My Support Staff have access to too many systems – and they are admins for all of them!

As an MSP you are the lifeline for your Customers IT needs. You keep their mail flowing, PC’s working and them working from wherever they need to.

They contact you about everything from “I can’t connect to the WiFi” to “I’ve just hired a new person – can you set them up for me”. This gives you a lot of responsibility while exposing you to many risks.

Your support desk team needs to be able to get those Admin’ jobs processed – fast – without escalating.  So they need access to all the associated admin tools, and often with full admin rights. Level 1’s are great, they are the front line keeping your tickets flowing, but they are not experts in everything.

So you simplify – create documents, guides and flow charts showing for which customer go to this place and do these things. But it gets hard – it’s hard to fully document every aspect of every customer, and the tools are so powerful that little mistakes can have big consequences. Before you’ve finished writing the document, they are probably already out of date. Despite the best of intentions, it’s impossible to maintain it all.

Even worse – it’s slow. Switching from tool to tool is painful, different UI’s, language and flows mean getting the hang of everything takes weeks – months, and sometimes never happens.

How many tools!!!

Lets run through how many tools you will commonly need to onboard a user.

• PSA – it’s where the customer details are and usually the support ticket
• Documentation tool – it’s where your processes are
• Password management tool – it’s where your passwords are (please tell me they are!)
• ADUC – For managing AD
• PartnerCentre – For buying and assigning a M365 license
• Intune or equivalent – for applying device policies and deploying apps
• LoB app admin interface – for assigning users
• Likely many more – depending on your setup, these can also be different for each customer

This is overwhelming just reading it – let alone actually trying to use them all in the right order in the right way for this specific customer.

This poses some real problems for your business

It’s hard to scale. Your profitability is directly tied to users managed per employee. By having this amount of tools the ability to speed up day to day tasks is hard – meaning you scale linearly, for every 150 or 200 users managed I need to employee another L1 tech. It only gets worse as you grow:

Training is hard with so many tools and customers

• More customers, more complex processes
• More employees, less ‘I know how it works so can just get it done’ and more having to follow the documentation or ask for help
• More customers the more likely the process is different – even if the tool is the same.
• More dependency on the one guy that’s been around for ages and “just knows” how each customer works.

It’s insecure having too many people with Admin rights

For your helpdesk to perform, they need access to everything – and they need the right permissions in order to complete their tasks. This is a large risk – especially in the MSP world.

• One mistake by an inexperienced (or inexperienced with that particular tool) employee can take out a customer for hours.
• Shared Admin accounts means you can’t audit who did what – compliance is difficult, traceability is non existent.
• A Disgruntled employee with full admin rights over all your customers – it doesn’t bear thinking about.

It’s a waste of time!

Switching between tools is slow – back in the day it was swivel chair provisioning, now I guess it’s tab on tab provisioning.

• Switching between tools just takes time – time that is wasted.
• Multiple tools means increased risk of mistakes – and that’s more wasted time
• Different processes for each customer in each tool costs even more time.

In fact when we ran through a basic user provisioning process with one of our customers we found 12 minutes out of 40 was literally taken up by tool switching and navigation. That’s over 25%.

Atria can help!

Atria provides a single portal to manage all of your customers – On-Premises, Hybrid or Cloud. Hundreds of customers, no matter where they are. Faster than PartnerCentre, more secure than shared accounts, and easier than ADUC.

• One process, One UI and one tool does all of your user admin – no matter where your users are, reducing training costs and speeding up user onboarding, offboarding and standard changes
• Atria simplifies complex and risky tasks, so your helpdesk can do them with no risk – and they are the same per customer, no matter what’s happening behind the scenes.
• You can extend Atria with PowerShell or your own scripts behind the scenes, meaning they can be executed by your helpdesk – safely.