Good morning. Welcome to today's CIT Tech for Business podcast. Today we're sitting
down with Kyle and Rob to discuss what to consider when hiring an MSP. Just a little
moment to introduce myself. I know this is our fifth Tech for Business podcast. I'm Kelsey.
I'm part of our marketing team and I'm going to be asking these guys just a couple questions
help us keep centered from all of our tangents that we love to have. But I'm going to kick
it right over to you guys. Why don't you guys give us your first name, your title, and then
we'll dive right into it. Thanks Kelsey. My name is Kyle Eder. I am the president and
CEO at CIT. Hey, good morning. I'm Rob Kramer. I am director of managed services at CIT.
Awesome. Thank you both as I kind of led us into in our intro talking about MSPs this
morning. Managed service providers. What are those? Well, that's a great question. To different
people, managed service providers means different things. But in general, a managed service
provider is an organization that you can call that's going to help answer computer questions
for your users. Whether that's, you know, how do I install this Microsoft application?
How do I print? I'm having problems printing. Can you fix it for me? Sometimes it's more
important to talk about what they're not and we can get into that in just a little bit.
Yeah, I think you can just add to that a little bit. So there's agreement. Typically, it's
a monthly recurring fee, usually based on users or devices that you have to support
your IT infrastructure. So as Rob mentions, obviously, there's typically help desk, there's
technical expertise provided by the MSP partner that you choose. And then there's a set of
tools, typically automation, to help control costs as well as bring in management framework
for how you manage your IT infrastructure. So it usually provides us some software for
management for things like patching of Microsoft patching, patching of what we call third party
applications, your web browsers, different components, making sure that things are up
or down, servers or firewalls are key components in your IT infrastructure to automatically
monitor for their status, as well as other things like how much disk space is in use,
is the processor running high CPU usage, those types of things. So you have a lot of metrics
and other things that get gathered by those tools. So very valuable, but it's a combination
of obviously trained and experienced IT personnel, plus software and services and a monthly agreement
is at a high level, what it is, it definitely varies by vendor or by MSP on how they package
it. But it's the end of the day, that's kind of sums up what it is.
Awesome. That makes sense. It's still a lot of things right, right out of the gate that
you're like, we could do a million things for you. Congratulations. And some of these
are going to have acronyms just like the name of it. But you guys briefly mentioned, right,
these are all the things that MSP can do. Kind of made my brain go. Are MSPs just local
companies or can they be bigger organizations that tend to have more outsourcing? What's
kind of the range of where you can find MSPs and where they're located?
You can find them everywhere. You got MSPs that are anything from a one or two person
company that support small groups within their area. It's a very large national organizations
that have thousands of engineers spread across the world. And the trick is finding the one
that's right fit for you. Somebody who's going to be well suited to your organization, who
can really partner with you, learn your ins and outs of your unique environment and help
support you on that. So small or large, there's advantages in both directions. Finding the
right fit is really what's important.
That makes perfect sense in launches. Right into my next question, how do you find one
with all of those options out there?
That's a great question. I guess I'd start off with looking at some of the common options,
asking friends or colleagues who they've worked with, if they have any recommendations. Because
finding somebody that somebody else is willing to recommend usually is a good indicator that
they're a solid company, that they're going to do a good job supporting your environment.
Going to Google and just typing in a search and just randomly calling somebody, you don't
know what you're going to get. You could be getting a one person shop out of 10 buck two
and they don't know your environment, they don't know your industry. And when they go
on vacation, you still lose your support. So sometimes you're looking for that organization
that's just the right size, that they have enough engineers. When somebody's on vacation,
you still get to call and you still get to talk to somebody, you still get support. But
they're not so big that you're just a small fish in a big pond, if you will, that they
Store authority were the right one to hire and replace. So you may need to build
don't really know anything about you. They don't learn your environment. It's just another
person calling you. You could just as well be calling a manufacturer someplace and talking
one up for yourself. So as soon as you find someone you know who's been building a Man
to a help desk in India. You don't really know. So finding that right organization,
so-so
Asking around, asking, like I said, asking your peers, asking other organizations in your industry
asking around, like I said, asking your peers, asking other organizations in your industry
if they're using a master's provider, who they've used and who they like is probably one of your
really strong indicators of a good place to start. Yeah, that's what I was going to say too. I think
the referral side is always a strong aspect. As mentioned, there are national ones.
