One of my loyal clients of 13 years had a customer who mentioned they had lost over 12 years of history because of a server crash. The client helped me get an introduction to the customer; I of course was very grateful for the referral. I did my best to contact that account right away, and setup a time to meet with them in person.
In talking with this prospective new account, they mentioned that they were working with one of the large IT groups and they had purchased the best of everything. Not only did they have good equipment but also this prospect had monitoring services for backups, servers, workstations, etc. The prospect also mentioned that two of the drives in the server failed at the same time. Even though they had monitoring, somehow backup monitoring services were not included with that fee.
Even though all of these bad things happened to the prospective client, they still purchased a brand new server, backup solution, and were about to sign a new 3 year contract for ongoing monitoring services with their current IT group. Upon learning all this I mentioned that maybe this IT group wasn’t treating them that well, they did lose 12 years of data under their watch. This small business has only 10 employees. At that size, it seems like the business has to earn a large sum of money just to pay for all of the computers and servers the previous IT company wanted to sell them.
This kind of story is common. Many business owners purchase IT solutions out of fear, blindly accepting what the salesman on the other end is selling. I am guessing for many business owners it might be easier to keep a known bad IT group over hiring an unknown new IT group. If the new group doesn’t know how something might be put together, it could mean either having to purchase more equipment the new group knows how to use, or else going back to the previous bad group and having to ask for help. At least this is the fear many business owners have about moving IT groups.
Here are some ideas if you would like to move from one IT group over to another
- Ask other business owners for IT company recommendations.
- Meet with a new IT group and ask for them to draw out a work plan on what is required to move away from the current group.
- Have the new group go over the current set of equipment and ask them which IT equipment in the office they do not support and what would be their recommendation to fix that product if it had issues.
I have been in touch with the new prospective client and encouraged them to finish the server build they already agreed to purchase when the other one failed. They are also still waiting to see how much of the data they can recover of the 12 years lost. They will have to pay all of the fees to recover the data that was lost which could be 10’s of thousands. I think they may have gone through enough pain that they may be ready to make a change.
As a Holland, Michigan Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer more than just server disaster recovery and break-fix IT support. We evaluate and organize your network, keeping your data backed up and secure—at all times. Don’t wait for server disaster to find a qualified Managed Services Provider. Reach out to Shoreline Technology Solutions today. Our information technology company will evaluate your network free-of-charge and provide you with best-in-class hardware and cloud-based solutions. We’re excited to hear from you!
President / Network Architect
Mark Kolean always had a fascination with technology from the time he was 3 and his gift of the Atari 2600 to current. In 1990 at the age of 14 Mark got his first job in customer support for a mail order business supporting Tandy TSR-80 computer software shipped on cassette tape. A few years later Mark was building hundreds of 286, 386, and 486 computers for the new emerging DOS & Windows 3.1 computers that had exploded on the market.
After a college career studying business and technology Mark Started Shoreline Computer Systems in 1999 at the height of the dot.com boom with the looming crisis of the year2k bug just around the corner. In the early 2000’s a lot of work was done with early network systems including Lantastic, Novell, and Windows NT Server. Mark became a community contributor to the Small Business Specialist community that revolved around Small Business Server 2000-2011 which focused on single or dual server environments for businesses up to 50 in size. Networks during this time frame mostly had a break fix relationship in which work was billed only when a problem occurred.
In the 2010’s Microsoft released their first cloud based software called Microsoft BPOS which would in later become known as Microsoft Office 365. This introduced a new model in technology with pay as you go subscription services. Starting in 2013 Mark’s team at Shoreline Computer System rebranded as Shoreline Technology Solutions to focus on the transition to become proactive and less reactive to data backup and security needs. Starting in 2018 all customers are required to have a backup management plan in place as a center point with the full understanding that if STS isn’t watching the customer’s data, then no one is.
Now in Mark’s 22 years of business he is building a company emphasis of how to help customers retire servers and build networks completely in the cloud.
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