Making the Transition to MSP – Workstation Management

In an earlier article we discussed how becoming a managed service provider can help you to grow your business; moving away from the old break/fix model to a more proactive offering. But let’s not stop there! Now that you have decided Managed Services is the way forward; it’s time to look at the steps you can take to make that transition easier.

To start off our series we’re going to take a look at how providing Workstation Management as part of your managed service offering can help you to tie in break/fix customers, generate recurring revenue and continue to drive growth.

Workstation Management:

Workstation Management is a great starting point when transitioning clients from Break/Fix to MSP.  The reason being, more and more companies are coming to realize that servers aren’t the only machines within their infrastructure which are important; in fact some of their workstations are actually critical to the running of their business.

If your client is an online retailer, chances are a lot of their mission critical activities – stock control and billing for example – will require workstations to be operational in order to run efficiently. If a work station goes down it will slow down the service, if all workstations go down then they simply won’t be able to sell to their clients.

Here is a great opportunity for you to offer your clients a service which will protect these vital machines at a low monthly cost. This service can include all or one of the following things – Workstation Monitoring, Workstation Maintenance and Work Station Support.

Workstation Monitoring:

The easiest place to start is with Workstation Monitoring as it is the easiest service to sell to your clients. With Workstation Monitoring you would simply assess the overall status and health of each workstation and then monitor to spot any issues which could go on to cause bigger problems.

The checks you could carry out and report on could include; Asset and Inventory tracking – to identify when hardware and software needs to be up dated, Antivirus Update checks – to ensure workstations are protected from viruses and malware, and Drive Space Changes – to alert you when Drive Space is being rapidly consumed.

By alerting clients to these small issues you can even find areas where you can upsell.

Workstation Maintenance:

As Workstations are becoming increasingly important in the daily running of businesses, you can also upsell maintenance services to help ensure your client’s machines will be not only functioning but also running efficiently at all times.

By automating recurring and essential maintenance tasks on your client’s workstations you can save yourself time as well as ensuring that their machines are always ready to use – reducing the amount of downtime which occurs for scheduled maintenance.

With Workstation Maintenance you can automatically update Anti-Virus software when you are alerted that an upgrade is due -to ensure machines are always protected from attacks, automate routine task such as defragmentation or file clear up – to save maintenance time and set up automatic reports – to show your client that you are on top of maintaining their network.

Workstation Support:

Finally, part of managing Workstations for your client’s should be offering support in the event that issues do occur – what good is all this monitoring and automated maintenance if there is no one offering user support to fix issues which may still arise.

With a RemoteManagement tool like GFI MAX you can not only carry out all of your Workstation checks and maintenance tasks from the one dashboard, you can even make use of the Take Control feature to determine if a workstation on your client’s network is accessible. As well as this you can then remotely take control of that machine to provide user support quickly with no traveling to site needed!

By offering all three of these services you can ensure that your client’s minds will be at ease knowing their workstations are protected from all angles and you can do all this from one place with minimal set-up required.

Additionally the GFI MAX building blocks program is available to all GFI MAX customers and will help you to understand the steps you can take to sell Workstation Management to your clients. You’ll even find all the marketing materials you could need to get you started.

If you’d like to find out more about how RemoteManagement can help you as your transition to Managed Services, why not head over to GFI MAX and sign up for a free trial.