Our goal is to provide firms with that which they would ask for, if they only knew it existed. The possibilities that present themselves at the outset of a relationship with a managed services client often have both parties abuzz with excitement. We enjoy improving our new client’s environment and end user experience, and watching the effect on productivity and morale.
A mid-sized law firm with an unstable history with their previous Managed Services Provider (MSP) was preparing to become a Kraft Kennedy client. We made sure that the transition was as smooth as possible despite some setbacks that threatened to derail the cut-over.
During the onboarding meeting, the client mentioned that the file server had abruptly shut down. Its current MSP was still working on the issue. This was the first sign of trouble. Two days later, the situation went from worrisome to potentially disastrous.
– Our Information Security and Governance Practice Group reviewed the file share and found that most of it had been corrupted. Only a handful of the corrupted files were recoverable, and this was due largely to the steps taken post-incident.
– Backups had been failing for months. To make matters worse, the MSP had realized this only after the file server failure. In the meantime, corrupted backups had been overwriting good backup tapes with corrupted data.
– The backup tapes were not labeled. In addition, there was only had a single tape drive, which meant a lot of time finding the tapes for the most recent data set before actually restoring the data.
– VSS was not enabled. There were no snapshots available to be a possible method of restoration.
Ultimately, we found a three-month-old backup set with all the necessary tapes and restored the files to a read-only network share for users to retrieve the files on demand. Multiple network apps had to be reconfigured and, as a preventive measure, we implemented Datto, a reliable cloud backup solution, to replace tape backups. The client was able to begin its contract with us unscathed even though its previous provider had left it without any historic data.