Florida MSPs Relied on Out-of-State Data Centers During Hurricane Ian

Alex Santana, president of managed service provider Connect SWFL, couldn’t believe his eyes when he surveyed the exterior of his company’s building after Hurricane Ian.

There was absolutely no damage to the structure.

The hurricane devastated Fort Myers. Connect SWFL is an MSP less than 10 miles north of Fort Myers Beach. Additionally, the business is in a flood zone, a short distance from the Caloosahatchee River.

“Once they were able to get the power poles up and running, it was fine,” Santana said of his business. “And you know, we were fine. We also have dual internet connectivity. So, one of our internet connections was already up and running while the other one took a little bit of time to come up.”

Santana doesn’t exactly know how other MSPs in Fort Myers or Southwest Florida fared post hurricane. But he said he does know that his company had redundancies in place in case disaster became reality.

Last week it did.

Sustained Damage from Hurricane Ian?

Despite the chaos and destruction that Hurricane Ian brought, the data that businesses need to function may be unscathed coming out of this storm. At least that was the case for Connect SWFL.

“The software we use is not in-house, so it’s actually hosted in the cloud,” Santana said. “So if anything happens and our clients need to open tickets, that’s available all the time. There are data that’s internal that’s obviously backed up locally, also backed up offsite, and available in case of a catastrophe. And that’s usually what we recommend: Always have offsite backup for our clients for those reasons.”

View the complete story on our sister site Channel Futures.