President Trey Lackey had been out of town during the weekend ice storm in January. He had two families holed up in his house because of power outages. Fifteen people in the Portland area died since the storm – linked to falling trees, hypothermia or fire. The ice storm caused pipe burst, fallen infrastructure and more. 

While some businesses were able to conduct business as usual, one of our customers came back to their offices to find devastating damage from a pipe burst and water damage in data closets. We facilitated moving them from their onsite data center to a public data center in the area in less than 24 hours. 

Access Tech: Pipe burst office damage to one of our clients.

During the winter storm, our customer’s office lost electrical power, exposing it to sub-freezing temperatures. As a result, the fire suppression sprinkler pipes in the ceiling ruptured and water flooded the entire offices and data closet that housed their production servers. Their tape backups were sitting on the desk of the IT manager. Yep, when it rains it pours. Our team quickly put our heads together and withing 24 hours our client moved into a secure and dry public data center. We moved their contact center folks offsite and restored all the systems in peril. It’s times like these that we triage internally calling on Trey who was on vacation and externally to data center partners and specialists in data recovery to make sure that folks can get back to work. 

Customers recognize that we always think about their overall success rather than just closing sales.  They value this and call us first when they have needs, especially emergencies.  This is extremely valuable to us, and we know we need to take responsibility to live up to their expectations.  Even if a situation doesn’t turn into a financial opportunity for us, we know that delivering value by matching a customer to even a competitor of ours increases our customers’ faith in us and the likelihood they will continue to call us first. 

These events are happening more frequently and with more intensity. Contact us at Access Tech where we can help you be prepared. Work with us to create a disaster recovery plan in place for your home and your business. Call us anytime, we’ll answer.