Never trust your ISP!

With everybody working from home and the increased reliance on team meeting software like Zoom and Teams, you can imagine that your ISP is probably suffering more than usual.

The unfortunate issue lies with how these outfits must cope with increased call volume, decreased staffing levels, and a huge influx of traffic on their residential infrastructure. Many of the technicians are overwhelmed with calls and they’re having to cover the residential side of the house where they used to once only worry about their corporate clients. Inversely, the residential technicians are now also handling corporate clients. The bad habits of the residential ISP technician can spell disaster in a corporate environment.

One recent issue reared its ugly head with an ISP who’s name definitely wasn’t Cox. In an attempt to rectify an issue quickly, the technician cleared the static IP configuration for a client and had them reboot their modem. When that didn’t work, they had the client reboot their firewall. When that didn’t work, they asked the client to factory reset their firewall. Luckily, the client decided to involve their MSP before taking that last fateful step.

Because, you know, a corporate firewall is just a plug and play device that will pick up where it left off after a factory reset </sarcasm>.

Thankfully, after only about 11 hours of downtime (there goes that SLA), the ISP was able to re-assign the static IP configuration to the modem and everything returned to normal.

The lesson here is we are all struggling. While it is generally easy to dump on your ISP, your MSP, or even your employer; we are all in this crazy 2020 thing together. Take an extra moment before you just do what the nice tech tells you to do and think, “should I be doing this or should I clear it with my SME?”

Good luck in September folks! Remember, Alien Invasion is on the calendar so keep your bingo cards handy!