Heather Lantz, SVP of Cybersecurity, Ascend Technologies

Written by Allison Francis
January 28, 2022

[Re: the fact that MSP leaders estimate engineers devote 39% of time into manual tasks and 88% say these tasks prevent engineers from spending time on innovation or advancing strategic goals]:

“To automate or not to automate is always the question for any managed provider. With the growth of our industry and the growth of the modern-day attack vectors, clients expect more from their managed providers and employers expect more from their employees. To meet these expectations, companies must discover how to achieve more with less and automation can be a successful option. The goal is to automate the most basic and manual tasks that are low risk and time-consuming to perform. This not only positions the MSSP with a resource and efficient platform but also as an innovative and forward-thinking managed provider.

“The automatable tasks vary for each delivered service and managed provider but what will quickly arise, are the challenges to build automation within a company. Whether a managed provider chooses to build the automation in-house or purchase a tool, they need to be prepared to commit to the continued management and development of the tool. Building an internal development team is just as important as developing the automation itself. Without the structure and staff to support continued development and automation the initiative will quickly stall out and cause frustration for the providers clients and employees. There is no question on the value of automation and automation has become a requirement of providers and is no longer a nice-to-have.

“Ascend approaches automation through several streams. Our individual teams plan and execute automation projects within our daily processes. The cybersecurity team also approaches automation within its processes and flows, our development operations team works to identify tasks that can be automated and proceeds to solve the problem. The cyber leadership is consistently reviewing and setting expectations with our vendors to develop their own automation to support our objectives.”

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Allison Francis

Allison Francis is a writer, public relations and marketing communications professional with experience working with clients in industries such as business technology, telecommunications, health care, education, the trade show and meetings industry, travel/tourism, hospitality, consumer packaged goods and food/beverage. She specializes in working with B2B technology companies involved in hyperconverged infrastructure, managed IT services, business process outsourcing, cloud management and customer experience technologies. Allison holds a bachelor's degree in public relations and marketing from Drake University. An Iowa native, she resides in Denver, Colorado.