MSP Competitive Advantage

Over the years in my experience talking with potential new customers during some of our initial conversations, whenever I asked them to describe managed services, it was often generally described to me as outsourcing operational tasks to an offshore team that troubleshoots incidents and performs changes, and most often operated in a reactive “ticket-taking” fashion.

And this was not inaccurate, as nearly all MSP vendors with which I have interacted do indeed operate in this fashion … and it was sometimes a very frustrating experience.

These experiences triggered a bit of introspection, and I recalled that in my earlier years at a prior MSP vendor, I worked with a large enterprise customer wherein our team did not consistently attain SLA; however, the customer also recognized the extra effort we always put in, our attentive bedside manner, and the care we took in managing their environment, thus they renewed our contract for several years.  Conversely, I also worked with another customer wherein we consistently attained SLA and all formal measures; however, for whatever reason, our team simply did not gel with the customer’s IT team, and the customer did not renew our contract.

Over time, I have come to realize that for many customers, their experience (i.e., how they feel) in working with an MSP vendor is just as important – and sometimes more important – as traditional organizational measures.  This experience prompted me to look in the mirror and consider the journey our MSP customers have with Ferroque Systems MSP and consider how we could refine our MSP delivery model to enhance our customers’ experience.

As a result, we made a few core changes to how we engage with our customers.  In this blog post, I will describe the distinctive benefits Ferroque Systems includes in delivering managed services to its MSP customers, and how this delivery model provides a better customer experience and provides a competitive advantage for Ferroque Systems.

We Manage Solutions

Ferroque Systems MSP manages solutions to deliver outcomes.  That sounds like a tagline, and admittedly, it is, but please allow me to unpack this statement.

Most MSP vendors are component-centric, wherein their delivery model revolves around managing components (e.g. servers, routers, etc.), users and/or endpoints, and tickets (e.g. incidents and changes).  The MSP’s organizational structure, service delivery, and pricing are all typically aligned with this model, which tends to be reactive (i.e. customer submits a ticket and MSP takes an action), often requires coordinating many people to do simple tasks (i.e. individual MSP technicians are responsible for individual components), and drives component/ticket-based pricing (i.e. if customer adds a new server(s) and/or user(s) to their environment, the MSP will submit a Change Order to incorporate the new server(s) and/or user(s) into the scope of their responsibility).

We have found that this model of service delivery is what potential new customers typically presume when discussing “managed services”, thus most customers perceive all MSP vendors are created equal.

Ferroque Systems MSP has a different model wherein our MSP engineers are responsible for solutions, not individual components, and this important distinction results in a much better customer experience.  In the paragraphs below, I will share an example that illustrates the distinction.

 All of our Citrix customers use Citrix Federated Authentication Services (FAS) to support SAML-based MFA (multi-factor authentication).  FAS uses certificates to authenticate users, and the certificates need to be updated periodically.  One such customer engaged Ferroque MSP to manage their Citrix platform and engaged another popular MSP to manage all of their Microsoft infrastructure, including the in-house Microsoft CA (certificate authority) servers and certificates.  Unfortunately, the other MSP did not properly update the certificate, and when it expired, it caused a Sev1 incident, which (naturally) required all relevant parties to join a bridge call to collectively troubleshoot.  Here’s the key difference: Ferroque had one MSP engineer on the call, while the other MSP vendor had 4-5 technicians on the call, since renewing the certificate for Citrix FAS involved (among other things):

• Powering on the root CA server, which required the MSP technician who was responsible for servers and also required the MSP technician who was responsible for security (since it involved powering on the root CA server, which per leading security practices, was kept powered down, so only the intermediate CA server was online).
• Requesting, creating, and approving a new certificate from the in-house Microsoft CA required the MSP technician responsible for managing certificates.
• Deploying the new certificate to all Citrix VDA (virtual delivery agent) servers via GPO required the MSP technician who was responsible for policies.

The Ferroque MSP engineer was driving the call, but not all of the other MSP technicians proactively joined the call, so each time we had to proceed to another component, we had to halt while the other MSP vendor contacted the appropriate technician to ask them to join the call.  And each time a new technician joined the call, we had to re-explain the situation and what we needed them to do.  This Sev1 occurred around 10:00 pm on a Friday night, so (needless to say) it was super frustrating having to repeatedly wait for a while, while the other persons were contacted and repeatedly having to re-explain the situation, which happened on four separate occasions throughout the call.

Alternatively, one Ferroque MSP engineer was responsible for the entirety of Citrix FAS as a solution, and thus knew how to manage each of the individual components that comprised the solution and each of the steps required to properly generate and approve the new certificate request, update the FAS service to recognize the new certificate, and deploy the new certificate across all Citrix VDAs via GPO.  Unfortunately, we lacked the necessary permissions, so we had to collaborate with the other MSP vendor to guide them through the process.

I am sure most seasoned IT professionals who have worked with an MSP have had such an experience (possibly more than once), were no doubt very frustrated by it, and thought “There has to be a better way!”  Well, they are right, and the Ferroque MSP delivery model is.

We Are Proactive

Traditional managed services are almost entirely reactive, wherein the customer submits a ticket to request the MSP team to perform an action, such as to troubleshoot an incident, perform a change, or provision a new user.  Of course, ticket-based activities are a staple of managed services and for good reason, because the ticketing system (and tickets) is the vehicle by which activities are planned, tracked, and coordinated and is the source of key MSP performance metrics, such as SLA attainment, ticket aging, etc.

