specialized piece of computer hardware.

The venture has been about four years in the making, and was developed when Marshall was looking for a solution to many of his Northern client's frustrations with expensive and relatively slow Internet connections.

"We've been doing IT support in Yellowknife and remote Northern communities for coming up on 15 years now," Marshall said. "It's what we do, and we know it well."

Global Storm IT was ahead of the curve when it built its own high speed wireless network to serve Yellowknife, Ndilo and Dettah almost 10 years ago. The local network is intended to provide secure offsite data back-up in the days well before cloud storage becomes normal.

"Online backup systems are extremely prevalent today - there are literally thousands of them now - but 12 years ago there was no such thing," Marshall said.

Finding solutions for business client problems has always been Global Storm's focus.

"I'm always on the lookout for technologies to assist my client base," Marshall said. "How can I help my clients with our slow Internet connections?"

Although cloud storage has become cheap and plentiful enough that even Marshall uses it for much of his client's critical off-site storage, the rise of the modern Internet with a data-heavy focus on social media and video streaming has created a new problem for Global Storm clients.

"Bandwidth is not an unlimited resource," Marshall said. "It's cheaper than it used to be, but it still costs a lot of money. So if you can use less bandwidth and make it faster, it's a win on two fronts."

Four years ago, Marshall found a partial solution in hardware dedicated to Internet "caching" with ApplianSys Ltd., a U.K.-based developer of hardware designed to make the internet go faster for clients.

Dedicated internet caching is similar to the web cache every computer maintains to speed up the download and display of frequently accessed pages.

In the case of a cache server, a sophisticated piece of hardware is able to download large files and then distribute them on local networks without chewing up bandwidth.

"Caching captures what's coming down the pipe," Marshall said. "All computers have a web cache and this is the same concept, except we do it on the edge of the Internet connection, not on every individual computer.

In a cached system, a large, bandwidth-eating file - a software or operating system update for example - would be downloaded once onto a "smart" cache server, and then multiple computers would retrieve the file from the local cache rather than from a remote system.

"Caching saves massive amounts of bucks," Marshall said.

One of Marshall's earliest large contracts was with the Government of Nunavut, which purchased 22 units.

Over the past four years, Marshall's business relationship with ApplianSys has grown to the point where Global Storm is one of ApplianSys' largest North American vendors, and its exclusive North American service provider.

"We now have three employees hired exclusively for the work we're doing in the States," Marshall said.

Two of those employees work out of Yellowknife, while a third is based in Austin, whom Marshall said he looks forward to meeting for the first time this February when he plans to travel down to visit the operation.

"The market is huge in the States," Marshall said.

Marshall is also opening a Hay River Global Storm branch within a month staffed with have one full-time employee, who he's already brought in from Montreal.

"I gave the first kick at the can to anyone in Yellowknife if they wanted to work in Hay River, but nobody jumped at it," Marshall said.

Marshall doesn't see a slowdown on the horizon. He said Global Storm is only getting started in the U.S. and when he looks south of the NWT border he sees large, untapped market potential.

"There's a lot of potential growth," Marshall said. "We're not standing still."

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