Sam Morales: CEO, Sequestered Solutions Alaska.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: View from the Top - Company overview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sam Morales came to Alaska with the Air Force from Florida in 1976. He worked in banking for 18 years, then joined Computer Task Group, Alaska, with accountability for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. IT outsourcing contract. In 2001, he became vice president and chief information officer for Alaska Communications.

Sequestered Solutions Alaska (SSA) was born in his living room in Eagle River that December. Morales, Joe Henri and Lara Baker founded SSA by first developing BrainyRack, a proprietary intelligent rack system. The company began offering hosted services to their first customer in 2005 in Alaska's only enterprise-level server farm.

* Becoming a Global Leader

Many services provided by internal IT shops will be delivered via cloud computing, that is, computing as a utility. Today, the amount of data globally is about 0.8 zettabytes, (that's 800 billion gigabytes[). That represents 62 percent growth since 2008. We intend to be a key player. My role is to position SSA as a global leader in data storage and infrastructure.

* Better IT

SSA has seen a slight upward bump in business. Companies for whom IT is not a forte have realized firms like SSA can provide this more economically and securely, along with service-level guarantees for systems availability. As conditions improve and IT spending levels return to normal, this should increase.

* Secure Service

We treat each customer as our only one. All staff have had FBI background checks. SSA hosts client equipment within its patent-pending BrainyRack enclosure; it runs proprietary software, monitoring power use, air temperature (in and out) and heartbeat monitors, all in its secure-server farm.

* The Emerging Cloud

We see an emerging market in computing as a utility--cloud computing. Although some technological issues remain, SSA already offers this to clients in diverse regions of Alaska. While equipment resides in our secure-data center, clients remotely manage applications and data. A client in Tampa...