Intro to Managed IT Services [video]

I'm Spencer Anderson. I've been in IT for about 20 years and Managed IT Services for about 15 years and with Loffler for about 3 1/2 years. Today I'm going to talk about Managed IT Services and everything your company needs to be secure, productive and efficient.

I'm not going to talk too much about specific technical features of Loffler's solution. Instead, we'll talk about why we set up the programs the way we did and why we think they're useful to companies that way. I'm happy to talk about any technical details of our solution or just managed services in general, if you have questions about that, but I figured this would be a good time to talk more about why we do managed services the way we do and why that can be helpful to create a partnership with your organization.

So as we went through, maybe about a year ago, we looked at which of our managed services clients we had really strong relationships with. That's a really important part of what we feel makes Managed IT Services work. That's something that's really important to Loffler as a whole - to have really good relationships with our partners. And so we identified a few keys to success and we wanted to retool our managed services around those pieces.

Communication

Communication is number one. I was meeting with one of my long-time clients and was telling them some new technical features and ideas we're looking at adding to the service, and he said, "That's all cool, but communication. Just as long as we're communicating, it's gonna be fine." And so, for us, there's a couple of things that really lead to good communication.

Recurring Service Reviews

Maybe call them "QBRs" or business reviews. We want to meet at least once a quarter with a primary contact on our side and a primary contact at your organization, that's the business owner or the IT decision maker or the head of IT in your organization. Having that conversation outside of the scope of individual tickets really allows us to work together to focus on delivering the solution.

Named Primary Contact

And, so with that, we want to name a primary contact at Loffler. We're gonna provide two named contacts that are outside of your account manager or department manager. You have a service manager and a team lead that are both available to talk about the non-normal stuff. People open and close tickets all day long, but there's always something else that's going on and we want to make sure you have an outlet to ask those questions too, and we want the same. We want to be able to say we're seeing
something that's going on, and talk about it.

Clear Expectations

Managed services is often an unlimited, all you can eat solution. But there are always limits to that, and we want to be really clear about what we include in the service and what is extra. So that when we are talking through how to resolve an issue, we are on the same page and there aren't any surprises.

Transparency

Everything we know about your organization, we want to make available to you, the client. I know some places they want to keep everything close because they want to make sure that they're controlling everything. And there is value in controlling and limiting access in the IT environment. But, we feel like we're really working on behalf of our clients. We want them to have the information that we do.

Shared Service Portal & Documentation

So, the service portal or all the ticketing documentation - I have a couple of screenshots on that a little bit later - any documentation we've collected you can see. You know a classic example is how to set up a new employee. There's 10 steps. But for these 5 people, there's 11 steps and you don't want to be going back and forth all the time saying you forgot that extra step on that person again. And so, we have documented procedures to set up new employees and then you have access to see that. So you can say, "That's right, but you know, we can change this over here and please rewrite it like that." We'll rewrite it and you can see it. And again, it's just that, that transparency, that confidence that that's not an issue moving forward.

Shared Reporting

The tools that we deploy to deliver Managed IT Services, collect a lot of information. Anything that we can report on, we want to make available to you - from inventory information, to warranty renewals, to what version of Microsoft Office, to what web browser. And all of that stuff we can make available to you. It helps with audits. Sometimes if you have an audit requirement that is part of your business or budgeting decisions or just again, knowing what you have.

Technology

We rely on technology. Our engineer team is really good at what they do. We staff a wide skill set of engineers. But we want to use technology to help your business.

Consistent Product Stack

We want to have consistent products in place so all your networking switching is the same, all your wireless access points are the same. Sometimes that's not realistic on day 1 of working with a service provider, but we want to put a plan in place to get there and to help the business operate. We want people working, not wondering which wireless access point is better than the other.

High Availability Configurations

If you say something is important to your business, we want to supplement that or compliment that with technology that matches that importance. If you use cloud-based applications that are critical, we need to put a redundant internet connection solution in place that can fail over back and forth so that your internet is working to match that need. Maybe label printing is critical because you are delivering product and the shipping company needs to be able to pick this stuff up on time. So you want multiple label printers in place. You want help designing those solutions.

Vendor Support

We want to use vendor support. We ask all of our clients to maintain vendor support for their key hardware, which is really important because, our engineers can't know everything about everything. We are really good at working with the vendor of the equipment or the software to get back to the solution, so you can to get back to work.

