How we got here
The short version.
White Iron started in 2017 as a side of a larger consultancy doing infrastructure work for medical practices and small businesses. The pattern was familiar: a small business with real IT needs, an industry full of vendors selling either off-the-shelf SaaS lock-in or enterprise-grade complexity, and nobody in the middle willing to do the actual work — show up, design something fitted to the business, document it properly, and stick around for the maintenance.
The team got known as the firm that would do the unglamorous parts. The firewall rules nobody else wanted to audit. The HIPAA paperwork the auditor would actually accept. The Proxmox cluster on the hardware in the back office. The patient portal that didn't have a $400/month subscription attached. Over time, that kind of work became most of what we do.
In 2024, we started building something bigger: a curated cloud platform that gives small businesses managed-service ergonomics without hyperscaler lock-in. That's coming online in 2026. The on-site services work continues as it always has.
What we believe
The hyperscaler hangover.
For fifteen years, the prevailing answer to every infrastructure question has been "put it in the cloud." That made sense when the cloud was new, cheap, and easier than running your own servers. It makes less sense now.
Hyperscaler pricing has drifted upward, the consoles have drifted into incomprehensibility, and the support has drifted out of reach for anyone not on an enterprise contract. The small businesses paying these bills are not big enough to negotiate, and not technical enough to escape on their own. A fifteen-person dental practice running their EHR on AWS is paying enterprise prices for hyperscale infrastructure they'll never use, supported by a tier-one helpdesk that doesn't know what an EHR is.
We think the answer is to walk it back. For most small businesses, the right place for compute is in their building, on hardware they own, configured by people they can call. The right place for shared services — email, file storage, collaboration tools, internal apps — is on a curated platform run by humans who know the business. Cloud isn't bad; Big Cloud is wrong for most of the businesses paying for it.
Durable compute.
The other half of the position: we think a lot of business infrastructure should last longer than it does. A well-built server in a closet can run for ten years. A well-designed network can outlive three rounds of vendor turnover. A properly-configured firewall doesn't need to be replaced every time the firmware updates.
We bias toward boring technologies, conservative choices, and configurations that survive the engineer who built them. We document everything. We pick vendors with long track records. We choose open formats whenever there's a credible choice. The goal is infrastructure that your next IT person — us, you, or someone else — can pick up and operate without a discovery sprint.
How we work
Four principles.
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Honest assessment over flattering pitch.
If your setup is in good shape, we'll say so. If we're the wrong firm for the job, we'll refer you to someone better. Engagements built on flattery don't last; engagements built on real diagnosis do.
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Fixed price where we can, hourly where we can't.
Most of what we do has a knowable scope. Quotes go in writing before work starts. When the scope is genuinely unknown (incident response, migration archaeology), we charge by the hour with a cap and a kill switch.
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Documentation as a deliverable.
We'll leave you with diagrams, runbooks, and credentials stored in a place you control. You should be able to fire us tomorrow and hand the binder to anyone else. That's a feature, not a bug.
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The phone gets answered.
The number on the website is real. So is the email. Your "account manager" is also the engineer who knows your setup. The phrase "let me open a ticket" doesn't come up.
Who we are
A small team, twenty-plus years of work.
White Iron is small by design. The engineers doing the work are the same people on the phone with you. Combined, the team has over twenty years of medical IT and security experience — solo practices through hospital networks — plus a long track record in network design, on-premises virtualization, and the kind of systems work the cloud was supposed to make obsolete and didn't.
We're based in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We do on-site work across the state and into northern Colorado. Remote engagements travel further when they fit.
Have a problem we should look at?
First conversation is free. By phone or email — whichever's easier.