Unmanaged SaaS Leads to Uncontrolled Expenses and Higher Risk
… malware and spyware. Besides that, they’re known for illegally sharing copyrighted movies, music, apps and games. When employees use company-issued computers to download these illegal assets, your customers also share the risk. They’re not even aware of it.
If you’re not managing your customers’ SaaS apps, you’re inevitably reverting your MSP practice back to a break-fix business. For instance, when a cybercriminal finds one of your customer’s unsecured cloud apps and encrypts it with ransomware, the customer calls you for assistance. You try to fix the problem. The break-fix model was replaced by the managed services model for a reason. The latter model is better for both parties. Make sure when you’re talking to your customers about their IT environment, you’re making them aware of the importance of managing all of their IT assets and environments.
Make Your Management Tools SaaS-Ready
After making your customers aware of the potential pitfalls of unmanaged SaaS apps, there’s still a critical next-step you need to follow to ensure you can mitigate SaaS-based shadow IT.
You may need to invest in new tools that operate at the web-traffic level to give you deeper insights into their cloud apps. Once you find a useful platform, you’ll also need to integrate it with your RMM and PSA tool, so you can manage each customer from a single pane of glass instead of requiring multiple logins and screens to see everything. Once these steps are completed, you’ll be able to keep your customers running optimally and safely once again, and you’ll gain an incremental revenue stream in the process.
Derik Belair is president and CEO of Augmentt, a provider of software as a service (SaaS) management solutions for MSPs. Prior to founding Augmentt, he was vice president of marketing at SolarWinds, where he led the digital marketing strategy for the company’s cloud division. Derik joined SolarWinds through the acquisition of N-able Technologies, a company he helped build and sell to SolarWinds in 2013. He has been working in the IT channel in a senior leadership role for more than 20 years. Follow him on LinkedIn or @BelairDerik on Twitter.
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