Cloud services drive managed service development

Ultimately, as with almost all projects, the positive reception from your own team is crucial. When embarking on a journey, having a clear goal is very helpful. It's important to define why you are undertaking this effort and what you expect to achieve.

To facilitate this, we assembled a team from various departments, including accounting, marketing, sales, and technology. This group worked together as an extended product management team to develop the service we wanted to offer.

In the security environment, our initial focus was on classic endpoint and server protection. A key factor for us from the start was the shift from reactive management to proactive activity. We wanted to be proactive rather than only responding when requested.

The move to the cloud played a significant role in this transition to selling managed security services. With cloud services, we achieved a major advantage: an "always up-to-date" platform. This provided substantial added value and an incentive for customers, ensuring their solutions were continuously updated without the need for major service costs or manual updates on our part.

Building on this foundation, we began with antivirus and exploit prevention and then gradually introduced additional security services.

Like many others, we initially structured our portfolio into three variants: basic, supported, and managed. We set the price for the Fully Managed version high enough that it might not be immediately viable. We began with the basic and supported versions, even though the basic version already offered more than what was initially described.

Our technicians or Managed Service support staff regularly monitor the customer portal for classic alarm messages, such as outdated clients or unrecognized policies. For the basic version, we developed a process where, if an error is reported during the check mechanisms, an automatic email is sent to the customer offering to correct the issue. Although fixing this problem may incur a charge, the checking process itself is included in the managed service, rather than just a license push.

In the support variant, we included some troubleshooting services. The managed variant is designed for customers who want a hands-off experience, expecting that issues, such as virus attacks, will be addressed proactively. This involves detailed analysis of numerous alarms and follow-up actions.

We implement the fully managed variant only in collaboration with the manufacturer. My advice for managed service start-ups is to start with something simple that is clearly seen as a service by the team. Ensuring that employees can support the service they provide is crucial. If you promise more than what is realistically deliverable, it undermines the team’s confidence and effectiveness in offering the service to customers. The same principle applies to sales.

We are currently undergoing an optimization process, revisiting a journey we began around seven years ago. We're evaluating our existing products to determine their relevance, currency, and alignment with our current standards. The goal is to adapt and optimize these products.

To achieve this, we've formed small internal teams comprising sales and technology members. Together, we're reworking our services to enable faster and more efficient scaling. Over the next six months, we will overhaul our security services, managed services, and cloud services to enhance our scaling capabilities.

This optimization includes streamlining contract processing. We've realized that our initial contracts were quite complex. We're now restructuring them to include a commercial section and a separate technical data sheet for the technician. Additionally, we're increasing our use of digital signatures to eliminate delays associated with sending and receiving physical documents. Our objective is to make managed services easy to consume across all areas.