MSPs have a tremendous opportunity to provide value accelerating cloud adoption and helping enterprise clients’ employees work from home securely during COVID-19. The value you provide now will be rewarded with other projects once the crisis is over.
I worked for Homeland Security after 9/11. I’ve worked with a lot of municipalities throughout the country. Several projects I worked on remind me of what we are facing now. One was the BioWatch project, which provided the federal government the ability to monitor our air for potential aerosol attacks using anthrax or rubella. The program is still in effect today.
As catastrophic as COVID-19 has been on the world scale, it’s not a declared disaster in an IT sense of a site failure or critical power loss. However, it does require business leaders to step up and respond. One of our business partners that have done so is Rich Petersen, president, and co-founder of JetStream Software, who wrote a thought-leadership piece on his company’s response plan to handle the outbreak for the technology community.
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While the protocols for handling a disaster have been in place for decades, we tend to put them on a shelf and maybe practice them every two or three years. Yet here we are. We have a primarily remote workforce inundating internet protocols, bandwidth restrictions are out the window, and we have to provide unlimited bandwidth in real-time. This has put a lot of pressure on remote access and doing security right.
Like every other company in the San Francisco Bay Area, our entire workforce is working from home. It has changed the way we work with our clients. Urgent requests and the need for support have made what is commonly a face-to-face whiteboard session now a virtual session to get the details of the requests and prioritize them.
Our vendor partners have been fantastic and responsive, and I can’t thank them enough for the support and understanding they have extended as a partner — and also to our mutual customers. While we are working from home, we have maintained open lines of communication with our customers, and they’ve given us secure access to provide solutions and service their networks. Everyone is being patient and understanding.
Our infrastructure is already fully redundant, and we have the ability to support requests for increased bandwidth and greater remote access to back-end systems via VPN. We’re using Microsoft Teams meetings to do the things that you normally do face-to-face. In-person whiteboard sessions are not going to be the norm for a while. This has clients thinking about the need to make architectural changes and drastically change long-term habits.
A saving grace to this situation is that millennials are already comfortable using the mobile technology that we have. The younger members of the workforce are taking this in stride while those who aren’t as familiar with mobile technology may be struggling a little bit.
Our customers are struggling. They did not have this contingency in place and weren’t prepared for hundreds of thousands of public sector employees becoming remote workers overnight. In one day, we have seen lead times on purchases go out the window due to the emergency response necessity. We have seen a dramatic uptick in orders for Palo Alto Network firewalls and cloud security, Lenovo tablets and laptops, VMware VDI software as well as the associated services to build remote access capability to many of these government enterprises.
From a business perspective, we’ve seen a windfall in the short term. We’ve been working with our clients nights, weekends, any time of the day over the last four weeks, and there’s plenty more to do. Other projects not related to COVID-19 will probably slow down as the priority of those projects decline in the stack.
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We own a lot of the contracts with cutting-edge technology partners like Palo Alto Networks, JetStream Software, Arista, Rubrik, Lenovo, NetApp, Cloudian, and Pure Storage for the state of California. This affords us the opportunity to have streamlined procurement processes and capabilities. That, combined with the amazing engineering talent we have, helps make us successful.
Another place we are seeing opportunity is in delivering high-value cloud services that give us an edge over hyperscalers. Native cloud services, like JetStream DR on Cloudian, give us the ability to respond to local enterprise needs in a more nimble, agile, and cost-efficient way than the big cloud providers. We can pivot and be responsive to the needs of our enterprise clients.
The big cloud providers have the capability to scale and ramp up, but they are unable to handle the sophisticated nuances of installing apps, creating the security profiles, adding users, and creating telework capability that is unique to each client because of custom apps and security access.
Once this crisis is over, I envision there will be more cloud adoption, more quickly. This will accelerate the need to burst into a hybrid cloud configuration. This crisis has shown every business the importance of agility and elastic expansion capabilities.
In the meantime, I advise MSPs to listen to the market and your customers and be transparent with regard to your capabilities. Under-promise and overdeliver to build trust and credibility.
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