This is a developing story. Check back as we speak to more MSPs in the affected areas.
MSPs are no strangers to stepping into a firestorm for their customers (think pandemic). And in the case of the ongoing and deadly Southern California wildfires, MSPs in the area are working hard to keep businesses running and reaching out to those in need with supplies and donations.
Here’s just a small sampling of everyday heroes at work.
Outside-the-Box Thinking Helps Business Meet Payroll
The vast majority of the devastation has been in residential areas, but power outages and evacuation orders are impacting business locations.
Biztek Solutions President and CEO Derek Anderson and his employees are located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, so fortunately did not have homes impacted, but they do have customers throughout SoCal. One, a construction company, is located in an area where the power company extended the outage for safety reasons. Some quick and creative thinking on Biztek’s part prevented the company from missing a payroll for its 200 or so employees.
Most of the business’s systems were cloud based, so Anderson said his team initially discussed a cloud restoration and then getting access for about 60 of the knowledge workers to work remotely. But that would take significant time and might be wasted effort if the power came back on sooner than expected. When the accounting manager told them the most pressing business need was getting access to the on-premises server to file payroll, Anderson’s team opted for a faster and much simpler solution—and sprung into action.
He told the accounting manager, “We’ve had no power issues on our office, knock on wood. I’m going to send an engineer. We’re going to pull your server out of your rack. I’m going to put it in our rack and then we’ll get you and your accounting team (which was three users), up and connected so you can process payroll.”
As the engineer headed to the construction company’s office, which was about 20 minutes away, Anderson and one of his other engineers “started configuring our firewall to basically mirror their firewall settings, because we had all of that documented. By the time the server made it to our office it was basically plug and play, do a remote access to the three workers, configure their VPN connection, and they were up and running.”
He adds, “We did it even with California traffic and they got it submitted within 5 minutes of their deadline.”
The company was grateful to get their people paid, and thanked Anderson for the work, which he provided for free. “In these situations we’re just happy to help. That’s just the right thing to do by our client.”
With Preparation and an Incident Response Plan, Businesses Don’t Miss a Beat
Keith Parker, founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Methodology IT, was monitoring his customers in the impacted areas. “The message was, ‘hey, first we want to make sure you’re safe. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. But our job is to keep you up and running.’”
They did have some customers impacted, either employees who lost their homes or the business itself had to evacuate the office.
A silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic, though, was that most of Parker’s clients are already set up to work remotely.
So when his client, a property management company that does have workers in the office, couldn’t open because it’s in the middle of the evacuation zone, Methodology IT was “able to get them set up relatively quickly so that they could continue to work,” Parker explains. “We were able to do things with their VoIP phones and email so that they could very quickly notify tenants about what’s going on relative to their buildings.”
In another case, he adds, “We had a set of users that we had just onboarded who lost their homes but also lost the devices that we had just onboarded for them. So we were able to rapidly redeploy machines to those folks. You know they have bigger issues, but at the very least they’re able to work and they’re able to communicate.”
He adds, “Luckily, through the years we’ve put these systems in place, but probably the bigger thing is we’ve practiced tabletop exercises where we have simulated some event taking away the ability to go into your office.” Parker has incident response plans for all their clients, something that has been stressed among his fellow ASCII Group peers.
Once it was safe to go back to clients’ offices, Parker’s team went on-site. “We didn’t necessarily need to go there, but just to be there, to assure everyone, ‘hey, whatever it is that you need, we’re going to take care of right now. It’s important that you have the ability to be open and serve your clients.’”
Trust Earned Keeps a Project On Track
For Alvaka Networks, an MSP and ransomware recovery provider in Irvine, California, the trust it earned with its professional services client is keeping an infrastructure and security upgrade project on track, says Oli Thordarson, president and CEO. In this engagement, Alvaka’s team is working with the CIO and a few other key people on their IT team. He explains that it’s a “fairly large technology refresh on some of their infrastructure, and as we’re doing that, we’re doing a lot of security implementations and updates as we go through that whole process.”
Three of the client’s team had to evacuate their homes and for now, are not able to continue work on the project, which has a deadline. “They’ve been wanting to work at high velocity and they’re seeing that we’re getting the job done. So they’ve been giving us more leeway to just keep forging ahead quickly. And then this came up. Instead of having a stop because three of the key IT stakeholders aren’t available, they’ve got enough confidence and trust in us at this point that they’re just having us forge ahead.”
Looking toward the immediate future, Thordarson says, “There’s going to be a ton of need to rebuild IT infrastructure in all those affected homes and businesses. Right now the more immediate need is for restoring communications like cellular communications and getting localized power generation in there … but I think there’s going to be some heavy lifting for IT support starting in about six months as places start getting rebuilt and coming back online”
Efforts Go Beyond IT As MSPs Give Back
Scott Hagizadegan, CEO of Shield IT Networks, in Santa Clarita, California, and his wife have their bags packed and ready to evacuate if necessary, but that didn’t stop them from organizing a neighborhood drive to help victims of the fire.
Hagizadegan and his wife went door to door, asking neighbor to drop supplies, including food, dog food, water, clothes, baby strollers, in their driveway. Hagizadegan drove the donations to local aid organizations. “Our neighbors really came through.”
As a company, he said they made a sizable donation to World Vision, an international humanitarian aid organization. “Personally it’s a big thing with our company, it’s profit with a purpose, so we do [things] regularly, but when stuff like this comes up, we try to make sure to help out.”
Parker, too, is working to help the community in a collaborative effort with the University of Oklahoma’s softball team, which his daughter plays for, USA Softball, and local youth recreation leagues in the areas impacted. When OU plays locally during the season, they will be collecting baseball and software equipment to distribute to the area youths.
In addition, Methodology IT supports a charter school that serves the underprivileged community in South Los Angeles. The MSP donated Chromebooks for remote learning during this period.
For e360, an MSP and IT reseller headquartered in Concord, California, and serving mid-tier businesses, enterprises, and state government agencies, it’s especially personal. “We have employees that live in the affected areas. Customers that have lost everything. We have friends of customers, partners, and employees that have lost so much. It’s been really, really hard and sad to watch this, as it has been for everyone,” says CEO Mike Strohl.
For his customers who are still trying to figure out where to live and where to find supplies, Strohl says it’s too early to get back to work. Our unique ability to help companies and people work remotely and move things to the cloud and all the other things that go along with it, that will come, and we will donate services like we did when everything shut down for the pandemic.”
For now, employees are taking part in an internal fundraiser, which the company will match, to donate directly to their friends and colleagues impacted. The effort has already raised $70,000, Strohl says.
Vendors Are Pitching in Too
To support their customers and the broader LA community, Kaseya has activated the following emergency response initiatives: The Kaseya Cares emergency response program offers immediate support to customers experiencing service or business disruptions. Kaseya wants any MSP impacted to contact [email protected] or their Account Manager. Partners who need immediate technical support assistance with disaster recovery can contact the Code Red team. “We are here to help, 24/7,” says a company spokesperson.
“As of tonight, two customers (which is two too many) have contacted our emergency response team for direct assistance due to the LA wildfires,” the spokesperson adds. In addition, “Out of respect for our partners affected by the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County, we are rescheduling our LA Symposium from January 23 to the week of March 17, 2025.
And together with the Cooper Voccola Family Foundation, Kaseya will be making a donation to the American Red Cross to assist with recovery efforts.