Service Alignment

Employee Productivity

This is another important piece. We've set our services up so when they're working well for Loffler, they're working well for you. We have the same mutual goals that your employees are working on their jobs, not interacting with the support desk about the ticket. So you know that same goal allows us to, you know, focus on fast response and really true resolution. We don't wanna just close a ticket. We want to get a senior engineer involved to find the root cause of an issue so that the issue doesn't have to be reopened a week later. You know we're really good at opening and closing tickets, but it doesn't help if the issue just comes back. So we wanna make that extra investment to get really at the root cause.

Proactive Maintenance

Our services are unlimited support within the scope of the specific services that you have. But when you're not asking us for help, we want to be reaching out into your environment and looking for areas that aren't in line with best practices or don't have the current updates or you know just could be changed in how they're configured so they're more reliable and more secure - less likely to be potential pull down the road for something else.

Response & Resolution

The most common complaint that we got was not, "Your engineers aren't good enough at what they do," it was, "I didn't hear back from them," or "I didn't know what you were
doing." So we've done a lot of coaching and using our tools and our systems to make sure that response is really our number one goal.

"I need help." We hear you need help, this is our plan. We want to get back right away to you. Even if we can't fix the issue right away or work on it right away, we can get that message out. That way, we are working closer together on how to address the issue.

So those are the four keys to success that we have.

On-boarding

One of the biggest concerns that that I see with talking with somebody new thinking about working with Loffler is, "Well, this is what I've been doing for a long time and it just sounds like it's gonna be a lot of work to make a change. Maybe I'm not happy about this. I'm not happy about that. But at least I know what those are and what does it look like to make even a change?"

And so we mapped out an on-boarding process. We have an internal kickoff process and a client kickoff. And then four weeks of on-boarding with different goals to complete each step of the way. We've identified what we're gonna ask from our clients as we onboard them, and what we're gonna do when we onboard them. So that they can see there's a path, that we've done this before, we assign a project manager to every on-boarding to make it so it's not an unknown. So that's one of the things that we've done to help just show that we've put thought into this. It's a backed up, pretty clear operating process.

Live Dashboards

One of the things that we do with all of our services is provide a live dashboard. It's one thing to say that we deploy Windows updates, and patch your servers and work stations, or maintain your antivirus or your backups. It's another thing for you to be able to log into a secure website, at any time, and see the actual data. That helps hold us accountable for what we're doing and it helps you know that you don't have to track somebody down or wonder or guess. If you have a question that you need to answer for your organization, you can find the data in the dashboard. This is an example of live data. You've got open tickets, completed tickets over seven days, created tickets over seven days.

So, some SLA detail about response, server health patch coverage, antivirus coverage, survey scores:

We send the survey to every person after we complete the ticket so you can see what people are telling us about their experience. That's something we added about six months ago. I mentioned the shared documentation portal. This is a couple of screenshots of that, you see some internal notes. This client is opening a new location next month. Be aware of that as you're providing support. Recently viewed documentation passwords, configurations, procedure documents. Remote access policies, printer setup policies, and we provide read access into all of this for our primary contacts.

They can see what we know about them and that can help you know, either just for peace of mind, validation, or for reference.

Core Service Programs

We have three different core service programs. I'll talk through each one.

Secure 1. The support for in-house IT. We really enjoy working with internal IT staff. They know the business, they know the needs of each application they're in charge of, and projects and initiatives. Those kinds of things, and we can focus on the behind-the-scenes support that's easy to lose focus on when you're helping the [end] user or trying to finish that project. So, three key deliverables from this: monitoring, alert review, and triage. A lot of different tools for monitoring and alerting if you go out and buy one or try open source ones. But if you end up with a mailbox, a folder full of alert emails that you never look at and you don't want clutter in your inbox, maybe you created a rule or you don't know what to do when you get an alert anyway. Maybe you get 20 at a time. Some core system is having an issue. It can be hard to get value out of that. So all the alerts while you're welcome to receive them as well, they all go to us, and our engineers treat each one and provide an interpretation. We get 20 alerts at one time, we interpret what's going on and say, "You got 20 alerts and this is the source of that you need to look into this right now," or maybe it's a simple one. You got a little disc space alert one of your service. You should look at that this week.

That information is available in other places, but it's really easy to miss if you don't have the right attention to it or you have other things that are priorities for you. So it gives you a second set of eyes. 
We do an IT security health check every month, as part of the services we're deploying with those updates. We're deploying third-party application security updates. It's applications like Firefox, Chrome, Acrobat Reader, Flash. We're deploying antivirus. Tools are pretty good, and they're pretty reliable, but they're not perfect, and people do lots of things with their computers. So one computer will fall out of scope, will no longer be getting patches for some reason, or antivirus is no longer running or updating.Somebody's traveling, so it's not connected to a central system to get updated.

