28 years of building Canada’s cloud.
From a two-person IT shop in 1998 to an independent Canadian cloud platform, with the same conviction the whole way: infrastructure should serve the people who depend on it.
Oriso is founded
Oriso opens its doors with two activities: hands-on IT support for local businesses, and ISOExpert, software that helped companies implement ISO 9001 quality certification. Small team, direct relationships, no outsourcing. That DNA never changed.
Pioneers of the Terminal Server
Long before “thin clients” were fashionable, Oriso deployed some of the first Terminal Server environments in the region, repurposing clients’ aging PCs as terminals instead of selling them new hardware. Centralize the computing, stretch the budget: the cloud idea, a decade early.
The iGOvirtual bet
A pattern kept repeating: clients under-invested in their own infrastructure, servers slowed down, support calls piled up. Rather than patching the symptom, Oriso made a strategic decision: build one centralized, professionally-run infrastructure and host clients on it. The iGOvirtual project was born.
The night that made a cloud provider
Then came the call that changed everything. A client’s office was robbed. The servers were gone, and the safe holding their backups was taken with them. A single backup tape survived. The team pulled an all-nighter to bring iGOvirtual into production and had the client operating again by morning.
That night, hosting stopped being a project and became the company. Oriso had just become one of Canada’s first cloud providers.IaaS and SaaS, before the acronyms were cool
Oriso formalized its offering into Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, becoming one of the first providers in Canada to sell cloud this way. What started as a rescue for one client became a platform for hundreds.
One owner, one long-term vision
François Michaud acquired full ownership of Oriso, consolidating the company under a single, patient vision: stay independent, stay Canadian, and build for decades rather than quarters.
iGOworkspace.com: Desktop-as-a-Service
When the pandemic sent the country home overnight, Oriso launched iGOworkspace.com, a DaaS platform delivering secure, fully-managed cloud desktops on Canadian infrastructure. Businesses kept working from anywhere while their data never left the country.
Acquisition of KeepSec
Oriso acquires KeepSec Technologies, bringing its cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and security engineering under one roof. The combined company gains the scale, talent, and technical depth to grow faster than either could alone.
Two independent Canadian builders, one platform: the deal that positions Oriso as the country’s real sovereign cloud.Hello, Togo
The same year, Oriso opens its first international office in Lomé, Togo. It is a base to serve West Africa and a statement of intent: cloud infrastructure should be accessible to everyone, not just to markets the hyperscalers find convenient.
Still independent. Still answering the phone.
Three Canadian core regions on a private backbone, an open-source platform with no foreign dependency, offices from Montréal to Lomé, and support handled by the same engineers who run the infrastructure. Twenty-eight years in, the model hasn’t changed. Only the scale has.
