Managed Services: How Do You Stack Up In the Trust Department?

The following is a cautionary tale for solution providers already doing managed services or looking to get into it. It's not meant to send you running from this particular business model, but it raises a significant issue: the trust factor.

Imagine this, for a moment: One morning, a technician wakes up, goes to work and hatches a plan. He works for an MSP that develops and manages grocery store inventory-control systems, remotely maintaining and updating those systems for clients spread across several time zones. He is a disgruntled employee, ticked because his boss has changed the employee bonus structure. In retaliation, the technician resorts to IT sabotage -- he inserts a malicious bit of code into the inventory-control software developed by his employer and installs it on all of its clients' networks.

You can imagine the result. Grocery chains open for the day, employees there boot up the inventory-control software being provided as a service by their MSP and, well, system crashes ensue. The MSP then spends two days putting out fires and placating angry customers whose systems were offline for two days.

It's a true story, according to Dawn Cappelli of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. The point of telling it? Managed services means 24/7 access to your customers' networks and all that goes with them. Security is paramount. And so is trust. To make it with this business model, customers have to know that you are guarding their networks, data and systems like they are your own.

So how do you do that, short of any official Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval -- as yet -- for MSPs? Clearly, reputation is going to be crucial. And hiring the right people. I'm compiling a list of MSP horror stories and best-practices tips for an upcoming feature story. Let me know of any MSP shenanigans you have witnessed or heard about. And please tell me how you have succeeded in gaining the trust of your customers.

Write me at [email protected].