Cloud Server Helps Restart Business Operations

The Background

A bad thunderstorm rolled through Mexia, Texas, a small town just west of Waco. Lightning painted the sky. The threat of unexpected downtime continually looms for any business; however, fears escalate during storm season…and for good reason.

The owner of a local oil and gas company anxiously arrived at the office early the next morning. It was quickly evident that the worst had happened. Lightning had struck and left a mark on their on-premises server and workstations, and nearly all their office equipment had been cooked. Later, they discovered that when the local internet provider replaced some of the equipment, the AC protector had been plugged straight into the wall without a surge protector. With every motherboard completely barbecued, the company quickly questioned: Will my business survive this outage, and if so, how much is this going to cost me?

Company Profile:
Matador Networks is a technology service provider and consulting firm.

Headquarters: Dallas, Texas

The Challenge

They were right to be concerned. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 40% of small businesses permanently close after facing an unplanned disruption¹. While the full extent of the downtime was unknown, a few things were immediately clear:

All employees had zero access to their data,
Their internet was down, and if that weren’t enough,
Payroll was due on top of it all.

The loss of data, hardware, and productivity left the oil and gas company in a predicament. How could they quickly get back on their feet, while trying to mitigate the risk of future downtime? They turned to Matthew Maupin, an Intermedia partner and the President of Matador Networks, LLC, for help.

Maupin explained the situation: “Anything with a network connection was damaged or fully cooked. That said, it could have been a lot worse. Luckily, the building didn’t catch fire! When the company contacted us, the immediate needs were to restore productivity and to process payroll so employees would get their paychecks that Friday.”

¹ Protecting Your Business, FEMA.gov

The Solution

Rather than replace the on-premises server, Matador Networks recommended a more secure, reliable, and scalable solution – Intermedia’s Cloud Server. The highly available multi-tenant platform is architected to deliver superior performance, security and 99.999% uptime, with 24/7 award-winning support and management. Designed for businesses of any size, Intermedia’s enterprise-grade application infrastructure platform is deployed via the same online control panel as Intermedia’s other services.

Matador Networks moved into action. The team picked up all the frizzled equipment, and went to work harvesting the data off all workstations and the core applications that were running off the server. Matador Networks even loaned a service laptop to the client in the meantime.

Maupin continues: “For getting instantaneous access to data after a business continuity event, a cloud server is as close as it gets. We didn’t have to do a physical asset replacement for the server or install the software. A physical server would have needed to be ordered, staged and deployed, requiring weeks. No company has that sort of time before they’re operational again.”

Within just 16 hours, Matador Networks and Intermedia’s Cloud Concierge™ onboarding experts had spun up the Cloud Server, migrated over all the data and applications, and fired up a new VLAN.

Maupin shares his account of the events: “If it wasn’t for Intermedia’s partnership and support, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve this level of response time in spinning up the solution. This absolutely would not have been possible without the Intermedia onboarding team.”

If it wasn’t for Intermedia’s partnership and support, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve this level of response time in spinning up the solution. This absolutely would not have been possible without the Intermedia onboarding team.
Matthew Maupin,
President, Matador Networks, LLC

Products They Use

Exchange Email

Help drive employee productivity with mobile-ready, business-grade email, calendars and contacts.
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Cloud PBX

Extend rich, reliable calling features that let you sound like a big business—and operate like one. With Cloud PBX from Intermedia, you can preserve capital and slash operational costs. And experience high levels of reliability and complementary migration.
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Skype^® for Business

Intermedia's hosted Skype for Business offers your business a powerful communication and collaboration tool. Backed by Intermedia’s premium security, 24x7 support and migration capabilities, Skype for Business gives you and your employees instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, meetings and shared whiteboard sessions right from your computer.
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Email Archiving

Intermedia’s Email Archiving helps keep your email securely archived and easily accessible using HostPilot, our central control panel. It helps provide the preservation, protection and restoration features that your business needs to help safeguard intellectual property, facilitate compliance, and speed eDiscovery.
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SecuriSync^® File Collaboration

SecuriSync offers simple, secure, cloud-based backup and folder and file sharing. And SecuriSync boosts mobility by keeping files and folders backed up and accessible through Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry—or through a web browser.
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The Benefits

Now when lightning strikes, Matador Networks’ client can rest assure that their data is private and protected in Intermedia’s secure, SOC 2-audited cloud. In the event of any natural disaster, their data will be relocated to another Intermedia datacenter, eliminating this nightmare from happening ever again.

Maupin elaborates on the benefit: “The real ROI here was in the turnaround time to getting this company back in production. Of course, an insurance company is involved because of the lightning, but replacing all the damaged equipment could have easily been a 2-3-week process. A once disastrous business continuity problem is no longer.”

VPN access makes the option of telecommuting available to office workers. With the company’s owner often traveling or out in the field, this remote access to information has proved to be a huge benefit. Further, they don’t have to be physically in the office to manage hardware-related server issues.

In addition to increased productivity, the benefits of a cloud-based server extend to the company’s payroll department as well. Now, they’re back to issuing paychecks as usual, and don’t ever have to worry again about communicating anything otherwise.