More automation for MSSP companies

Credit to Author: Marina Smolyanaya| Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2018 16:43:19 +0000

Automation is a cornerstone of MSP business. For a company with a significant number of clients it is almost impossible to provide services without some kind of platform for supervision, resource management, and control of IT systems. That is why 89% of MSP partners use remote monitoring and management (RMM) systems and 72% of them use professional services automation (PSA) platforms. And we are making our products compatible with those platforms.

When providing security services, automation is even more crucial. MSP providers usually need to solve problems long before their clients even notice them. Therefore, our task is to give PSA systems information about security incidents as fast as possible, with enough technical details for their specialists to understand what’s going on and what to do about it.

Our tools to secure, monitor, and manage customer infrastructure can be integrated with the most popular RMM and PSA platforms — ConnectWise Automate, ConnectWise Manage, and Tigerpaw One. Not long ago we added integration capabilities with another popular PSA platform, Autotask.

Integration of our key solutions (Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business and Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud) with Autotask provides a powerful combination of monitoring and management tools, such as automated billing and ticket creation for client accounts.

Automated ticketing

By enabling the automation of ticket creation for various customer incidents (such as uninstallation of an endpoint security application or a virus attack), you may work proactively on your customers’ protection, and also fix any incidents before customers even notice them. You may set up a special workflow for each of your client accounts. Having tickets created automatically reduces the time you spend monitoring your managed client account and increases the number of clients that a single technician can manage. For additional resource efficiency, you can assign priorities to tickets and create queues to streamline their prioritization. This will help ensure no tickets get lost.

Another crucial and almost unique feature is the automatic closing of tickets. If, for example, an engineer receives four tickets from the same company reporting that its antivirus databases haven’t been updated for a long time, then, rather than address each item individually, the engineer can start the update task from the product console. Once it’s executed and all endpoints are up to date, the tickets will all be automatically closed.

Billing automation

Integration with Autotask provides easy access to information on the use of our products, which significantly simplifies and automates reporting and customer billing. The integration tool can calculate the number of protected devices and provide this information to Autotask on a daily basis. Every month, you can create a customer invoice without having to deal with the overhead of calculating the number of protected devices. That information is stored right in the PSA system.

Embedded reporting

You can generate service and license reports directly from Autotask. Service reports include statistics on protection services provided to the client over the last 30 days and the last 7 days, which helps show the security product’s value. License reports provide information about license usage and availability.

Power of configuration

On its face, integration is just a set of parameters and interaction rules that can be set up and configured. However, the benefits are huge and crucial. When configuring an integration, you can set up mapping between the entities of the Kaspersky Lab solution and Autotask entities, and define rules that determine how your Kaspersky Lab solution interacts with Autotask. In other words, at the outset, you can map one-to-one your customers’ accounts in Autotask with similar entities in Kaspersky products: virtual servers, if you use Kaspersky Security Center, or workspaces, if you use Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud. Once that’s set, a significant amount of the task load will be automated for your engineers: automated billing, ticketing, and other processes. You do not need any additional tools or consoles; you can access everything from Autotask.

And last, but not least: it’s crucial to know that the integration will work regardless of which kind of endpoint protection product you use — cloud or on-premises. If you prefer to use Software-as-a-Service solutions, you may choose Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud; if you have your own infrastructure and prefer to host and update the management console yourself, you may select Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business. From an integration perspective, it doesn’t matter; both product lines are supported.

To learn more about Kaspersky Lab’s MSP Program, please refer to our Managed Service Provider Partnership page.

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