What are the essential tools for today’s MSP?

Any business that wants to remain competitive knows that we are in the age of the customer. To stay relevant and ensure that your business can continue to grow, you need to be providing excellent customer service, all the time.
The best way for an MSP to maintain this level of service, is to use the right MSP software & tools that make giving this 5* support as seamless as possible. The best tools will support integration, giving you less to manage as a business, and optimizing your operations rather than slowing them down, a huge risk of juggling an overclocked tool belt. Let’s look at the must-haves.

RMM

Remote Monitoring and Management is the cornerstone of a good MSP. From the right RMM tool, you should be able to enjoy real-time monitoring and alerts, experiencing a window into your customer’s operations. Alerts can provide insight into system resources and provide valuable information on (but not limited to) Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, and VMware.
The best RMM solutions do not stop at alerts. With the right onboarding for each new customer, you can set up an automation that allows you to be hands-on, even when you’re hands-off. These can include IT hygiene, scans, updates, or performance tweaks.

Patch management

More recently, tools like Atera have embraced the automation of patch management, giving a valuable integrated bonus to your RMM, and expanding your security posture at the same time. The best patch management solutions can be applied to individual groups or devices and utilize either scheduled or on-demand patch updates.
Of course, only you know what your customer needs the most. Atera is known for including custom scripting and patch management, where our users can script, execute, and track any maintenance tasks they choose, meeting even granular or niche customer requirements with speed and flexibility.

Remote access

Taking the hygiene of your customer devices to the next level, Remote Access software allows you to troubleshoot with your client, even when you are not in the same location. At Atera, we know that all MSPs like to work differently, and so we give our customers a few choices, all integrated into our all-in-one SaaS. For full Remote Access, we are proud to integrate with three industry leaders, Splashtop, TeamViewer, and ScreenConnect. You can manage your devices and clients from any device, enabling remote working even on the go, and chat directly with each customer from a live chat toolbar. Nifty, eh?

PSA

Professional Services Automation (PSA) helps you manage your customers from one centralized dashboard, giving you insight into your contacts, service level agreements, tickets, contracts and more. Taking integration seriously, at Atera your PSA is linked with your RMM, providing technical alerts and device information, streamlining your operations, and ensuring your staff has all the information they need to ensure 5* customer support.

Reporting software

Cutting-edge RMM and PSA tools will include reporting software as standard, automatically capturing valuable metrics on customer satisfaction, staff efficiency, support load and more. At the same time, on a less macro level, you can use this granular reporting system to see all commands and activities that were given at any time, logged in one centralized database. This provides accountability and traceability and allows you to use historical data to improve performance or to revisit information for training or troubleshooting purposes.

Best of the rest: what other essentials are in the MSP toolkit?

• Online backup: Data security is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s a must for compliance and customer data privacy. Your bag of tricks should include data archiving, file recovery through a hybrid environment, and continuously up to date back ups and restores.
• Powerful anti-malware detection: Give your clients the ability to opt out of traditional signature-based detection. These legacy antivirus tools are often too little too late. Intelligent firewalls, privacy shields, and AI-based detection are the security solutions of the future.
• Warranty management: Expired devices and certificates are extremely high risk. Continuous warranty lookups are essential, and should be cloud-based, lightweight, and without additional installation.
• A documentation platform: Bringing all your client’s data and documentation together is a great cherry on top of your MSP offering. Whether it’s password management, standardizing support processes, flexible asset tracking or pulling and organizing data from third-party integrations, you’re making life easier for the customer.

Bringing it all together

Who knows what the future will bring for MSP businesses around the globe? Many are pointing towards AI and Machine Learning to be the ‘Next Big Thing’ when it comes to remote management, professional services automation or remote monitoring and maintenance.
For today’s businesses, ensuring you check all the boxes above in the most streamlined way possible is essential. One tool that can carry all this weight is immeasurably valuable. This will limit complexity, ensure seamless communication between the business and technical sides of your company, and act as a strong differentiation against the competition.