24/7 Local Support for Network Outages

Outages can occur any time, rain or shine, any day of the week. A significant Houston-area outage on a Sunday morning impacted 12 of our valued customers, but luckily, thanks to Centre's 24x7 boots-on-the-ground mentality, our team was able to get those businesses up and running in no time. Not only is it important to have an MSP who can support you efficiently, but when major problems occur when you least expect it, you need to have a partner that can guarantee true 24/7 local support. Here's how we helped get 12 customers back online in just a few short hours. 

Challenge

Increased Risk and a Loss of Network Access 

If one thing is certain, it's that anything can happen. Unfortunately, a network outage is under that category. This specific outage impacted 12 of our valued customers, and to make matters worse, it happened on a Sunday. While this may not have affected most customers' daily workflows, it creates immediate security and compliance issues and if the problem persists, will disrupt the new work week. 

Primary challenges occur after an outage: 

• Security and Data Risks: This is your primary concern. When your network goes down, gaps open up for cybercriminals to access. Additionally, people might turn to other internet options, like a public Wi-Fi, which is incredibly unsafe. You need to get things up and running ASAP or your data could be at risk. 
• Communication Breakdown: This includes any way that your company communicates whether that be email, Microsoft Teams, or internet-based calling. 
• Work and Productivity Hurdles: Whether it's an important meeting your employees are prepping for that week of customers who need access to their account, a network outage will bar both of these from happening. 

"Our customers affected by the outage ranged in impact. One was a church with a Sunday outage, some were not opened and others had employees who could not continue with their work. We approach any outages of this nature as an emergency situation. Even for customers that had zero downtime during this outage we wanted to ensure that the company was up and running properly for Monday morning."

Christopher Wilcox

Manager of Afterhours Delivery at Centre Technologies 

Solution 

24x7, Boots-on-the-Ground Support 

Whether the outage occurs on a weekday or a weekend, day or night, any number of people could be affected. It's important that you have a 24x7 team that is dedicated to getting you back online. While being a Sunday may have deterred some MSPs, as soon as the outage was confirmed, our afterhours team went to work getting to the root of the problem and solving it as fast as possible.

• Weekend consultants ran phone support, ISP fail-over support and POC communication as well as customer communication.
• On-call Service Delivery Managers (SDMs) helped with communication and ensured that all required team members were properly engaged, a technical bridge was started and ran our internal IR processes.
• Additional system and network architects assisted in getting our weekend consultants Meraki access in minutes. While sometimes these request seem minimal, it allowed the team to almost instantly move forward with additional support request.
• Support-On Call and Network On-Call specialists both called in to assist with the outage. Centre utilized their skills to assist in fail-over setups and their POC relationship to assist in driving communication. 
• Two more technical specialists joined the technical bridge in case assistance was needed.

"Having a 24/7 team to monitor and respond was absolutely vital to getting our customers productive before they came back to work in the office on Monday. In cases where their was a secondary internet option, we got those customers back online within minutes. The network providers' own team was not aware that an outage had occurred throughout the state and due to our senior networking resource's long history of working with them, knew how to get their engineers involved to get this issue resolved quickly and conveniently for our customers."

Johnathan Sieger

Service Delivery Manager at Centre Technologies 

Impact 

The Importance of an MSP Who Has 24/7 Local Support 

If an outage occurs, you need fast results. So having an MSP that guarantees fast, round-the-clock support that can actually fix the problem is paramount. Without that, your put yourself at risk of even a small outage keeping you offline for days at a time instead of the mere hours our customers were on a Sunday morning. 

"Network outages are never fun, and we work hard to prepare for them to better assist Centre customers with any downtime. We implement solutions such as backup internet service connections to assist with changing internet connections on the fly when available to keep organizations running. We know that network outages impact businesses at all levels and can lead to loss of revenue so it is vital to have a 24/7 response team that can work quickly and efficiently to resolve major issues to get clients back up and running effectively."

Chris Pompa

Senior Technical Consultant at Centre Technologies

Big or small, Centre Technologies is available around the clock to support you in whatever you need. Contact us today if you're ready to be completely protected for whatever comes your way. We're here for you 7 days a week (especially, Sundays).