Ransomware Prevention at Scale: American Lazer / CommSat’s Success with BlackFog

American Lazer started out decades ago as a print solutions / copier company. As technology advanced and the copier business declined, the company made a decision to pivot into managed IT services. Vice President Chris Copelas joined the organization to focus on the pivot and acquisitions, and American Lazer / CommSat was born. While the MSP business is the main focus of the organization, the business is currently a 60/40 split, with the majority being managed services. One of the key challenges for Chris and his team is moving existing clients over from what the company calls ‘break fix’ clients to fully managed clients. “Educating our client base so they understand the value of being a managed service client can be challenging. Legacy customers often feel like it’s a more sensible option to ‘pay as you go,’ effectively calling us when something breaks, an approach that has its challenges for both the customer and the provider. One example I can share is a client we have, we tried to move them over to a managed service account and they wanted to remain on a break fix. Not long after they had a ransomware attack where data was compromised, and our team was called in for remediation services. We managed to get them back up and running quickly, but at a cost of around $50-60K, a fee they would not have paid had they been a managed service account. Data was compromised in the attack and overall, the costs may have run into the hundreds of thousands. 

Needless to say, now they get it, and they are a managed account now,” commented Chris Copelas, Vice President, American Lazer / CommSat. When asked if ransomware was something the organization worried about, Chris commented, “God yes, every single day! We deal with an attack every couple of months with our break fix customers and this is very stressful for our team, they work tirelessly to get these businesses back up and running, the real cost of ransomware doesn’t take the human toll into consideration. When we acquired CommSat we knew we needed to educate our customer base about the risks of not having 24/7 cybersecurity protection and source the best anti ransomware solution we could find.” 

American Lazer / CommSat knew they needed a solution to both protect their customers data and prevent ransomware. The solution needed to be best-in-class, easy to deploy and work well alongside the other solutions in their portfolio. During the research phase they became aware of BlackFog and its anti data exfiltration technology and got in touch to learn more. 

After an introductory call they were interested to see the technology in action, and they decided to do a proof of value in their own environment where they tested the product for a 2 week period. “We loved what we saw with BlackFog’s technology very early on, we saw the value in anti data exfiltration technology and knew it would be a good fit for our solutions portfolio and our customer base. It was actually one of the first products we brought in after buying CommSat,” commented Chris. 

BlackFog is now an integral part of the MSP solution that the company provides. Chris commented, “We don’t put all our eggs in one basket, we use solutions like Kaseya and Sophos, and BlackFog works really well alongside them.” When asked about how BlackFog helps them work more efficiently Chris replied, “BlackFog’s tenant functionality is a game changer for us, previous to the tenant function we would have to manually count customer seats and adjust the pricing every month which was a time consuming exercise. With this functionality we now get a summary of each client in real-time and can instantly see the number of seats. This helps us with billing and saves a ton of time.”  American Lazer / CommSat has been using BlackFog for over 4 years and the solution is an integral part of their managed service offering. Sharing his final thoughts Chris commented, “BlackFog is our go-to, it’s our default product. BlackFog is a piece of cake to deploy, the technical team is always available if needed, support is fantastic, we always highly recommend BlackFog for those reasons, but most importantly, at a time when ransomware is really prevalent, we have a perfect record, every system protected by BlackFog has never been compromised.”