So our services allow us to cover no matter where you are and then we're having an engineer check it once a month to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be. And then access to the Loffler toolkit. Again, that transparency. We want to share the information that we have with you. We also wanna share the tools that we have. So we have a lot of great IT administrator tools and control different inventory parts and all those are usable by our Secure 1 clients. It can help them save some other costs, maybe they're paying for remote control software for something else, or they don't really have it, so it's great way to roll out some of these tools for you to use to support your systems.

Secure 2 is focused on end users. So end-user support, infrastructure, standards, and best practices. Everything in Secure 1 is included in Secure 2. End user help desk support is your traditional first call support. Our average time to answer is 40 seconds or less for the last 12 months. We have some clients that use web-based chat. Our average chat response time is 0 seconds for the last 12 months, again providing that response. Our engineer teams are designed so that we don't – nobody on our team is tasked with reading the script and then escalating the ticket or the script to resolve the issue. Each engineer that takes a ticket is trained and staffed and enabled and expected to take the issue that comes in. Most tickets get handled by the engineer that receives the ticket. We do have
a wide range of skill sets that we staff, because not every level 2 engineer can resolve every issue and then they have past escalations, so that you don't have to worry about that. That's their job to  escalate, get the right person on the ticket. That's one of the main things we do as a core piece of our service. We put a lot of effort into that. Server, network administration, Office 365 Exchange administration, so all the back-end systems, we're doing that, too. Firewall, servers, backups, Office 365, Azure, private cloud solution and we're making sure all those pieces are running right.

A lot of our proactive support that I mentioned goes into those pieces. Updating firmware or segmenting the network or setting up guest WiFi. Hosted anti-spam and anti-virus for email. Whether you're using Office 365, Google Apps or an on-premise solution. There's just a lot of value of having an additional layer of spam filtering. You get the benefit of two layers. You get a lot of control in how you handle email and a dedicated service for that. And there's something that, you know, people don't wanna get too much SPAM, they don't wanna miss emails they don't want or they did want, so the service allows us to find that balance. Cloud managed print – we do a lot more of in our clients that no longer have on-premise servers to be a print server anymore.

Loffler has a really great business printing solution called uniFLOW, and this is not that. It's a really lightweight cloud print solution that allows you to easily print to different printers in your office but print to the office when you're at home or do secure printing. The print job won't release until you're at the printer. You don't need an on-prem server.

Working through individual support tickets is important. Implementing best practices is important, but for us, we wanna make sure your IT is aligned with your business. We wanna make sure that you're aware of costs that are coming up, maintenance renewals, end of life on products, Windows 7 when those 2008 Server end of life, so you're planning ahead for those. You're not scrambling in Q4 possibly or early next year. Those go end-of-life in January. And we have a strategy to go through that so we can bring budget recommendations to you ahead of time so that we can talk about how you're using your IT and understand what you wanna do with your business, and ideas on how to use IT to help those initiatives.

Secure 3 adds some additional services and tools and technology in the top of our existing
solutions, whether it's from a compliance requirement or you dealt with the cryptovirus one day and you really wanna minimize your chance of that happening again. There are some additional tools to help that, and they all require licensing costs and so we picked several of them that we think
help reduce risks and bundled them into a package.

Advanced network monitoring: People use cloud services more and more. The responsiveness and the configuration of the network becomes much more important. If you're using Salesforce or Office 365 or the ERP solution or accounting solution that's web-based or your local networking does not meet those needs to deliver that service fast, it's not going to feel like a good solution.

Security awareness training: We're going to send emails to people throughout the year trying
to trick them into clicking on links and then provide some really accessible education about why they shouldn't have done that and how they identify that in the future. If your company uses Wells Fargo and an email comes from them and we send it to the finance department, say I log in
here and update this information, and then if somebody clicks on that and types, we say, "This is how you can identify a phishing email." End user education is really important part of a security
strategy.

Office 365 Backup and Email archiving: This goes the same for G Suite. As you move files and data into OneDrive or G Drive or Teams or SharePoint online, those become file sharing solutions for your company. As your licensing allows that people start to use those tools whether you know or not, and may not be keeping a copy on your file server that's backed up. Those tools provide a recycle bin functionality, but that is not backup and recovery. Those solutions are susceptible to cryptovirus. If you have OneDrive on your computer and you get a cryptovirus, guess what, there's a cloud version, too. [Your documents are safe.] It all syncs back as the traditional backup and recovery solution with point and time recovery. [This means] not needing to work with the individual user or relying on a recycle bin to get the data back.

Multi-factor authentication is the classic login using the password, and then get a pin on your phone type in that pin. There are really flexible ways to implement that in an organization, so that when you're in your physical office, for example, you don't need to type in the pin. But if you're traveling in the hotel, you do. Or you're in a different country, you do. That is still convenient for you to do your work, but somebody else who probably isn't you, it's a lot harder for them to authenticate to get into your Office 365, things like that.

