Case Study - From Putting Out Fires to IT That Just Works

The Challenge

Frío Control is a Thermo King distributor delivering transport refrigeration solutions across Mexico. In their industry, a system outage is more than an inconvenience: it puts their clients' cold chain at risk.

When we started working together in 2022, they were coming out of a rough stretch. A security incident under their previous support arrangement had cost them critical data and, with it, much of their trust in their own technology.

Their infrastructure didn't help either. Their servers had no redundancy: if a drive failed, whatever was on it was lost. The VPNs connecting their corporate offices in Monterrey, Aguascalientes, and Silao dropped two or three times a week, cutting the branches off. And their business management software, installed machine by machine, caused slowdowns and bottlenecks every single day.

What We Did

We set out to do two things: first, stop putting out fires; then, make sure they didn't start again.

First, stabilize

We redesigned their infrastructure from the ground up. Their servers now run virtualized on a Proxmox VE high-availability cluster, an open source virtualization platform. If a physical machine fails, another one takes over immediately and operations continue without users noticing. No more waiting for hardware repairs or backup restores to get back to work.

We added redundant solid-state storage, centralized their applications so every user can work from any branch without local installs, stabilized the site-to-site VPNs between offices, and set up a dedicated server for automated backups, running open source software on Linux.

Then, the support plan: their IT department

Stabilizing was only the beginning. Since then, through an IT support and infrastructure plan, we have been Frío Control's technology team:

• User and infrastructure support: we look after roughly 60 devices, including computers, servers, and network equipment, across their three corporate offices.
• On-site when it matters, remote when it's faster: we combine in-person visits with remote support, after hours included.
• Maintenance that doesn't slow them down: we use weekends, when there's no activity, to run full backups and server snapshots.
• A team that already knows their operation: after more than four years, we know what's critical for each department and each branch, so no request starts from scratch.

Today the VPNs between offices run reliably, and a well-run support plan doesn't stop there. Fiber outages on the internet providers' side are common in their area, so the next step is already mapped out: VPNs with dual redundancy, so that if one link goes down, the connection between offices carries on over the second one without operations feeling it. That's the difference between having support and having an IT department: there's always a next step, and we take it before it's needed.

If, like Frío Control, your operation can't afford to stop, tell us how your team works today. We'd love to talk and help you build IT that prevents fires instead of just putting them out — and that, over time, simply stops being something you have to think about.