Accelerating delivery velocity and customer impact today, and opening new doors for tomorrow

A case study in highly optimized MSP delivery and help desk operations, with 20-30% higher delivery efficiency and improved customer experience.

Products

Cloud Manager
Security Manager

Company and vision
Providing IT Support and Cybersecurity services to the Alternative Investment industry

Atlas Technica, a New York based Managed Service Provider (MSP) with over 250 FTEs, specializes in providing IT Support and Cybersecurity services to the Alternative Investment industry. They have been on a transformation and growth journey fueled by efficiency and a fanatical focus on customer experience. They have embraced automation and created new best-practices for managed services activation and ongoing support. SkyKick recently sat down with members of the leadership team to understand the secret sauce and how this template of MSP operations might be valuable for other growth-minded MSPs.

Alex Corelis, Associate Director of Engineering at Atlas Technica, articulated his vision and strategy for leveraging technology to reduce costs and improve customer experience. The team has developed an approach situated at the convergence of these ostensibly conflicting business goals. Their focus revolves around identifying tools and technologies aligning with three pivotal imperatives for all activities within the Technology Engineering Team: consistency, reliability, and speed.

This is a story of their transformation journey, and it is only the beginning.

About

Atlas Technica is an MSP specializing in providing IT Support and CyberSecurity services to the Alternative Investment industry.

Challenge
Need to optimize cost and consistency while delivering premium customer experience to high-stakes financial industry customers

As a business, Atlas Technica wants to grow, transform, and do great things for their customers. However, it’s operating in an environment with competing priorities, on one hand keeping costs under control, and on the other, consistently improving customer experience. This typically means reducing escalations, improving quality, minimizing intermediary hops, improving customer response time, and empowering frontline staff to resolve issues without involving senior personnel.

The strategies that brought them to this point won’t suffice for future growth. They must consider a new operating model to achieve their goals moving forward.

Like any good MSP operation, their delivery model inherently comprises tiers. This structure encompasses a substantial frontline workforce, a subset of individuals with slightly more experience within the frontline team, and occasional escalations to a centralized services team with proficiency in various technology domains, particularly specialized expertise in PowerShell and scripting.

This centralized services team is a critical part of the business. It is 5-member strong and functions like a “Ninja team” whose mission is to create internal tools and automation that seeks to make the client-facing teams more successful, helping multiply the productivity of 100+ delivery operations personnel.

Alex Corelis, a leader in this org is clear-eyed on the opportunity and challenges. Alex said “We have a big organization. We support different customers who came in at different points of our growth journey. Inconsistency exists from one customer to another. We have a wide range of talent at different skillets. We have a lot of diversity and complexity in our operations. In a world of ever-evolving customer needs, equipping our client-facing team with the right technology and tools is paramount.” Furthermore, “Every customer touch point, especially the ones that go through the initial build process or the ones that go through the help desk, is an opportunity to either lose the customer for life or to have that customer be an ambassador for bringing five more customers.”

Alex and his team grapple with questions such as: How consistent is the approach with client-facing teams? Is it consistent or 10 different people doing 10 different things. Is it reliable? Does it work 100% of the time? Does it have graceful error handling? Is this something that will help move ahead on customer experience, reduce time to market on a build deployed, or reduce time to resolution?

To say this is a trivial challenge would be a massive understatement. Navigating organizational hops, especially in support, significantly impacts customer experience. Lengthy build deployments incur costs. Manual processes that could take 8+ hours to complete causes disruption in a customer site and as a result, customer experience suffers. Atlas Technica “Ninja team” aims to knit together best practices for rapid, automated deployments, to go from hours to minutes.

The question becomes what is the right automation tool and what are requirements needed in this tool?

Solutions
Comprehensive automation from initial builds to ongoing management ensures consistency, reliability & speed – wowing customers

When evaluating potential solutions within their diverse environment, encompassing various technologies and a sizable team with diverse skill sets, they sought a platform for build deployment and help desk operations that fulfills six specific requirements.

Firstly, being PowerShell experts in centralized services team, they require a platform to document and disseminate intellectual property generated within their centralized services operation. This ensures easy and consistent adoption by client-facing teams. Secondly, as their portfolio expands across diverse customers, they emphasize the need for multi-tenant consistency and tools to standardize operations from one tenant to another, enabling the consistent application of best practices across multiple customers.

Third, they seek tools and techniques to track, monitor, and audit every touchpoint, regardless of whether it originated from the centralized services team or the 100-plus client-facing individuals. This enables a comprehensive audit trail to monitor actions effectively. Fourth, they highlight the necessity for the capability to create automation and scripts for continuous learning and implementing best practices or updates from Microsoft, benefiting all their customers.

Fifth, with a massive focus on Microsoft 365 in their operations, they looked for a tool purpose-built for Microsoft 365. Lastly, considering the growing emphasis on Azure management, they prioritized a tool with the capacity to extend in that direction to align with their evolving work and specialization.

With these requirements in mind, Atlas Technica wanted a solution that is powerful, easy-to-use and purpose-built for MSPs. The team posed critical questions to address. They delved into considerations such as the storage location for pre-existing customized Powershell scripts, identifying a need for a centralized repository built and curated. The inquiry extended to the accessibility of automation tools for front-line technicians and the establishment of a secure, scalable authentication process for agents entering customer tenants.

The solution selected? SkyKick Cloud Manager.

Impact
High efficiency and reliability in ongoing support while automation freed up time to bring new services to market

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. It’s been a journey but there has been great impact on cost efficient and improving customer experience. Overall, the delivery efficiency has improved at least 20-30%. For instance, in a specific build process, the time required decreased from 8 hours to just 10 minutes. This automation ensures consistent, reliable, and fast application, replacing manual tasks such as creating tenants, subscriptions, licenses, users, mailboxes, and configuring policies for software and security.

“SkyKick Cloud Manager helps us scale and multiply our best engineers.”

-Alex Corelis

On the other hand, the Ninja team continues to get great feedback from client facing teams on how customers are perceiving the company as a different kind of MSP. This recognition stems from their customer-centric and forward-thinking approach in response to clients’ needs.

Creating time and space for growth

With the efficient platform in place and core operations improving, it has provided the team with the time and flexibility to contemplate the next layer of services. The team prides itself on differentiation on cybersecurity. In addition, Atlas has been a bread-and-butter Microsoft 365 partner and they have now found the space to cater to advanced scenarios within Azure. Presently, the team engages extensively with Azure compared to three years ago.

“We have just finalized the development of a script that will implement a monitoring solution based on Azure resources for Azure Site Recovery. That will allow us to be proactive and catch problems with Azure Site Recovery before they affect the client. We also have a similar solution for Azure backups. Together with SkyKick’s platform, we are able to use our expertise and automation to bring new solutions to customers faster, better and more consistently.” said Alex.

Despite the considerable training and preparation typically required for these new endeavors, the process of rolling out has become more streamlined. Thanks to a platform that facilitates the swift transition from identifying a need to presenting and delivering the solution, the time-to-market cycle has significantly shortened. The efficiency gained in this entire loop minimizes the need for extensive readiness and training, making the implementation of new solutions more agile and accessible.

With SkyKick Cloud Manager automation, Atlas Technica can increase their service offerings, reduce cost, drive growth and profitability and differentiate as an MSP. “This is what makes us different, and this is our transformation story,” said Alex.