6 Ways to Help Your MSP Stay Healthy During COVID-19

Our realities have all been turned upside down by COVID-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus. Life has been disrupted in ways unimaginable a few months, or even weeks, ago, and they are likely to remain this way for an unknown period of time.

At the same time, life must go on. And MSPs must play an essential role in helping that continue.

All of your customers are scrambling to adjust to this new way of life. Some of their businesses are going to face massive slowdowns if they’re not forced to shutter completely, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, other clients are going to lean on their IT services harder than ever to remain productive during this crisis. MSPs are already in the remote management business, so social distancing will come easy, but it’s going to be a whole new thing for many customers.

To better serve their new, varied needs, not to mention keep your own operations running as smoothly as possible, resources must be redirected, processes and protocols must be adjusted, and MSPs must remain nimble as the situation evolves. Here are six things you can do to prepare for and cope with what’s underway … and what’s to come.

1. Working from home means more work for MSPs.

To minimize transmission of COVID-19 (coronavirus), organizations able to have their employees work from home will do so. For some businesses, this may merely increase their VPN usage or require a few new sets of credentials and access for particular employees and systems.

But for other operations, shifting work off-site will be a massive, unexpected transition. For example, school districts, colleges and universities will be relying on remote learning at unprecedented levels they neither anticipated nor designed their systems for.

Even for companies that already embraced remote working and that have processes and systems in place, there’s a percentage of workers who haven’t taken advantage of the model before. They won’t have VPN clients on their laptops–if they have laptops at all. New credentials may need provisioning, new apps may need installing, and new hardware or virtual servers may be required.

There is also going to be a massive learning curve for many new to remote work, which will result in a flood of support inquiries. Folks contacting tech support are rarely in a great mood to begin with, but there will be a higher percentage than usual of people panicking that things aren’t working or that they’re not doing things correctly.

Recommendation: Stagger staffing for better coverage as more off-hours work is likely.

Recommendation: Automate as many routine tasks as possible to free up resources for emergency developments.

2. Current systems will be taxed to the max.

When key business systems experience a massive increase in usage, there will inevitably be some hiccups and bottlenecks. MSPs must be vigilant with their performance monitoring to minimize disruptions.

As MSPs see usage spiking they should be proactively increasing capacity and bandwidth in consultation with their clients to prevent outages or spotty service. It’s better to get ahead of things and beef up their service levels than deal with complaints about crashes and sluggish performance.

Recommendation: Monitor usage rates for signs of potential overload.

Recommendation: Check in with key clients to discuss their expected needs.

3. A crash course in cloud computing will be required.

Customers already leveraging cloud computing and storage may need to increase their utilization of these service, but others that have stayed on the sidelines may find themselves forced to jump on the bandwagon in a hurry.

There will be a steep learning curve for these organizations, so you should be prepared to serve as a trusted advisor, trainer and teacher during this transition. Recommending appropriate services and onboarding employees is a key value-added benefit MSPs can offer.

Recommendation: Proactively assess and recommend changes to current cloud services or the need for new ones to manage the increase in remote work.

4. Customers will need help locking things down.

As the economic impact of social distancing and quarantining takes hold, business will be laying off or furloughing employees. Those workers once had access to various internal systems and servers, and credential and access management must be