CTN Solutions

IT solution provider, CTN Solutions, turns to Barracuda MSP for help when one of their customers’ suffered a system failure — the day before payroll was due to 1,000 employees.

CTN has been providing professional IT support for businesses throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware for nearly 20 years. The solution provider serves as an adjunct IT department for its clients, which range in size from 20 employees to 1,000 employees. While downtime is something all of CTN’s customers want to avoid at all costs, some still push back when it comes to backing up their data.

One customer in particular, which has a national reach and close to 1,000 employees, serves as an example of the importance of having a reliable backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution in place. For more than a year, CTN had encouraged the client to protect its data off site, to no avail. “Earlier this year, the client finally took our advice and signed up for our cloud backup service, built on the Barracuda ECHOplatform,” says Drew Morrisroe, CEO of CTN Solutions. “Having nearly 2 million files that consumed 1.7 TB made the customer a perfect fit for Barracuda MSP’s fixed-price cloud storage plan,” says Morrisroe.

A Server Crash That Proves Cloud Backup’s Value

Despite running redundant on-premise servers, CTN’s client suffered a perfect storm of multiple drive failures, which led to a system crash — and loss of its local backup — just three months after it started backing up its data to the cloud. “As Murphy’s Law would have it, the crash happened a day before payroll was due,” says Morrisroe. “We became aware of a serious hardware issue with a mission-critical server that processes payroll and other critical business functions. Without this server, their business was crippled.”

Due to the large amount of data lost, performing a recovery from the cloud was the only viable option available to the customer. But, performing a recovery via the Internet would take too long to get payroll done in time, so CTN turned to Barracuda MSP for help. “The Barracuda MSP engineer began the data recovery process to a local external drive right away, but the fact that we needed to restore 1.9 million files made this a lengthy process,” says Morrisroe. “Barracuda MSP kept us and the client in the loop with the status of the data recovery. To show how urgently the client needed its data, the client made arrangements to transport the drive from Boston as soon as it was available.”

After retrieving the recovery drive at 10 p.m., the client flew it back to headquarters and with CTN’s help completed the data restoration operation. “We got the payroll data restored first so they could get their payroll processed for hundreds of employees, and then we finished building their new servers and restoring the rest of their data,” says Morrisroe. “The restore was a complete success — with no data loss — and they were able to meet their deadline thanks to Barracuda MSP’s solution and all of our teams working together.”

Lessons Learned From a Real Disaster Recovery Experience

Restoring their customer’s payroll data and their 1.9 million files did more than successfully pay employees on time; CTN now uses this success story to stress the importance of cloud backup to their other customers. “Some companies only view IT is an unnecessary expense — until something major happens, and they can’t access their data and business applications,” says Morrisroe. “The incident we had earlier this year with a customer losing its server and local backup was a clear reminder of the importance of backing up to the cloud. We’ve been sharing this example with other customers, and we are experiencing greater success in getting them to protect their data with Barracuda MSP’s comprehensive BDR solution. With Barracuda MSP’s reliability and fixed-price cloud storage plan, there’s no reason any of our customers should not have peace of mind when it comes to protecting their critical data and applications.”