ACLD: Customer Case Studies
“We did not have a disaster recovery solution, so we sought out Continuity Centers, and it has been a great relationship for over five years.”
Richard Vandyke, IT Director, ACLD
Situation
Adult and Children With Learning Disabilities (ACLD) provides services to over 3,000 children and adults with autism, learning, and developmental disabilities in the Nassau County and western Suffolk County region of Long Island, New York. These services allow individuals with challenges to pursue enviable lives, promote their independence, and foster supportive relationships within the community.
Providing these services requires an intricate web of behind-the-scenes IT support and the curation and securing of vast amounts of data. If data is lost, crucial services – and the lives they support – can be severely disrupted.
Solution
Partnering with Continuity Centers has allowed ACLD to operate, tap and preserve its vast reservoir of data seamlessly and efficiently. And if there’s a tech glitch that disrupts the flow of data, Continuity Centers are there with on-site and remote expertise to solve the problem and treat it as their own.
Result
Data has become integrated into the administrative fabric of ACLD and the protection of this data is paramount. Continuity Centers provides ongoing security audits and Continuity Centers ensure that all data is securely backed up offsite.
Gone are the days when ACLD staff had to go to a dimly-lit basement and sort through tapes for hours to retrieve backup data. Having the information at one’s fingertips is mission-critical to keeping the services seamless for ACLD clients.
ACLD, founded in 1957, is a leading not-for-profit agency on Long Island that proudly supports the needs of individuals with autism, learning, and developmental disabilities and their families. The ACLD mission is to provide opportunities for children and adults with disabilities to pursue enviable lives, to increase their independence, and to improve their quality of life. For more information about ACLD visit their website.
Technology Turns Disabilities Into Abilities
ACLD is now five years into its relationship with Continuity Centers and during that time has been transformed from an organization with data stored on clunky tapes to seamless digital backups and secure storage. If a campus had experienced a fire or flood, valuable data would have been damaged or lost. And if a hacker had struck, ACLD would have been stuck rebuilding data from scratch using 20-year-old technology.
This extended partnership has helped cement his view as a firm believer in the power of partnerships.
Mission-Critical For ACLD
ACLD nurtures the growth and development of challenged children from age 3 to 21 and continues to be a compassionate hand into adulthood. For example, ACLD is a local leader in providing employee placement, over 500 employees at 100 different companies in over a decade, providing skills to those with disabilities, and providing an economic boost to employers who need the work.
“Having our IT systems available and secure is very, very important; if someone can’t find the information they need, they can’t provide a service to someone we support.”
Richard Vandyke, IT Director, ACLD
With over 1,300 employees, ACLD needs to have scalable IT solutions that allow for exchanges of information and reliable backup. To that end, ACLD uses a cloud-based platform to help manage the varied locations through the agency’s ecosystem. Such locations include administrative buildings, schools, day programs, day-hab sites, and 47 private homes, each with a business office.
VanDyke credits the IT staff at ACLD for building an efficient network that serves the organization well during “normal” times and turned out to be very resilient during the COVID19 pandemic.
While many companies had to deal with suddenly having their staff dispersed because of COVID19, ACLD was already using many tools that allowed the staff to work remotely. Meanwhile, Continuity Centers behind-the-scenes support provided peace of mind during the pandemic with its suite of high-speed recovery, off-site data protection, Office365 fortification, and ransomware prevention tools.
Still, the diverse ecosystem does create wider attack vectors and more cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This is where Continuity Centers come in by providing support and a safety net. provides ongoing white hat hacker-level vulnerability and penetration testing, to help ACLD identify areas of potential exposure and provide remediation steps to help secure their infrastructure, both internally and from outside.
“They have been very effective for us,” VanDyke says of and Continuity Centers.
While works to uncover and remediate vulnerabilities within their IT systems, Continuity Centers provides managed Disaster Recovery, which includes secure offsite backup to geographically separated cloud repositories, completely isolated from ACLD’s network, with immutability and a Service Level Agreement with customized Recovery Time Objectives to bring their most critical servers online during any type of disaster, including a ransomware attack.
“At Continuity Centers, we always look to give back to organizations that provide services to help others reach their full potential, and being asked to help protect their business is an honor.”
Gregory Tellone, CEO, Continuity Centers
Van Dyke credits Continuity Centers for sitting down with ACLD and creating a tailored program to fit their needs. He said ACLD gets boutique-style service while tapping into the resources of a large organization who is always there for us.
“As big as they are, they still carved out a disaster recovery solution, just for us,” VanDyke says.