Accounting Firm Dials Computer Rescue 911
Getting end users to care about IT can often be a challenge. After all, if IT isn’t a part of their everyday, it can often go overlooked. This is why MSPs are such great partners for businesses, as they take care of the back end technology of the company so the customer can focus on what they really care about—running their business.
Managed Services Provider, Computer Rescue 911, works hard to educate clients about the value IT infrastructure brings to a business, regardless of industry. The Michigan-based company offers both business IT solutions and residential services, including corporate IT management, web support, solution placement, and consulting.
When Server Failure Strikes
Recently, while reassessing long-time client Hiestand & Co’s backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions, they noticed the firm’s Windows Server Backup was intermittently failing. Hiestand & Co is a certified public accountant (CPA) firm, so avoiding downtime, especially during tax season, is critical. Recognizing the potential downtime costs from failed data backups, Computer Rescue 911 recommended they implement Datto’s solution. On the same day that Hiestand & Co gave them the go ahead to install a Datto SIRIS, Computer Rescue 911 sent a technician to the firm to get them set up.
On Wednesday of that same week, Hiestand & Co called the MSP because their server was no longer booting. The Computer Rescue 911 team determined that the failure was due to a bad RAID array. Luckily, they had already taken a proactive approach by updating Hiestand & Co’s BDR solution just days beforehand. With Datto’s Instant Virtualization technology, the MSP was able to boot an image of the CPA firm’s server and run the company off of the SIRIS device.
For the next eight days, it was business as usual at Hiestand & Co. While they ran their server off of the SIRIS, Computer Rescue 911 ordered the new parts, rebuilt their server, and did a bare metal restore with the help of Datto’s always-on technical support.
“It was our first bare metal restore and it took Datto support maybe eight or nine hours. They were on the phone with us the whole time, hand-holding in the times when it was restoring. They were right there waiting with us,” explained Kevin Damghani, owner of Computer Rescue 911.
Why Business Continuity Matters for Accounting Firms
The team at Computer Rescue 911 has over 60 years of combined IT experience. They have become well-versed in their clients’ various needs depending on their industry. “For CPAs, from January 1st to mid-April, if the system is even down for five minutes, life is theoretically over. Most CPAs that we have are working late nights and most weekends during tax season. So, having systems up and running for CPAs is vital to make sure that they can access their tax programs to do business and personal returns for their clients. Without it, they can’t access their database from previous years for reference and they can’t access their current tax returns,” explained Damghani.
Clients like Hiestand can’t afford even a second of downtime. Knowing this to be the case, Damghani and his team were able to keep them up-to-date with the best business continuity solution.
“I don’t want to spend any time worrying about my company’s IT needs and this Datto device saved me a lot of headaches when my server crashed. Not only did it keep me from losing my data, but I was able to get up and running on the Datto device in under an hour and was not really affected by loss of work due to ‘server downtime’,” explained Guy Hiestand, owner of Hiestand & Co.
Since 2010, Hiestand & Co has looked to Computer Rescue 911 for business continuity needs, and the relationship has proved to be a positive one thus far. Damghani and his team have focused a lot of their attention on server application maintenance. This extra step saved Hiestand from worrying about any unwelcome downtime, making tax season far less taxing than it could have been without the Datto solution safely in place.