Tricks, No Treats: 3 Terrifying Tales For SMBs

Halloween is all about things that are spooky and scary. For business leaders, nothing is scarier than unexpected challenges that bring your business down. This Halloween season, we’d like to share some true horror stories from the business world that might give you a fright. These stories are not for the faint of heart but do offer important learnings for all of us. So, grab some popcorn and read on, if you dare. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

One dark and stormy night, a sinister force hacked a large distribution company’s systems. Like a vampire, a ransomware attack sucked the life from their systems, leaving them paralyzed. As panic set in, a glimmer of hope emerged-DDMS, their cloud-based software lifeline. However, even that stronghold was being attacked. Fortunately, we were able to identify when the suspicious activity was happening, and our team shut them down and contacted the company.

We called the business and found out what was happening. Armed with that knowledge, our team embarked on a daring midnight mission. The company also used our e-automate solution, but it was on-premise. So, we worked feverishly to move their entire e-automate system into the cloud. Although the rest of their systems were inaccessible, they could manage their end-of-the-month reports and take care of their customers.

For this company, the cloud was their silver bullet to protect themselves from the monster of ransomware. While they were large enough to have an IT department and a security team, most SMBs are not staffed in this way. Ransomware attacks hit a new victim every 14 seconds, stealing information and exploiting businesses. For smaller businesses, this could spell doom. Don’t let your business become another statistic in this grim tale. Embrace the protection of the cloud and keep the ransomware monsters at bay!

One late evening, a third-shift employee at a mid-size manufacturing plant was making paint. Something he had done many times before. Since this manufacturing plant didn’t track its inventory, this employee, Harry, could cut dangerous corners. He poured the ingredients into the 3,000-gallon mixing tank and started it up. Everything was fine until, about 30 minutes later, a bone-chilling snap echoed throughout the plant. It came from Harry’s mixing tank. To his horror, Harry saw that the shaft connected to the motor housing had completely sheared off.

With trembling hands, Harry slowly peered into the tank. It was worse than he expected. Inside the 3,000-gallon tank was a rock-hard, solid batch of paint.

Cleanup crews had to be hired to chip away at the solid paint with jackhammers, but that wasn’t enough. Two people had to go through by hand, scraping the inside walls of the tank to get it clean.

The nightmarish incident cursed the company with eight weeks of downtime for this one tank. Additionally, it cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in wasted materials, lost finished goods, incurred clean-up costs, production downtime, and equipment replacement. The total cost of Harry’s mistake ended up exceeding his annual wages.

To this day, the exact ingredients of Harry’s mixture remain a mystery. But that company implemented a quick yet thorough inventory control process to ensure it would never happen again.

This next story follows a hardware store that runs on Spruce and hit a period of terrible luck. One foggy morning a few years ago, the store owner, Frank, pushed open the creaky door only to be overwhelmed by the stench of smoke. His blood ran cold as he traced the odor to the server room. And there he saw something straight out of a tech horror movie. One of the servers had caught fire and completely burned the other two.

Frank found a company several states away that could retrieve some of the data from their burned hard drives for $14,000. What else was he to do?

But bad luck wasn’t done with them yet.

Several months later, as the witching hour of their fiscal year approached, the dreaded blue screen appeared on their computers with a message. The message read that they had to pay $55,000 to get their data back. This hardware store had backups, but the hacker had gotten a hold of all except one flash drive.

Of course, Frank called the police, and he heard that they shouldn’t pay the ransom. There was no guarantee they would get anything back or that the hacker wouldn’t just demand more money, so Frank called ECI.

By working tirelessly together, the team got this hardware store's cloud version of Spruce up and running. All was well—until Mother Nature had other plans.

A while later, a tornado howled through Frank’s town. It knocked out the power and knocked down trees. Everyone wanted to buy chainsaws and other equipment to clear the trees and roads. Fortunately, because they were cloud-based, Frank could continue to run his store from his iPad and keep up with the needs of his customers. It wasn’t perfect but was miles better than working off paper. At last, their streak of bad luck had ended.

Like any spine-chilling, scary story, there is a way to defeat the monster. For many of our customers, that solution is the cloud, and for good reason. The cloud helps protect your business from ransomware, natural disasters, and small mistakes with huge consequences.

There are many unknowns and boogeymen in business, but there are ways to protect your business from them. Make sure you’re doing what makes sense for your business and not making unsafe decisions like so many horror movie characters.