A Watershed Moment for Cloud-Forward MSPs
Introduction
No one has to keep a finger on the pulse of the changing IT landscape quite like Managed Service Providers (MSPs). By way of managing dozens of client companies in a variety of industries, each with their own evolving needs, admins working for MSPs are IT experts by trade. In order to effectively manage thousands of users across dozens of organizations, they simply have to be masters of their craft. Based out of London, has been supplying comprehensive, 24/7 IT support for small-to-medium-sized companies for over a decade. As the number of clients continued to grow, Jon Abbott, Priority One鈥檚 Managing Director, needed to find a scalable, platform agnostic, cloud-based solution for supporting clients鈥� directory needs in mixed-platform environments.
- Organization: Priority One
- Size: 35 Employees, 50 Client Organizations
- Location: HQ in London, UK with smaller office in Manchester
- Problem: Priority One faced a challenge in adapting their business to the rapidly changing IT space and incorporating cloud offerings without losing margin.
- Goal: Priority One is committed to building a full-cloud offering that is both secure and scalable for their business and clients, including the core directory.
Managing Director
Background
For MSPs, efficient time management is crucial. These lean, tight-knit organizations typically operate at a very high level of efficiency and must be ready to respond to a daunting spectrum of client requests at a moment鈥檚 notice.
鈥淲e see ourselves as a 24/7 appliance IT department. From their service desk to their planning, from their risk assessment road maps to their security, whatever our clients need from an IT perspective鈥攚e deliver,鈥� Abbott explained. 鈥淭here鈥檚 about 35 of us in the company, and the majority of us are engineers. We are very strong in finance, medical, and media industries, and we support businesses anywhere from 10 to 300 employees.鈥�
As the traditional on-prem IT infrastructure model continues to shift to the cloud, MSPs like Priority One are seeing the need for centralized access to cloud-based applications and disparate resources spread from client to client.
鈥淕oing back just eight years, everything was pretty much on-prem except email. When we looked at that space to see what our clients were using, we didn鈥檛 feel confident in products such as GMail and Office 365鈩� back then鈥攖hey just weren鈥檛 up to scratch,鈥� Abbott said. 鈥淏ut over time, I鈥檇 say in the last four years, the IT landscape has been steadily moving over to the cloud.鈥�
Managing IT operations for 50 organizations, each with their own combination of platforms, resources, applications, and offices, requires considerable time and product expertise. Minimizing friction for users on the front end directly correlates to maximizing time for Abbott and his team on the back end. And, while locality has been a mainstay in the past, MSPs are now fully realizing the benefits of managing clients remotely with the cloud.
鈥淭he main objective that we鈥檙e striving for is for a user to be able to open their laptop, connect to all of their applications in a fast and efficient way, without having to jump through any hoops. That was the goal we were trying to achieve for all of our clients.鈥� Abbott said.
“So we don鈥檛 want to have VPNs, and we don鈥檛 want to have network breakdowns. I鈥檝e been in IT for nearly 20 years and as an infrastructure person, that鈥檚 what you鈥檙e always trying to deliver.”
The Challenge
While moving all of their clients to the cloud became a clear objective, deciding exactly how to achieve it proved a bit more challenging. Whatever option they chose, it would need to work for Priority One clients that were currently reliant on Microsoft庐 Active Directory庐. As the dominant centerpiece of most IT organizations for the past 20 years, the legacy, on-prem Microsoft directory solution had become a thorn in the side of Priority One鈥檚 cloud-forward plans for their clients.
鈥淚f we鈥檙e going to move our clients to the cloud, we want to move to the cloud 100%, without anything left onsite apart from the desktops and the networking equipment,鈥� Abbott explained. 鈥淢oving files to the cloud was pretty easy, email was a no brainer鈥攋ust Google or 365鈥攂ut the sticking point was Active Directory and what we were going to do with that element.鈥�
The solution needed to meet the highest standards for cloud security, and it also needed to work seamlessly across Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as a variety of IaaS and SaaS platforms.
“If you don鈥檛 manage the platforms properly, either they鈥檙e going to get hacked, or it鈥檚 going to be remarkably inefficient. It鈥檚 just not going to work if you don鈥檛 piece together the right applications and make them actually seamless.”
Beyond needing an efficient, cross-platform solution, Priority One was unsure how moving to the cloud would affect their revenue, and in turn, their bottom line as an MSP. Migrating all of their clients to the cloud would require more than just changing their offerings; Priority One would need to adjust their business model as well.
鈥淭here was a concern we were going to be losing a lot of revenue if we just moved everything to the cloud, because everything would be done by the providers and we wouldn鈥檛 have a job to do. This is a factor we will always investigate before moving forward with a new product.鈥�
With an inbox of client requests and a suitcase of business concerns, A