A Prescription For Disaster

Aldridge is a managed services provider providing best-fit IT and cloud computing solutions to growing small and medium-sized businesses. The MSP’s clients benefit from their unsurpassed commitment to support. For one customer in particular, Texas-based pharmacy Complete Pharmacy Care (CPC), Aldridge’s first-responder assistance in the face of disaster is the only reason the company remains in business today. Here is their story.

Around 2:00 AM on Sunday morning, Aldridge’s client monitoring system notified them of an outage at the site of CPC. The IT company sprung into action, sending an onsite technician to meet the client onsite at the pharmacy to try and mitigate the situation. What they found when they arrived is unlike anything they’d dealt with before.

According to Santos Gaitan, NOC Technician at Aldridge, “The server room in a state of destruction: a hole had been cut into the ceiling, allowing rain from the weekend’s storms to fall onto the equipment. Hard drives from all servers had been pulled and various cabling had been cut. Someone had ripped into the walls to tear out network cabling. Needless to say, it was a complete disaster.”

The pharmacy’s CEO, Leonard Lynskey, knew this was bad news. The server room hosted almost everything they needed to stay up and running, including prescription records, a digital fax server that stored data, an exchange server that stored email, a server that ran printers, and the only phone system.

Lynskey recalled, “We’re sitting there, and we have no way to call our patients, to send or receive faxes or emails – there’s nothing. Imagine you walk into your business on a Monday morning and everything you have to communicate is gone. Gone.”

Oddly enough for a pharmacy crime such as this, almost no medication had been stolen during the break-in. It was apparent that the destructive act was committed solely to destroy the company itself.

Gaitan contacted Datto and verified that the previous night’s offsite backups had completed around midnight without issue, which was a few hours prior to the break-in.

Lynskey remembered the relief of learning this great news. “In the midst of all of the chaos, [Aldridge] said ‘the Datto backup finished an hour before you were robbed. You have everything. You have email, all your patient data, fax server data – everything.’”

Aldridge worked to ensure it’s client was able to get back up on its feet. Within the hour, Aldridge had all of CPC’s servers spun up in the Datto cloud and were able to begin migrating the data into their cloud environment.

On Monday morning, CPC employees were unable to work at their office due to the structural damage. However, thanks to the Datto restores Aldridge had pulled the night before, they were able to access their critical client data. By Tuesday, they were able to start serving patients on a limited basis.

“We were only down one day. Had we not had a second copy of our data already up in the cloud, we would not be having this conversation,” said Lynskey.

“We were able to get Datto to copy all the backup data to a new physical device and deliver it before the end of the week, allowing us to completely migrate the client’s environment to our cloud,” says Gaitan.

The pharmacy learned a valuable lesson that day. Said Lynskey, “People don’t realize how vulnerable they are. All you have to do to destroy a business is destroy the servers.” Lucky for CPC, Aldridge had ensured the business was leveraging Datto, which had prepared the company for this sort of disaster. As a result, Complete Pharmacy Care survived the incident with limited downtime and zero data loss.

Reflecting on how the situation would have been had they not implemented the Datto solution, Lynskey asserted, “Because of the physical damage inflicted on the pharmacy, we absolutely would have gone bankrupt. It would have taken us six weeks to rebuild all of the equipment.”

“We prevented the client from going out of business,” says Gaitan. “Due to the fact that the client handles critical medications, it’s likely that our actions not only saved the company but may have saved lives.”

“Datto provided a ray of hope in all of this because we had all of the data and all we had to do was build a bridge to it,” said Lynskey.