Back in September I had the great pleasure of attending DattoCon22 in Washington DC and met lots of current and prospective partners at the JumpCloud booth. And I’ve got the t-shirts, pens, and stress “popper” swag to prove it.
During the opening keynote to the audience of approximately 3000 MSPs from all around the world, Kaseya CEO Fred Vocola spoke about how hiring and retention are top pain points for MSPs. Among many other stats, he shared that 19% of Kaseya partners reported that hiring and retaining staff was a major business issue in their 2022 Global MSP Benchmark Report. In Datto’s annual State of the MSP Survey, the figure was very similar with 22% of their partners saying that hiring was one of the issues keeping them up at night.
This isn’t new. As long as I’ve been reading MSP reports – which is a long time – hiring and retention have been high on the list of MSPs problems.
Addressing Capacity with Efficiency
One way to help attract great employees a little is to improve staff efficiency. Give them the tools to do more in less time, and automate the mundane repetitive tasks to allow them to spend more time on interesting things. This will also hopefully help retain the great staff you have.
Some areas we can help are:
Centralizing Identity, Access and Device Management
Unifying these 3 pillars in one platform greatly improves technician efficiency. Having to manually manage multiple services to carry out the tasks that we enable MSPs to do directly within the JumpCloud platform is tedious, error prone, and increases security risk.
In addition to increasing technician efficiency, JumpCloud shortens the time that it takes to train new technicians – a slow and costly process that takes months. With our unified platform and our certification process, MSPs can minimize the number of resources required to operate their MSPs and can get new resources trained quickly.
Patch Management
Patch Management is one of the most important tasks MSPs carry out on behalf of their clients, but often it’s very manual and takes a lot of technical resources. JumpCloud allows the MSP to create patch management policies and automate this process saving many hours of engineers time.
Powerful commands
Lots of tasks that MSPs carry out can be scripted via Powershell, bash, or other scripting tools. The JumpCloud platform allows MSPs to create and centrally store scripts to be used and, more importantly, re-used. It could be for deploying a standard piece of software or performing a more advanced task. Either way, scripting is a very powerful way for MSPs to automate.
Remote Assist
Having the ability to remotely connect to a client’s computer is vital for MSPs. Some current tools (RMMs) require the engineer to leave one product and enter another to get this done. JumpCloud has this built right in so is another amazing timesaver.
Password Management
40% of help desk tickets are password related. With SSO and Password Manager we can help MSPs all but eliminate this tedious, repetitive, and uninteresting task – a massive benefit. Also having the passwords to access clients’ systems securely stored prevents MSPs from having to open yet another tool. Finally, the ability to share 2FA tokens for situations such as common admin accounts allows engineers to quickly connect to the correct resource without having to look around for the office cell phone.
PSA Integrations
Another way we can help save MSPs time is with integrations. Our integrations with Autotask PSA and ConnectWise Manage help the MSPs’ finance teams save time as they spend a lot of effort collecting invoices from vendors, breaking them down and assigning them to the proper clients.
In addition to the billing integrations that help the finance team of an MSP, our ticketing integrations are a real time saver for MSP technicians and support staff. They can live in their PSA solution knowing they will be alerted by a new ticket if anything in JumpCloud needs their attention. This allows them to be more productive and ensures that they are not underbilling their clients.
Multi-Tenant Portal (MTP) Homepage alerts
In addition to our ticketing integrations, MSPs can rely on our MTP homepage, which is a single pane of glass for alerts in the MTP. This means that MSPs – even if not using the ticketing integration – are able to see at a glance, issues or potential issues at clients’ sites from a single dashboard. This allows staff to be proactive in resolving issues, rather than waiting for the client to call. It’s more efficient and improves client satisfaction.
Learn more about JumpCloud for MSPs.
