The average business today can use hundreds of different applications to manage operations, making it almost impossible to manually keep track of documentation for each customer.
For managed service providers (MSPs) like Liongard Partner, machineLOGIC, change management is critical.
MachineLOGIC is an award-winning managed IT service provider, delivering professional services expertise and cloud, security, and collaboration solutions to small and mid-sized companies. They believe that simplicity, innovation and the best people are the keys to every successful business
To improve change management across the organization, machineLOGIC needed a solution to surface valuable information automatically, so they could spend less time digging for data and identifying issues, and more time focusing on customers and solving issues.
What they got with Liongard was a platform that’s helped them standardize, secure and scale operations across their MSP, saving money for the business, and time and frustration for staff. We sat down with machineLOGIC NOC Manager, Connor Mong to find out how they did it.
Easy Change Management Across Systems
For machineLOGIC, as for many MSPs, finding out when changes happened, and why, is a major source of frustration and wasted time for technicians. Connor’s team lacked a way to reliably track changes; and trying to investigate where changes originated, or even what exactly changed, resulted in digging through a mountain of data to try and find a resolution.
Using historical data from Liongard helps Conor and team cut through the noise to get to insights faster, saving time and allowing them to lower resolution times and focus on growing customer relationships. With 18 months of data down to the endpoint level, all in one place, the machineLOGIC team can travel back in time to see precisely when, where and what changes were made.
“It’s peace of mind,” says Connor. “If something critical breaks, we can jump exactly to when and how it broke and fix it right away instead of having to take downtime to figure out why it broke in the first place. This saves us 30 minutes to an hour for each incident.”
Learn more about historical data and change management.
After streamlining their change management process, Connor and team rolled out Liongard across their stack to increase visibility and standardize, secure and scale across the organization.
Standardize
Along with gaining visibility into change management, Liongard is helping the machineLOGIC team standardize processes across systems. They are currently using custom Actionable Alerts to perform employee on- and off-boarding for their customers, ensuring they’ll receive a ticket if a mailbox isn’t properly forwarded, or a license has not been deactivated. This saves the team time and allows them to keep critical customer issues at the top of to-do lists.
MachineLOGIC has also been able to realize cost savings from consolidating tools across their stack. Before Liongard, Connor was using an independent identity monitoring application. With Liongard, he has been able to completely replace this tool with more complete data, lowering costs for the organization and streamlining his access to important data.
“I can definitely see us retiring a couple more niche tools that we’re using because Liongard provides those capabilities in one tool already.”
Learn how one partner saved $40k in operational costs in less than a year.
Secure
Think of your system’s data as a map. You need to know where you came from—and where you’re going—to reach your destination. Knowing basics like what’s installed on each system, which systems are vulnerable, and if licenses are allocated correctly ensures you’re able to avoid any upcoming roadblocks or critical security issues.
For machineLOGIC, identifying these critical systems issues is a top priority. The team currently use Liongard to automate security and other critical alerts across customer systems. Their custom Actionable Alerts automatically notify the team of any change in privilege level so they can quickly verify its validity and act if the change came from a compromised user.
“Being able to see how many privileged users we have in Active Directory and M365 has been eye-opening,” said Connor. “With one client we found something like 30 domain admins, and that allowed us to jump on that issue right away and manage it proactively.”
In addition to change management and monitoring, Liongard has also been helpful when setting up a new Sentinel One instance and alerts at machineLOGIC. Instead of having to go through all 500+ Sentinel One alerts and setting them up individually, Connor and team can set up Liongard threat alerts that show up as tickets in his PSA to let him know immediately if there is an active threat that needs attention.
“Liongard turned a lot of reactive situations into proactive situations, which is great for us, and great for our support team in terms of staying ahead of customer tickets and providing an increased level of service.”
Scale
Liongard’s comprehensive partner onboarding program helped machingLOGIC save time deploying their own Liongard instance, as well as when training new employees to use the platform. This empowers them to scale their organization more quickly and easily.
“The onboarding process was really fun for me,” says Connor. “We currently have over 1,000 systems to set up, so making sure that all the important pieces were set up with Liongard—and the gamification of the process—I loved it. I’d say the process is unmatched with any other tool I’ve had to roll out. I cannot say enough good things about it.”
This ease-of-use translates to novice Liongard users as well. With historical data and automatic documentation, helping new employees hit the ground running has never been easier. And saving time
on internal hires means the team can focus on servicing accounts, fixing critical issues and growing the business.
“If I have a new hire in my department, I don’t have to spend time getting them up to speed on what to do when an Alert comes in; they have everything they need in the documentation to get started right away.”
Request a demo to see how Liongard works and how you can standardize, secure and scale across your MSP.