We often talk about what-ifs in our business. I wanted to share some specific experiences from the last year.
We will start with Company A. They are a small operation of five office users. They deal in large projects scattered around Texas, and everyone on the team is an important cog. We implemented a managed IT service plan to keep their systems stable. They opted out of the backup monitoring as they had “a system in place.” One of the alerts that we received through our system is early stage warnings of failing hard drives. In case you haven’t ever had one fail. One, they do fail. Two, they can be a bear to recover from if you haven’t taken proper precautions.
So first, most of them fail. We’ve had clients that don’t even know that hard drives have moving parts and 100% of them will fail over time. If they happen to fail without warning, this is where a good backup strategy comes into play.
There are different flavors of backups. File or folder based backups keep copies of your data file. Volume or image based backups keep not only the data files, but also the program files (installed software, like your accounting or line of business application) and everything else exactly as it is now. It’s a snapshot of your exact current setup, right down to the signature file in your email program and the icons on your taskbar. Exactly.
The difference between the two may not look like much on the surface, but if you ever have to recover from dead hardware, the difference is huge. Here’s an example of the difference. Say your computer is a room full of filled with filing cabinets. Inside those filling cabinets are paper documents, those are your computer files. In the cabinets, everything is organized and where it should be. Now take all of those filing cabinets and dump them one after another into a pile on the floor in the other room. That is what a file or folder based recovery looks like. It’s all there, but it’s going to take a while to get in order. Volume or image based backups would be like having drawers of the files in order in the other room. Your old filing cabinets may be toast, but all you need is some shells and you can drop your files back in. With software, it would allow you to even switch types of shells. In geek-speak it’s called restoring to dissimilar hardware.
So back to Company A. They are on our basic managed IT services program (monitoring, antivirus/malware, and had opted out of managed backups) and we received errors for the CEOs hard drive. We called and spoke with their office staff about it and they said that he, “wasn’t having any issues.” We tried to convey that they were not going to have any issues until it was a full on issue problem. No dice. They weren’t buying this invisible error that we were telling them about. It’s often hard to sell the invisible. We asked if they had good backups. Check. That was all we could do. We can’t force clients to do what’s in their best interest.
As time went on, the errors got more consistent. Called two other times over the next few weeks. “Still no issues.” Again, invisible issues. Finally about four weeks after it started having real issues problems, we received a call from the office manager. “(CEO) is having issues with his computer.” Not a ptoblem, we went to work on it. We tried to connect the drive and copy the data directly to a new one. That’s the fast way to replace it. When you catch it early enough, you can mirror (copy) the drive data bit for bit over until you have an exact copy. Install that new hard drive with exact copy and you’re up and running. The problem was that it was too late. It was too corrupted at that point to salvage. So that meant a fresh install, of everything. OS, programs, data files, everything. The short of it is that it took several trips and over a week for him to even remember all of the settings and programs that he had. In the end it cost them a lot of time and money over something that could have easily been prevented.
Several months ago we had a call from a prospect, Company B, who had one of their two internal IT staff leave. It was their most senior technician with really all of their knowledgebase of their network and server expertise. The remaining technician was primarily in a desktop and application helpdesk support role. They contacted us because they were interested in partnering to replace that person’s capabilities instead of going through the process of interviewing, hiring, training, etc. This can be a daunting task for most non-technical small business owners/managers.
Company B is a great fit for our managed IT services because they had users spread around multiple locations and no centralized management or monitoring of their systems. Add on top of that they were use to a monthly spend (senior technician payroll, benefits, training, management, etc.) and we were going to be able to “cut it considerably” according to Company B’s owner. On the management side, it’s hard enough to keep up with a hundred plus computers by hand. Then add to the fact that it’s across more than a handful of locations and you will have a very unstructured, unpredictable situation over time. This is what drives some serious investment software tools to help make IT service departments or groups make sense of it all. To add to the issue, the software investments can be substantial.
Last year, we ran all of the numbers for one of our (then prospective) clients who is a technology savvy company themselves, Company C. They were looking at the costs of just mirroring some of the same infrastructure that we have built. They had the money, that wasn’t the issue. They’re also very technical. The owner even told us in talks, “You guys don’t do anything that we can’t do.” When I heard this I thought, “Yes and no.” Technically, he was 100% correct. Their staff is very technically inclined and there’s nothing that they can’t figure out. But the difference is that their main purpose within the business is working on client’s projects. Not only that, they’re really good at what they do. I believe that anytime someone is really good at what they do, they’re wasting time doing anything but that. I could tell you stories about doctors and lawyers doing their own backups, but I digress.
In the end, we showed them all of the numbers and they were not in their favor. After the hardware and software costs, training, and ramping up, there was no ROI track for an operation of their size. So this brings me to the area that I thought the owner wasn’t 100% on target. I think that he wasn’t taking into consideration the economy of scale that we have built over the last decade. This is what we do. Our tools are top rate and our staff is more than just “proficient” at it. It reminds me of the quote, “An amateur practices until he gets it right. A professional practices until he can't get it wrong.”
In the end, Company C came on board and it has been a great partnership with them. They just “get it” as a company. If the numbers work good for them, then they work great for Company B. And like I said, Company B was already budgeting for more than what we were going to cost. But then the economy snuck into the picture and they liked having the extra capital around every month. After several months of them limping along, we recently came up with a new offer. A 100% free, no risk trial.
We are so confident in the value that we deliver, that we offered part of our infrastructure to them at no cost, for a limited time. They liked the idea of a test drive. Over the course of a few days, we worked directly with their in-house technician to get it all setup. We would provide monitoring, inventory, and reporting for them, no antivirus filtering, malware filtering, SPAM filtering, or backups. It’s just the basics, but still very powerful insight into the pulse of their networked devices. We just completed the setup yesterday.
Today the reporting and alerts started firing off, less than 24 hours after enrolling their first group 85 systems. We will not run all of the final health check reporting until around the end of the month, but there was a items of interest. We found that 15 of their systems were not setup with their AV software. Actually, it was installed, but not running, so they still have no protection on those systems. We found 3 hard drives that are likely on the fast track to failing. We found at least 10 would not auto-enroll, which is usually do to other (often critical) issues on the systems. In a short time we had a laundry list of to-do items for their in-house guy and we haven’t even enrolled the other 30 systems that they have. I hope he doesn’t have any plans for the weekend. J
These are some real world examples from working with clients. Our hope is to convey that an ounce of prevention can really save companies money on their IT systems. If you don’t use AgniTEK, at least make sure your systems are being proactively taken care of. If you have any questions about how we can help improve your business, or just curious, please engage us by either emailing
sales@agnitek.com or calling us toll free at 888-4-AGNITEK (888-424-6483).
As a reminder to all Financial Services prospects here in Texas, we recently went through multiple 3rd party audits to verify our annual satisfaction of vendor requirements for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) section 501, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. We are also versed in HIPPA, SOX, and other regulatory compliance requirements.
If you have a network, we can likely help your business. Call us.
Have a great day.