You know, being a local provider, you're going to be slanted towards believing there's a lot of value
in the local provider just because from what we've seen over the years, just being remote
is not enough. You know, there is definitely times, you know, you need to be on site, you want to be
on site, you want to make the connection. It's going to, there's things you need to do to keep,
you know, upgrading on the systems and other components and it's just, you know, nearly
impossible to just, you can't do it all remote. It just, if you have on site support to handle
those things and you just need some augmentative, then possibly, you know, a national provider could
fill the need for you. But in many cases where you're truly looking for, you know, an IT partner
that can be more holistic and usually find from the customers we work with, you know, the intention
or the expectation is that they're looking for, you know, on site, remote, you know, the whole gamut,
you know, the whole end game is to say they want IT working and keep the systems, keep their users
productive and, you know, quite often, you know, a local provider I think provides a little more
closer relationship, closer alignment with what the customers are actually expecting.
Oh, that makes perfect. Oh, sorry, Rob, go ahead. Well, I was just going to add a little bit to that,
you know, Kyle makes an excellent point and that is, you know, managed service providers,
as we are, we gather a ton of data. We learn a lot about the customer's environments
and one of the things that that lends itself to is really looking towards the future and as we move
forward, you know, what's going to be the best fit for the customer in the future? Do they need to be
looking at a specific type of technology or something, you know, that's coming down the line
or do we need to make some changes to their system to optimize it? Having that holistic coverage where
you actually have engineers who can come on site and can have that hands-on expertise for you
really kind of fills out that managed service desk environment and allows you to kind of have
the other side of it. So if you don't have that local IT presence and you need that kind of help,
looking for a provider that has kind of that full package is going to be very important to you.
Now that makes perfect sense and just really, really quickly that kind of brought up the question,
right, that say I'm a customer and of course in today's world I'm hybrid or a lot of my workers
are remote and yes, it's great to have somebody on site, but how does that work? Let's say that I
have, right, employees that are all working from their homes, somebody's in Hawaii, somebody's here,
would a local MSP still be able to provide the support that I need?
Yeah, actually very, very effectively and if you're the type of organization who may have a local
network administrator with an organization like ours, we'll give you access to the tools. So you
can actually use our tools to help support your remote users wherever they have to be. So just
like we use it to help remote in and shadow somebody's screen and solve a problem, a local
IT person could use that same tool to do that work as well. So yeah, it is very effective. Having the
knowledge of the organization, learning about their unique software and applications and how their
users need to function really is more critical than where they're sitting. You know, when the
pandemic hit, we saw this mass migration to this hybrid environment and those organizations who had
some pre-planning for that, who had some users who traveled from time to time, had some ability to
work remotely, actually were able to make that transition very easily. So it's very, very
important. And organizations who are fairly static, very in-house, they had to scramble a little bit
and they had to lean pretty heavily on people like their managed service provider to help them
figure out how to get their users out to the house and still be able to do what they need to do. And
it was a very interesting time to see how different organizations reacted in that.
Yeah, very much so. And I also think that the tools themselves give such ease of access to
get to those devices, but to have a local provider that can prep those devices and have them sent to
those remote workers when they are ready for upgrades, we see a lot of synergy and a lot of
value in that as well. Just the consistency of the support provider to understand the nuances
that everybody's IT systems has. Nothing is a one-size-fits-all IT. It never is. They're
never the same. So the way that they prefer to have their devices set up and what the users
expectation is of the workstation when they receive it needs to be planned out accordingly.
So when you send it to that remote worker, you want them to be as productive as fast as possible.
And we find a lot of synergy in pre-prep, pre-imaging, even with cloud-connected desktops
and Azure AD and those things. You want to go through some prep on those devices before they
go to the users. And I think a national provider have very difficult time executing on that.
I smell a future podcast coming there about prepping devices.
That could be a whole nother 30-minute discussion. So yes, we'll tuck that one in our pocket for a
future one. But let's say that I am a customer. I have X number of employees. Is there a certain
number of employees that when I'm interviewing an MSP, I should say, yes, you're going to be a good
fit or no, I'm either too big for you or you're too big for me. Do you guys tend to come across
that when talking with people? Kyle can speak a little bit to that probably more than I can,
as he's in a lot of those pre-meetings. But if I look at the kind of customers that we have,
we have a lot of customers from very small, 5, 10 users, all the way up to several hundred users.
