On the back-office cloud, were you able to accommodate all the assets you came by in the acquisitions?

Yes. That was helped by the fact that a few years ago we went pretty heavily into virtual desktops. One thing that's unique about HireRight is we are a first company, and then we look at performance and up time. We are considered a credit reporting agency, so when we built this thing out, VDI got a lot of our attention. You can secure it well and scale it extremely well. So that's what we built our cloud around, keeping the data in one spot, not allowing it to go anywhere.

Cloud being a fashionable term these days, can I ask you to describe it to ensure we're thinking/talking about the same thing?

That's a great point, because everybody's got a different definition. When we talk about our back-office cloud we're talking about a certain set of tools in the application tier that have to have maximum up time and have to be available from anywhere in the world. So we built a cloud stack around that. (See .)

In the traditional model you have people with laptops running around, security teams trying to lock stuff down, VPN connections. We didn't want to go down that path. We wanted to be able to expose one interface to our employees and then control the backend horsepower we throw at it and be able to shift that horsepower around depending upon where the work is at any given time.