It’s been some journey but the Smile IT tech team can give themselves a huge pat on the back as they recently closed their 50,000th support ticket! This is a huge milestone for us as we continue in our quest to be Brisbane’s best managed service provider and an indicator of the enduring quality of our IT service.
Back in 2010 we moved to a Connectwise Manage ticketing system and the very first of these tickets were lodged. 12 years later and we’ve put 50,000 smiles on dials, solving our clients’ problems and keeping their businesses on track.
We’ve navigated cybersecurity breaches, system failures, data loss network upgrades, online safety struggles, ransomware and so much more. Through it all the tech team has kept smiling, solving problems day in and day out and taking huge amounts of stress off our client’s shoulders.
Those 50,000 tickets closed are a tribute to them and their work ethic. We had a chat with the techs and gleaned a bit of inside info about a couple of the more memorable ticket they’ve encountered across this journey. Have a read:
Most Challenging Ticket
“It was a Friday morning, a few years ago when Ransomware was starting to gain traction. A client called saying they couldn’t access any of their data… the files seemed there but nothing works. I logged into their domain files and literally everything had been encrypted with text files. Yup, Ransomware.
I had to call the client and say their data was indeed inaccessible, but I would be there in 30-minutes. The entire drive there I racked my brains for a solution that didn’t involve paying the hackers their ransom. I had a lightbulb moment when I remembered that I had setup the backups for these guys in a way that only a username and password inputted by the backup software could access them.
I arrived and logged into the server, sweating bricks and with fingers crossed. Indeed, all file shares were encrypted. This narrowed down the source of the ransomware, as only a few team members had access credentials. I checked the backup software, which was functional. I checked the backups themselves, and the latest one from the day before was intact. The relief was indescribable.
I was able to tell the company that their data was intact, but the lengthy process of running malware removal tools and restoring the discs would mean they wouldn’t work today.
We found the source when I logged into the director’s laptop and was greeted by a red desktop announcing the machine and all network shares had been encrypted. Turned out he had opened an extremely dodgy looking email attachment and infected the entire network.
Ransomware is real people, be very careful of those suspicious looking emails!”
Most Rewarding Tickets
“This ticket really showed to me the value of having a managed service provider on your side. A company had a lot of archived client data, all going to the same NAS (eeek, first mistake). They asked us to check it out because the NAS had stopped giving alerts. When I had a look two discs had been dropped and all the data was gone!
Never mind, there was a partition on the RAID that would still work. All that was needed was a reboot. Right? RIGHT? Wrong. I rebooted, check the shares, everything is gone. Full panic stations and I had to give them the bad news. With all that lost data, the client would be in regulatory hell, facing fines of 100’s of thousands of dollars.
The only solution was to find a data recovery company. I called one around the corner and their fees were good, so I booked it in. A week later, nothing. Two weeks more later… still nothing. I had to call the client and let them know.
Then I heard an ad on the radio for a global data recovery specialist. What the heck I thought, let’s give them a try. They were expensive, but it was worth a roll of the dice. They offered a free assessment, saying they’d only charge us if they recovered the data. They’re called OnTrack Data Recovery and were extremely professional, keeping me in the loop the entire way.
Four days later, I got an email saying they were successful in the recovery. I login to their system, squealing with glee and am presented with a full directory tree of the NAS with everything listed.
Day made, clients money saved. That was an arduous yet rewarding ticket to solve.”
Experience the Smile IT Difference
50,000 tickets might have been a massive mountain to climb, but it’s just the beginning. We can’t wait to help out our Smile IT clients with keeping their ICT infrastructure on track and productive now and in the future.
If you’d like to be a part of that, please get in touch with a member of our team. We’d love to chat.
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!