So does that mean that one size fits all? No. But there is a point I think you will find
that you need to know the organization you're partnering with has the back end infrastructure
capacity to handle the types of issues you're going to have, that they have the training and
stuff you need. A lot of large organizations will tend to get a little bit more complex.
They may very well have a more advanced environment. And if you're working with a
MSP that's a little on the smaller side, they may not have the breadth of experience and knowledge
that you're looking for. So yeah, it is an important question to ask. Does that mean that
one organization can't service both? No. Like I said, we have many customers that kind of span
the environment size. Would I want to take on a 10,000 user organization? I don't think I'd be
ready for that. I think I'd have questions whether or not we have the capacity to handle the number
of calls and stuff. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. It really depends on the environment,
what their expectations are. So yeah, I think it's, you know, again, there is no one size fits all
on this side of it. It's how it's the role the MSP provides can be adjusted accordingly. The smaller
organizations, Rob said, once you're, you know, you're typically less than, you know, 50 full time
employees, you know, an MSP essentially could be your IT department. You know, they handle the
onsite, they provide the remote help desk, they manage the systems, they do the upgrades,
they handle everything. As you start to get larger, and definitely more than 100 plus users,
typically you start to see a need for an onsite IT person, somebody within the organization that is
now a full time employee, but the MSP is augmentative. They handle projects, they handle,
you know, keeping an eye on the systems 24 seven, they provide the management platform that that
resource uses as an augmentative side of it. But then that employee is more focused on the users
for the customer's productivity, as well as their data, their systems, their line of business
applications. As you get bigger, those become complex. And I know we might talk a little bit
about this, let's go through there is where it's a struggle for an MSP is once you get into those
internal line of business systems, MSPs, we can't go that deep into the organization side of it.
It's a more, you know, higher level IT support for the functioning of the desktops and the patching
and the health of the networks and the security of the systems and those things. But once you
get into that data, you know, having somebody on site who really understands that keeps the users
becomes becomes very productive and most larger employees, that's where it really starts to,
to be a need. But an MSP can provide a tremendous augmentative, consistent support that has,
you know, for us, we're 24 by seven, I know there's other MSPs around. So looking for those that you
have somebody on glass, you know, around the clock that can, you know, give you a call if the system's
reporting offline that they can potentially take to make sure things are patched to give you the
management platform to manage it. There's a tremendous value there that again, having somebody
internally to try to build that themselves just takes them away from the core business.
Because the MSPs do a very, very good job at that. It's what their purpose built for.
And that was going to go. Yeah, sorry, Rob, I was gonna say,
yeah, to Kyle's point there, you know, we're not going to know a lot of those line of business
applications. However, for some of our customers who are kind of in that in between category,
they don't have a local local IT person, but they have kind of a unique application.
We proxy that we will call the vendor on their behalf, we'll get the tickets set up,
and we'll work with the user to try and solve that problem. We don't necessarily have that
expertise, but we can help broker the connection and help translate for you for the person on the
technical side to the business side. So, you know, we can act as kind of an intermediary
for those calls as well when we need to. It's a good point. Perfect. I was going to say two
things first. Can you give an example of some of those line of business applications? Which ones
are easier to proxy with? Which ones are maybe a red flag to be like, hey, you're going to have
to use their support. Well, that's kind of a grab bag, but just if somebody was like, how do I look
my applications and know whether this is going to be a problem child or if it's fairly easy?
ERPs, CRMs, a lot of those, you know, accounting, into your accounting set,
it kind of falls in the ERP side of it. Why don't you get into those things? I won't name
it even by name. And obviously some things that are custom built side with it. And even some of
it is just the data workflow that some organizations have evolved into. How they're using, you know,
your Word and Excel documents, their file share structure. Companies have evolved over the decades
of how they're using just, you know, unstructured data that just sits on a file share within it
in very unique ways. You run into those things and they have very unique processes with all
they print and share and execute a workflow within their business side of it. So, you know, it can
be very far reaching. And for an MSP to walk in the door and just have, you know, some,
there's no magic sauce to just say, boom, we get it. We understand everything. There's,
it takes, you know, it takes time and certainly to go deeper into those things.