That said, beyond just responding to tickets, Ferroque Systems MSP also regularly performs several proactive activities to enable a better user experience and a better environment, including:

• Maintaining good environmental hygiene by cleaning up debris that often litters the technical landscape, e.g., removing invalid certificates, disabling (or deleting) stale/unused user accounts, removing unused VMs, removing unused user profile folders, etc.
• Managing the environment in alignment with leading practices, e.g. by disabling legacy encryption protocols such as TLS 1.0/1.1 (unless required by any legacy endpoint browsers), maintaining strong password policies, including for service accounts, maintaining version control by keeping application and platform versions up-to-date (avoiding version sprawl), etc.
• Keeping the environment running in an optimized state, e.g. by periodically reviewing user profiles to identify and correct bloated profile folders, reviewing VM assignments and sizing to ensure they remain appropriate for server roles/functions (especially important for public cloud environments that use consumption-based pricing), conducting annual environment assessments to identify risk areas and areas in need of optimization, etc.
• Performing daily pre-flight checks each morning to manually review the environment to ensure all VMs are online as expected, sessions are being evenly distributed, etc. (as a supplement to the monitoring solution).

These are activities that customers want (and often expect) their MSP team to perform; the key distinction is that Ferroque Systems MSP proactively performs these activities without having to be told, whereas most other MSP vendors do not consider to perform these activities unless the customer submits a ticket to request the MSP to do so (which often the customer does not do).

We Include Consultancy

Traditional MSP focuses solely on operational tasks, but that is only half of the equation, as the flip side of the coin includes all of the architecture and engineering activities necessary to take a new solution from the drawing board into the production environment.

Traditional MSPs are typically hesitant to participate in activities outside their immediate jurisdiction, which often frustrates many customers. This is usually because MSPs typically react to requests for assistance in “gray areas” with a “that is not my job” or “I am not responsible for that” response.

Ferroque Systems MSP understands that, of course, there is a need to work within operational boundaries and specific responsibilities – and during onboarding, we deliver a RACI matrix to clarify such responsibilities – and Ferroque also understands that customers often expect guidance from the technical experts who should know more about their operational environment than the customer’s in-house IT personnel.

Knowing this, Ferroque MSP regularly provides thought leadership and guidance for relevant in-house customer initiatives.  As well, it is not uncommon for customer IT managers to ask Ferroque MSP to assist in-house annual budget planning/preparation.  Many of these activities involve engaging with the customer in a consultative capacity, and Ferroque Systems MSP is skilled at being able to organically blend consulting and operations seamlessly (either via meetings and real-time discussions for ad-hoc questions and guidance or via a Professional Services engagement to support requests for formal initiatives).  As necessary, Ferroque Systems MSP may also sometimes coordinate with its in-house Professional Services team to assist in problem management for its MSP customers.

This organic blend of operational services and consultancy provides a seamless service delivery that enhances the customer experience, as it delivers a complete level of customer service, including a focus on operations with a mix of engineering, thus providing more value to the customer.

We Monitor Business Workflows

Environment monitoring is one of the most important elements of IT operations, and it is very tricky to “get it right.”  For example, I suspect almost every IT professional who reads this post has experienced a situation of a significant service disruption or outage, but struggled to find any monitoring metrics that alerted them that something was wrong, such as users experiencing a substantial disruption, but all the back-end infrastructure metrics were green.

This is because most MSP vendors monitor traditional “traffic light” infrastructure metrics, such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc. and attempt to extrapolate the back-end metrics to assess the user experience.  Historically (and still today with many monitoring solutions), that was essentially the only method of trying to monitor the end-user experience; however, it is often inaccurate and does not alert in real-time.

Ferroque Systems MSP uses ControlUp’s monitoring solution, which, along with traditional back-end infrastructure components, enables us to monitor the following:

• ControlUp DEX (digital employee experience) monitoring enables monitoring of the user experience by correlating important KPIs (key performance indicators) such as availability, responsiveness, logon duration, and others to calculate a user experience score.
• ControlUp Workflows enables monitoring of important customer process workflows to monitor the availability and performance of the IT systems that comprise various functional workflows.

Both of these features enable monitoring from the user perspective (i.e. from the outside in, rather than from the inside out), which Ferroque MSP combines with back-end infrastructure monitoring to provide a holistic monitoring purview.  We also use ControlUp synthetic monitoring to verify the ongoing availability of key sites, such as for Microsoft Teams and customer transaction sites (e.g. retail customers).  All of this allows us to directly monitor the availability and performance of the end-user experience, key customer business sites, and back-end infrastructure, which provides us with a complete view of our customers’ technical landscape.

Periodically we also use end-user surveys to capture the subjective perception of how the user community perceives the overall quality of the environment (e.g. responsiveness, availability, reliability, etc.) and use the feedback to fine-tune the monitoring baseline (to link monitoring baseline values to a “known good” user experience), as I have described in the Ferroque Systems blog that outlines how to establish a monitoring baseline.

In Conclusion

Our four key distinctions of Ferroque Systems MSP that collectively represent a significant enhancement in customer experience:

• We manage solutions to deliver outcomes, whereas most MSP vendors manage components, which drives component/ticket-based pricing, is very reactive, and often requires coordinating many people to do simple tasks.
• We provide consultancy through thought leadership and guidance for relevant in-house customer initiatives, blending consulting with operations as needed.
• We provide regular proactive services to maintain good environmental hygiene, version control, align with leading practices, and keep customer environments working at optimal levels.
• We monitor business workflows that enable key functions/processes, the end-user experience, and traditional back-end infrastructure, and implement scripts to automate some alert responses.

At Ferroque Systems, we believe managed services should go beyond fixing tickets. If you’re looking for an MSP that manages solutions rather than just components, we are ready to help. Give us a call today to learn how we can transform your MSP solution together.