Headquartered in Topeka, Kansas, Premier One provides managed IT and security services as well as IT consulting to small businesses. The company’s client base includes service-based industries, such as title insurance, accounting, legal and nonprofit, with branch offices in multiple locations. Premier One’s Vice President of Technology, Chris Hamm, explains, “We deliver a fully managed service, handling everything from the keyboard to the cloud. What sets us apart is our quick response time, continual communication with clients, and ability to dig a bit deeper into IT and security issues than other service providers.”
Labor limits create patching problems
As Premier One’s client base grew, Chris needed a solution to help profitably scale the business. One immediate challenge was managing patching more efficiently.
“We’re a small business and patch management was always a labor-intensive effort for us. We had approached it in different ways in the past, but never found an ideal delivery model. We found we couldn’t double the systems we could patch without burning labor hours,” says Chris.
“We needed the ability to adapt our business to better serve our customers and the immediate question became how can we effectively automate something as critical as patching?”
Enhanced patch management process
Premier One has used the Managed Workplace remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform for the past ten years. Chris shares, “We upgraded to every new version since 2007 and have become very advanced in how we use the RMM. We continue to see tremendous innovation.”
With Managed Workplace’s capabilities, Chris put a more efficient patching process in place. “Simple changes in the RMM continue to make the patching process easier, enabling us to enhance our patch management. For example, the addition of the Last Check for Updates field has improved our ability to discover and manually remediate systems having difficulty in receiving patches. We can also audit a new client’s patch status across all servers and workstations, then use this data to deploy a minimum level of patching to support systems going forward, ensuring the systems remain up-to-date and compliant in the future. We can deliver patches consistently and look at uptime history and usage for all devices, seeing any concerning trends. This hasn’t been possible with other solutions.”
Managed Workplace has also helped Chris solve patch issues on his clients’ laptops. “Users were taking their laptops home and there wasn’t an easy way to deliver updates. Managed Workplace can monitor Windows with either an agent-based or agent-less design, so we can put a device manager on each laptop and deliver patch updates, regardless of whether the device is on or off the network.”
Says Chris, “We now have an efficient, consistent patching process that we put in place every month that delivers a high quality level of patching. Managed Workplace has proven to be the key tool for this.”
More Patches with Higher Efficiency
Using Managed Workplace, Premier One has continued to realize new savings and advantages. Through its new patch management process, Chris is able to deploy patches three times faster and cover twice as many endpoints compared to before. He has also nearly cut his patching labor hours in half.
Chris also credits the RMM for helping land new business. “We are constantly re-evaluating our tools and processes. We find that the decision to stay with Managed Workplace continues to make the most sense for our business model and service needs. In addition to its comprehensive monitoring, agent-less design and features, the licensing model is simple and the price point is very fair.”
To learn more about Managed Workplace, visit our Managed Workplace RMM page.
To learn how other Partners are improving their businesses, check out Barracuda MSP’s collection of Success Stories.
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Photo: Olivier Le Moal / Shutterstock.
