7 Struggles Today’s MSPs Wrangle

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) deal with extraordinary complexity and scale as they deliver network cyber resilience for clients’ diverse, multi-vendor environments. Devices, policies, rules enforcement, data standards, and workflows vary widely from client to client and network to network.

Business growth hinges on accelerating time to value. Automation is key to optimal network security, compliance, and management and to focusing resources on building resilience faster. In its work with MSPs of all sizes, BackBox has identified seven of the top struggles they face and how it uniquely helps overcome them.

1. 1. 1. Customer Onboarding. Depending on the size and complexity of a client’s environment, onboarding just one new client can take days or weeks. Quite often, BackBox finds that MSSPs and MSPs manually onboard new clients, sending spreadsheets back and forth between them and the latest client to collect requisite information. In one instance, BackBox worked with a particular MSP customer who took over 30 days to onboard 200 clients and over 4,000 client devices. The BackBox Platform dramatically accelerated the onboarding process through its automated discovery process and ability to support an incredibly diverse OEM network infrastructure. BackBox supports over 180 vendors and thousands of devices. It provides advanced features like automatic IP Address conflict resolution and adding devices through IP range, CIDR block, or CSV import. When new devices are added to a client’s network, tasks are automated to ensure they match the config policy. Faster onboarding equates to a shorter time to invoice our MSP clients and their end customers.
      2. Customer Data Segregation. BackBox is designed for MSPs and offers a multi-tenant environment as a part of its Platform. This allows MSPs to separate customers and their data from others and manage on a per-customer or global basis, focused on addressing specific device support issues. BackBox also offers very granular role-based access to its MSPs and their clients so that MSPs who co-manage their device estate can offer very controlled access.
      3. Time Efficiency. Time is money. Automation is critical to success, but it must be easy to implement. BackBox has a library of 3,000+ automations out of the box and a no-code way to customize or build new ones. MSPs can automate repetitive administrative tasks like backup and restore and implement standard processes to make complex tasks more manageable, including multi-step updates and large-scale configuration changes, while minimizing potential IT issues. MSPs can significantly reduce operational costs through a single interface across a diverse OEM set of devices.
      4. Keeping Networks Secure. In today’s security environment, with over 3,300 CVEs released per month and AI-enabled attacks dramatically shortening the time to exploit, the industry must assume that known network device vulnerabilities are being exploited more quickly. Keeping devices up to date is where BackBox shines, cutting the time companies are vulnerable to attack. BackBox’s vulnerability intelligence allows MSPs to proactively identify active exposures across clients’ diverse network environments and choose whether to automate vulnerability mitigation changes or remediate the vulnerability by updating the device software. One customer told BackBox that bi-weekly patching takes only one hour, compared to at least 35 hours to do manually.
      5. Avoid Configuration Drift. MSPs are held to strict SLAs, but configuration drift can happen for several reasons. For example, a client’s network admin can make changes that cause configurations to be out of compliance and introduce the risk of incidents or outages. BackBox makes it easy to run compliance checks on devices to assess cyber resilience, identify drift, and automatically restore devices into compliance with industry standards and clients’ internal policies.
      6. Inventory Reporting. How do MSPs handle devices clients put on their networks (i.e., rogue devices)? Do they even know they exist? What about checking for changes to the network configuration and reporting that everything is as expected (as defined by the SLA between the companies)? BackBox is a network source of truth that accurately models devices and their configurations to identify network components and dynamically update device details (including device manufacturer, type, model number, firmware and software version, and end-of-life). MSPs have an accurate real-time picture of each client’s device inventory to audit their resiliency quickly.
      7. Business Differentiation. It’s much more effective to compete on value than price. However, differentiating your services can be challenging. BackBox’s network automation capabilities are easy to deploy and enable MSPs to achieve top-notch network security, performance, and management. Additionally, features like exception-driven alerting, ITSM integration, and AI-based vulnerability and configuration lookups and recommendations help MSPs accelerate their response to potential issues and mitigate the risk of downtime and security incidents. BackBox also works with MSPs to create new revenue streams by offering compliance-based services that align with industry compliance frameworks or client specifications.

Learn how BackBox is helping MSPs scale their business while saving time and delivering additional value to their clients. Schedule a 30-minute demo for an interactive tour of the BackBox platform.