Trust Is a Key to Driving Additional Revenue for MSP Businesses

The need to succeed on the ever-expanding market of managed infrastructures encourages managed service providers (MSPs) to create additional value-added services that can make their offerings more attractive and help build trusting relationships with customers. This, in turn, can create differentiation and offer new forms of revenue.

MSPs have to ensure security of trusted data not only in the data center but also in hybrid and cloud environments, and they must now assure their customers that their data is being accessed only by authorized parties. Adopting IT auditing technology will provide visibility into IT infrastructure changes and a complete audit trail about all modifications made to the sensitive information. This includes access attempts (both successful and not), summarizing vital details about who changed what, when, and where in meaningful reports.

As a real-life example, InterDev, one of the U.S. service providers, has employed Netwrix Auditor as the solution to monitor IT systems and report back on any modifications made to sensitive data to both provider and customer. This comprehensive approach and attention to customers’ needs helped InterDev increase the value and efficiency of its services and enhance its status as a trusted end-to-end solution.

Gary Nichols, CEO of InterDev, commented, “We initially partnered with Netwrix to address our customers’ security needs, and we found that Netwrix truly understands the demands of managed service providers and resellers. Beyond improving security manageability for our clients, the flexibility of Netwrix to support the needs of our recurring revenue business as well as traditional resale was a critical factor in our partnering with Netwrix.”

InterDev’s interest in an IT auditing solution came from a number of occasions when it couldn’t track changes to critical configurations of Group Policies and group memberships. Driven by a high-level necessity to protect its customers’ entire technology infrastructure and beat the escalating cyber security risks, the company made every effort to enhance security and efficiency of its services.

“We needed a solution that could provide some level of automation and consolidation of logs and attributes down to a central repository, and provide historic archiving. We also needed a system that can automatically notify our customers and us if an unwanted change occurs so we could take immediate action,” explained Daniel Schultheiss, Director of Information Technology, CSO, InterDev.

Today, Netwrix Auditor serves as a cornerstone of InterDev’s cybersecurity program, enabling complete visibility across managed IT systems, including Active Directory, Windows, Exchange, SQL, VMware and file servers. Providing high-level overviews of employee activity to identify malicious changes and to proactively detect inactive users, Netwrix Auditor helps InterDev to maintain security policies and comply with various industry regulations.

“Netwrix Auditor is a solution that will help us grow our business and will be an additional differentiator in our managed services field. We do believe that it will be a revenue generator for our company and provide higher security for our clients,” commented Daniel Schultheiss.

To read the complete case study of InterDev’s use of Netwrix Auditor, please visit http://www.netwrix.com/go/interdev.

John Ross has more than 20 years’ experience in IT. He focuses on technology partnerships that drive customer adoption and lead to long-term benefits for all involved. At Netwrix, he develops channel programs and relations with VARs and MSPs. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSP Mentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.