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Responding to a Fire at a Cold Storage Trucking Company
Case Study: Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
ACS was providing managed IT services to a refrigerated trucking and cold-storage company based in the Greater Boston Area that experienced a fire and required immediate disaster recovery services.
Founded, owned and operated by three generations of family members, the company experienced a fast-burning, accidental fire at its headquarters and warehouse facility south of Boston. The blaze destroyed its entire operational infrastructure, including its IT platform – which consisted of nine servers and more than 60 computer workstations, which housed everything from inventory, customer and financial data to information on the company’s employees and truck fleet. In less than two hours the fire had nearly wiped out not only company’s facility but also its business because its value proposition was directly tied to its ability to consistently meet its customers’ needs on short notice.
The Challenge
Day 1 - 2:00 p.m.
Fire starts at trucking company HQ and warehouse facility
Day 1 - 4:00 p.m.
The facility is destroyed including nine servers and 60 plus computer workstations.
Day 1 - 5:00 p.m.
ACS personnel arrive on site. ACS works through the night re-building and re-configuring the company's entire network.
Day 2 - 9:00 a.m.
Back in Business! ACS restores all of the company's data and establishes new network operations at a temporary HQ.
Results
ACS personnel, including members of our senior management team, were on site before the blaze had even been fully extinguished. Working closely with the company’s management team we were able to:
- Access the company’s stored data using real-time backups housed at our facility in Brockton and at our redundant data center in Marlborough, Massachusetts
- Working through the night, our team re-built and re-configured the company’s entire network and completely restored all of its data at its temporary headquarters.
- Provide our expansive inventory of emergency reserve hardware and software to immediately replace the company’s nine servers and 60 workstations.
Impact
The company was back in business by the next morning, having met its ongoing obligations to its own customers and having restored a sense of normalcy for its employees in less than 24 hours.
During the subsequent weeks, ACS worked hand-in-hand with the company’s leaders and:
- Restored lost inventory
- Established a new permanent headquarters
- Built a new, highly secure and robust IT platform
That platform, which was funded with fire-related insurance proceeds, was replaced again at the end of its service life with a cost-effective, ACS-operated, enterprise cloud computing solution, which gave the company even greater IT strength and flexibility.
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What Our Clients Are Saying
"ACS Services is an exceptionally well-managed Company. The technicians’ service and communication skills are outstanding. The knowledgeable team is ACS’ most valuable asset."
Austin Smith
Controller, Karas & Karas Glass
“We contacted ACS in the early fall and had a meeting within a couple of days to review our needs. Within a week I had a comprehensive proposal and we scheduled a follow-up to review the details and set in motion a plan to implement the onboarding. The monthly maintenance and Help Desk have been virtually invisible, which means it’s working very well!”
Joe Burkett
CFO, CAFCO
"ACS provides excellent customer service and is very responsive to our IT needs. We have worked with ACS for over 10 years and have always found them to be reasonable, responsible, and extremely knowledgeable with regard to new technology. They have guided us through multiple conversions and work tirelessly to resolve all of our IT needs.
What ACS does that really benefits my specific company is they monitor our network and anticipate and resolve problems before they interfere with our day to day operations. They also provide off-site back up storage which is invaluable to our business."
Debra J. Caswell
Office Manager, Lynch & Lynch Attorneys