DNS filtering is another layer of security that you type in Loffler.com, it's an additional validation that, in fact is Loffler.com, and there isn't a middleman in the middle of attack pretending.

Email encryption is important for sending confidential information, whether it's financial information, customer information, email that's plain text sent by default. There are encryption solutions to help secure that data through email. I'm happy to pull it up a screenshot on my laptop over at the table in the other room. But this is an example of some of the network visualization that I talked about when I talked about the advanced network monitoring. As we get through the services that are in the cloud and not using on-premise servers, you need to know what the network data is doing in order to get to the resolution quickly. So you see the network, a whole visualization and at first this tool goes out and identifies everything that's on the network, that's plugged in, whether it's a hub under somebody's desk that you forgot about that was put in three years ago, because you needed an extra port, or somebody brought a wireless access point and plugged it in because they didn't think the wireless was strong enough, so they put their own in. So detect those kinds of things that help identify very quickly and that collects data on everything so you can see the people as it should see individual ports. So the classic, "The network feels slow today," complaint can get resolved very quickly by being able to see what's doing what, where, and what changed. And then we can take the appropriate action.

IT Strategy & Budget Roadmap

These are not technical questions like, "What's the firmware version of your firewall, or what processors on your server?" These are questions about how you're using technology and how you want to use technology. We talk about work stations, user administration, servers, network security, business continuity, and, we take your answers and say, "Here's what you're doing today and here's where you say you'd like to be."

That's part of our strategy roadmap planning session. We help handle the budget, we assign projects to your goals, where there was white in those graphs. So you can play it out another year or two and say, "These are the things that we wanna do in this order. Here's the estimated cost," rolls it up really
nicely to reference back at us.

And then we go through that overtime. Maybe once once a quarter/year and you can see your business's IT score change. The actual number isn't really important. It's the fact that you have a point in time where you are, have a goal of where you wanna be, and then to see that progress over time. Selfishly, one of the things for us is as we would do proactive support for our clients. They say we're not contacting you anymore. We never have any tickets. I don't know if we need the solution anymore, cause we've cleaned everything up and we've reduced the number of issues, but there's still value in our service programs. One of things we can do is help you better utilize technology that you have and identify things that you wanna do and pick good solutions to match up with that.

Audience Questions:

[Guest] On the Office 365 encryption, antivirus, spam filtering, is that based on the client's tenant or do you manage the tenants for them?

[Spencer] On the spam filtering, we put a solution between their email and the internet, so whether
it's an on-premise email solution or a cloud solution. We point all incoming email at that service first, then it delivers it to the tenant and then all outbound email routes through that as well. So it's a cloud-based solution and then it's configured. We have a set of, you know a standard configuration
that's pretty good but every business has some unique things that they want to be able to accommodate and what we found is that we can accommodate those solutions. So everybody gets a daily quarantine digest and so they can see what was blocked by spam, and right on it say: White list this. This is not spam. Never be spam again. Or you can log in and actually do some more granular management on their own. They'd like to, forward to support@loffler.com. You know, make the request.

[Guest] So, if we have Loffler do some of our IT management for our school, as the daily functionalities go, you will make recommendations for changes? Access points, adding, taking them out, switches, whatever comes up?

[Spencer] Yes, recommendations come up in that recurring service review part, the QBR. Our engineers will identify those things, too. If they're fixing the same issue over and over, and, there's a solution especially a reasonable solution, not a huge cost of some kind. They'll bring that up
at the time because they wanna get those issues addressed. So it's a combination. I mentioned two primary contacts for each of our engineer teams. They also have a service lead, and they're a technical resource, but they're also tasked with looking at those recurring issues and saying, "Why do we keep working on the same thing over and over?" and so they're really focused on identifying those kinds of things and then bringing visibility to them whether it's directly to the primary contact, or to the service manager. To be an agenda item on the next review.

[Guest] That's for repetitive issues that come up. How about just overall changes that might...

[Spencer] During our on-boarding process, we look for things that are out of best practice. We talk about those right away and then as they're uncovered as well. Part of our proactive maintenance is to
go out and just make sure each piece of equipment is running how we'd like it to.

Well, that's all I had today. I thought I would share one more comment. I talked about the response, and we added a new client in October, and their first feedback to us was, "Loved the immediate
response to follow up with any issue, no matter the urgency." That's the service we really wanna give. That's why people work with Loffler, it's because they get the help they want right away, and that was great to see the first feedback to us [from that customer].