Again, we have to rely on the vendors or somebody on site to champion those products that we can
make sure that the systems are operational and healthy and available up to the point of then
once it's in the application, it gets much more complex, but that just requires a lot of
collaboration and making sure that you're talking, which I think circles back, I think the importance
of the local, because you need that regular cadence and communication to keep everybody on the same
page, just as you would if they were internal. You need to make sure that the teams are talking,
whether they're external or not, you got to have that. And that's definitely what we've seen over
the years is just the need, when we've seen things start to become problematic between our services
and the customer, increasing the cadence between our managed team and the customer's teams,
resolves those challenges, whether we go to a weekly call and then make sure things are
quieted down because some system upgrade went through, there's a spike in calls, users are upset,
customer comes upset, start talking more, miraculously things start to get back on track,
people are collaborating better, and then you start to move forward. So it's not that much
different than what you do internally between departments. Things aren't working, you got to
get people meeting to resolve things, and that's, you got to look at your MSP in that way, kind of
extension to say they don't have a crystal ball, they're not going to be able to walk in and see
things behind the curtain. So you got to get people talking.
One of the things that came out of that, Kyle, that came to my mind was we talked about the calls
and the cadence and stuff with the customer. To be clear, it's not always an IT person we're talking
to, the customer. When we're talking about those applications, who that point of contact is for the
line of business application, sometimes that is the accounting person, sometimes that is the office
administrator, but they have the knowledge, that local application, that there are interface locally
on site for that support when we're troubleshooting with the vendor.
No, that all makes perfect sense, and I know it can be right, a whole deep, dark hole of it's hard
within 30 minutes to say, hey, here's all of the things that you can look at. But on that vein,
if you had a really high level, say, I have a business, I'm looking at MSP, when would an MSP
maybe not be the best fit, and when should I maybe look to hire somebody internal?
Boy, that's a tough question. There's a lot of different things I think that play into that.
First of all, what's your technology environment like today? Is it fairly stable? Is it functioning
and providing the resources you need to do your business moving forward? If it's just hanging on
by a shred of life, and it's about to die, that may not be an indication you want an MSP, but
rather just a technology partner who can come in and help you breathe some new life into that,
get it upgraded, get it stable, and then to maintain it going forward, you would want to
look to an MSP, somebody who can help you as you look to the future to make sure that things are,
again, patching it, that they're healthy, that you've got good security in place.
And then as new things come around and we understand your business, we should be able
to work with you during things like quarterly business reviews to say, hey, here's some things
you should be planning for. Did you know that the Microsoft Server 2012 R2 goes into life in October
2023? We should be planning an upgrade. We should be looking to make sure that we're staying ahead
of this so that we can do it in a controlled manner and not get blindsided and also have to
scramble because that's always going to put you in a bad situation. So if you're in a good situation
today and you're just looking for that help, that security and that support to keep things
functioning, it's a great time to start talking to an MSP. If you've got a local IT person and
you go, you know what? This person is going to be out for a period of time. They're going to take
some vacation. They have a personal life too. They can't always be available. I need somebody
to help them, to augment them. That's another great reason to look for an MSP. We're not there
to replace that IT person. We're there to be their partner, to be their henchmen, if you will, to
help them keep that environment working. If you're coming to an MSP and saying, hey, my environment's
a complete mess. I need somebody to straighten it all out. Somebody who's holistic like we are,
we can work with you. We can work with your environment. We can get you upgraded and then
transition that into our maintenance and support under managed services. So there's a lot of
different things that can play into that. Is there one right time for every company? No.
You kind of got to look at it and say, what are my needs? Am I growing to the point where
I don't know how to keep this functioning? I don't know what the future holds. I need some advice.
That's probably a good time to talk to somebody. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's very far reaching, but I
think Rob makes a very good point. What I've seen from customers, if you're looking at the MSP and
you're thinking they're going to go into that managed service contract, it's going to alleviate
all your IT problems and you have a lot of IT problems, that is not going to be the fix for it.
