How we spent New Year 2022
While the world was busy welcoming the new year, Protected Harbor ensured that our customers were still up and running, regardless of date and time. Shortly after midnight on January 1st, 2022, our monitoring system raised an unusual condition, as emails suddenly stopped being transmitted for a client and instead started to build up. A build-up of outbound emails triggered the Application Outage Avoidance alert. Our team started the new year off doing what we love: helping businesses stay protected and productive.
What happened?
The email server was experiencing an error, stopping outbound emails from being delivered.
The Manager on duty, Fasif VP, immediately responded and found the problem was something we hadn’t experienced before. Fasif followed Protected Harbor protocols by restarting services, troubleshooting, and rebooting cluster nodes. Regardless of what he did, emails were still not being sent. Nick Solimando, our Director of Technology, was dispatched to investigate.
Nick confirmed Fasif’s concern. We had never encountered this error before. Nick walked through the standard procedure, reviewing the steps Fasif had taken to confirm the issue. Nick could not find a solution despite bypassing our reputation filter and moving emails from one node to another. Upon further investigation, Nick found other people over the internet are experiencing the same issue, indicating that there was a problem in the programming code of the server. His experience and intuition led him to disable the internal email filter, and emails began to flow again.
Eventually, he found a REDDIT thread – Exchange 2019 Anti-Malware – Bad Update? : sysadmin (reddit.com) covering the issue. One thing about the people at Protected Harbor, they are eager to learn. Technology is constantly changing, and our team needs to stay up to date. We are never egotistical enough to believe we know it all and enjoy working with the IT support and MSP community to stay on top of new trends and issues.
From beginning to end, the event took 40 minutes. Our customers were unaware of this event, nor did we receive a single support call or ticket regarding missing emails.
It’s just another day at Protected Harbor – where we solve problems others cannot.
Protected Harbor celebrated this new year by standing true to its name, protecting and delivering the customers at any cost, no matter the day and time. Customer satisfaction is the utmost priority, and this is what we strive to do.
“This is an example of events that customers are unaware of occurring but are the hallmark of the difference between other MSPs and us. As CEO of a technical architecture company, there are the events I am most proud of.” -Richard Luna, CEO, Protected Harbor
Closing thoughts and future plans!
We’ve all heard the saying, “Know thy customer.” It’s a simple concept that’s been around for ages. But it is also one of the most critical factors in creating a successful brand. If you know your customers—their struggles, their needs, and what they expect from you—you’ll be able to create a brand that resonates with them.
Having complete control and management of all our internal technology is our core philosophy to deliver better customer uptime, experience, durability, and responsiveness.
We refer to ourselves as the Anti-MSP since we take an opposite approach to most Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The majority of MSPs are now just reselling cloud services; they have no control over, or understanding of, the technology they are managing.
A more extreme example of this was the Office 365 attacks from 2021 when thousands of company emails were compromised due to the MSP that managed the accounts.
As the ANTI-MSP, your responsibilities are more significant. We must respond 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, including on New Year’s Day 2022, since we control and manage our technology.
We plan to protect the customers and deliver at all costs in the future. The customer is interested in how we can help them with their IT needs, not what we offer. We need to articulate that value proposition and then deliver on it.
The good thing is that the new year brings a fresh start, and we are all ready to start something new. Switch from a reseller MSP to the experts who understand your needs. We at Protected Harbor are excited about the industry’s future and are looking forward to delighting our customers with unmatched services and solutions. Let’s get started with the new year 2022! Learn how we do this.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
