Is Your Office 365 Managed Service Provider Proactive or Reactive?

Unless They Monitor End-to-end – Then All They Can Do Is React

If you rely on services like Office 365, Salesforce, Box, Workday or other cloud apps the answer is not at all. That’s because the remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools most widely used by MSPs lack end to end visibility to these cloud apps. Tools from Solar Winds N-Able, AVG, LabTech, or Kaseya – to name a few – work great when all the infrastructure to deliver applications is under your (or their) control. But for SaaS apps that is not the case. Not even close. Never mind you are paying them to be proactive not reactive. The cost and consequences of this can be huge.

We use the Dashboard!

One thing we hear from many MSP’s and end customers alike is that they rely on the SaaS providers status dashboards for monitoring. Those are completely re-active, with any updates long after the fact. That works some of the time for some of the users, but never works all the time for everyone. Those dashboards are reactive – not proactive. You get dashboard updates when your provider knows they are having issues. But there’s plenty of times your users can have issues that have nothing to do with the cloud app. For example, when the issue is outside their infrastructure and inside yours. Or if there’s trouble within your ISP’s network. The cloud provider is not responsible for that. Are you sure your MSP is covering your SaaS? You might get lucky- but unless they monitor end to end – don’t bet on it.

The wrong approach costs real money

Degraded or disrupted service can cost the business real money. What if you can’t get a quote to a customer thru your SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com? What if you’re waiting for a PO to be emailed into your Office 365 mailbox? What if that critical agreement you’re redlining can’t be retrieved from your Google or Box.net drive? The list goes on.

Even though outages are rare – if they are not being monitored proactively, regardless of whether a fault is on the SaaS providers’ side or not – knowing earlier is the key to resolving it faster. Do you want to be the one that explains to the CEO why that Saleforce.com outage that prevented quotes going out at the end of the quarter wasn’t their fault?

Without proactive end to end monitoring, you and your MSP can only react. The good news is that tools like CloudReady completely fill the void between what you get from your cloud providers dashboards and what you get from your MSP’s remote monitoring platform. CloudReady Monitor is built for today’s reality – where the majority of infrastructure powering your business critical apps is outside your (and your MSP’s) control.

Many leading MSPs ranging from the largest global outsourcers to your local IT pro already use CloudReady to proactively assure the highest levels of service availability and performance for all of your SaaS apps. When choosing your MSP, or renewing services with your current MSP, make sure you ask them if they are proactive. If not – you will be much better off finding another one – or covering your own SaaS with CloudReady Monitor.