You may have had somebody else managing the IT, whether it's another managed service provider or
it was somebody internal or an independent contractor. If the IT budget wasn't realistic,
if you were not investing into the correct IT infrastructure, and that is the reason for the
issues, just switching to another provider or bringing MSP in there is not going to that by
itself fix it. You're going to have to allow for and have strategic conversations to make sure
that you're investing in the IT infrastructure to make IT work right. The customers that we work with
that continues to invest and drive the most value out of the IT invest in their IT. IT is not
inexpensive. It's not something that needs to be managed for the least cost possible. That has
never been a successful model. I've done this for over 30 years. The customers with the least cost
have never proven successful. I've never seen it. Why there can be some cost strategic benefits of
the MSP side of it. Again, we mentioned some of those on providing the platform, providing
the augmentation, providing those things. That's just working smarter and using people in their
right seats to drive the most value out of your IT spend. They can definitely be done in those
customers that we engage with that do that. There's tremendous synergy and they really drive their IT
systems. We see them actually produce better results for their customers and that's the end
goal. It looks tremendous side of it. Take a close look. My advice is make sure you have a realistic
budget for this. Technology is a tool. It's a tool you use in your business to help your business
to move forward and to service your customers. Just like any tool, you got to take care of it.
If you don't take care of the tool, it's going to fail you when you need it the most.
No, that makes perfect sense. There's all of these tools, all of these options. Just kind of
wrapping it up for today's discussion because I feel like we could probably turn this into a
whole series if I could go on so many tangents about all of these things. Let's say that I am
looking at somebody and I'm looking at their tool set and I'm looking at all of the in-house
services beyond. You go to an MSP website and they're like, we can do printing and we can do
all of this. Your brain goes, do I need all of that? Again, I'm sure it's custom to the customer,
but is there something that if you were looking checklist and you were being like,
okay, what are some of the differentiators between MSPs that are maybe red flags or things
that you're like pro tip, that's a great thing to have. I think in this current environment that we
all live in, any provider that you partner with, any MSP that you look at really should have a
strong security focus. You want somebody who's going to be looking out for your environment to
make sure that we're doing the right things to keep you as secure as possible.
Their tools should reflect that. If they're not using current tools, things like endpoint
detection and response or what's called EDR, traditional antivirus is fine, but EDR is really
an important factor for securing those endpoints. It's really the recommendation that I would expect
most MSPs to be making to other customers today. Looking for a customer for an MSP company that
has a strong focus on keeping your environment secure as well as being able to support you
around the clock when your business needs it. I think those are some of the key factors that you
should be looking for. Yeah, I think having the manager as a provider, having security
trained personnel on staff is also, in 2022, incredibly important. Just because nobody has
a get out of security incident free card, it seems. There's a lot of things that come through
there and having experts that go through those things. I think it's an important point. Not all
MSPs are equal. I know when you see the proposals, it looks very static. We all present very similar
things in little different manners, but it can be confusing. Ask about how they secure their systems.
Ask how their staff, how do they handle these after hours? How do they handle a security incident
if it were to occur? What would they do? Vet those out. If they're too small for your needs,
you're going to find a pretty large gap there and that's going to be strenuous in a critical
situation to make it worse. Ask how they approach the IT budgeting side of it is another thing.
We just talked about that side of it. Do they help with having realistic budgets that are strategic
and aligned with the business so you have predictive spend as much as possible with this side of it?
That brings in security, investment sides of those and the operational budget, and just the overall
support of the systems. How do they account for it? How do they do it? And then how do they secure
the systems? Because MSPs in this side of it, we all know that we're under the scope of the
of the threat actors to come after because there's, you know, we have access to system
sides of that. So if your MSP is not secure, you know, you're open yourself up for an issue
there as well. So just stuff that you want to definitely ask to make sure that they have things
covered. We're a SOC 2 type 2. We went through that certification. We invest in a tremendous
amount of tool sides of those. The EDR Rob mentioned is, you know, definitely one thing we
rolled in early last year's side of that into the platform side of it because you need to keep
evolving these things. It's well beyond just patching and stability and remote control
and 22 is what you want your MSP to be.
That sounds like it routs up really well. I've got a lot more to say on that topic.
We're like, and that's the cherry on top. And no, as I mentioned throughout this one, I feel like
we could talk with both of you in multiple different series. I'm hoping that this sparks
good questions for people where people are like, what did you mean by that? And that we can turn
it into a whole other series. But thank you both for sitting down today talking about what is an
MSP? All the good things, but how people would get in contact with us if they do have those
questions, they can email us info at cit-net.com or they can head on out to our podcast page,
which is cit-net.com backslash podcast. There's a form on there. You can send us an email,
call us, chat us. These guys love to talk. If you haven't caught on by now five episodes in,
we're like, yeah, we can talk all the time. We just keep ourselves on the timer for these.
So we're going to be back next week with another episode, but thank you both so much for sitting
down today and filming another tech for business podcast. Thanks for watching.