BC Networks, Inc. > News > Common Misnomers in the MSP Market

Common Misnomers in the MSP Market

Remote Monitoring and Management Technology

Currently, many IT service providers do not use any remote monitoring and management technology.  Instead, they rely on customers or technicians in the field to report problems. In other cases, they are using freeware or low-cost tools that aren’t designed for managing multiple customers.  Because they have a scattering of tools, each with different interfaces and different operating paradigms, the cost of training technicians and managing customers increases.  The absence of a single view of all customers raises the risk of something important being overlooked by harried technicians.

BCN's remote monitoring and management platform allows BCN to boost the productivity of our technicians and use their skills more effectively.  If a technician doesn’t always have to be at a customer’s site to resolve issues, then they can deal with more customers at one time.

BCN's remote monitoring and management solution offers:

• Broad protocol and operating system support – this allows you to support more types of customers and more verticals than your competitors

• Comprehensive managed services feature set – including monitoring, management, notification, reporting and interoperability capabilities.

• Scalability – it needs to be designed to manage small networks and large networks as well as scale from a few customers with dozens of devices to hundreds of customers with thousands of devices.

• Monitoring flexibility with agents and probes – agents are critical to monitoring mobile devices such as laptops that are not always connected to the network, while probes are essential for cost-effective monitoring to avoid the expense of installing agents on every device.

Operational Best Practices

One of the most significant cost of any managed service is labor, which is why it is critically important that an MSP adopt operational best practices to use their remote monitoring and management platform effectively and efficiently.  But many MSPs have little or no experience on how to effectively use RMM technology to deliver profitable managed services and few have the time or resources to develop these processes without guidance.

BCN's has adopted Best Practices that have allow us to avoid the long and costly exercise of learning how to configure and deploy unique RMM technology.  Without best practices, for example, it could take four hours to configure an Exchange server rather than following best practices and doing it in an hour. Another example is alerts. Setting the threshold too low will cause too many false positives, which wastes time. Set it too high and you’ll miss customer issues, which will impact the service level.

Automating Services

It is essential for MSPs such as BCN to automate as many customer services as possible to reduce the time, labor and costs associates with these resource-intensive activities. By grouping services and tools, MSPs can offer a more differentiated managed services offering with better service levels and a higher quality user experience.

Advanced Desktop Management

According to a recent IDC study, adopting centrally managed PC configuration best practices resulted in an average savings of $190 per desktop per year. (IDC: Optimizing Infrastructure: The Relationship Between IT Labor Costs and Best Practices for Managing the Windows Desktop, October 2006). The potential savings for a 20-seat customer installation is almost $4,000 per year.

BCN's managed desktop solution gives BCN the power to centrally configure, manage, secure and protect desktops centrally from a single interface, and prevents most of the problems that necessitate a visit to the site where the affected PCs are located. Standard and enforceable configurations save enormous time for troubleshooting problems and greatly reduce the risk of the user modifying the PC settings and breaking the system or exposing it to risk. Centralizing desktop configuration tasks reduces the hidden costs of supporting PCs.

Remote PC and Server Support

Remote Support Manager enables BCN to control, manage and gather information from remote computers, in real time, while users continue to work without disruption. By providing technicians with access to in-depth management and detailed troubleshooting information, remote support solutions help MSPs improve efficiencies and operations by lowering support costs and decreasing average resolution time.  Our remote support solution can be automatically deployed as to minimizes rollout costs.