One of the main goals of any managed service provider (MSP) is to grow their business to work with a greater number of customers. More customers equals more revenue, and the ability to support a greater amount of employees.
However, business expansion brings its own unique challenges to an MSP. As new customers are added, there’s a need to service them. Current employees might be able to handle one or two additional customers on top of their existing workloads, but any more than that and two things are affected: the service quality provided to customers and the employees’ quality of work life. Many organizations have quickly moved to capture new business, only to find that they are unable to scale correctly to service it.
In addition, the environments that MSPs manage are becoming increasingly complex. The pandemic has expanded most every customer’s network needs to incorporate the company office and remote workers, wherever they may be. The network surface has expanded, with a growing number of endpoints to manage across wired, wireless and WAN. And with each new device or connection, or cloud-based service rolled out, the potential attack surface expands, making security across these complex networks a major factor. Managing all the different technologies in play across several customer engagements at the same time becomes impossible.
Layer on top of this situation the fact that it has been difficult for companies across all technology industries to find the talent they need – meaning some employees have to perform multiple tasks or work above or below their paygrade. It becomes all an MSP can do just to maintain current service levels for customers.
It’s clear that MSPs need assistance to scale without limiting service levels or overworking employees. This is where Juniper Networks’ enhanced Mist MSP Dashboard can help.
About Mist MSP Dashboard
Juniper’s Mist MSP Dashboard was designed with visibility and ease-of-use in mind. The dashboard is a single-pane-of-glass that provides MSPs with visibility into all of the wired, wireless, and WAN devices across all customer organizations. Using the Dashboard, MSPs can provide experience-first networking for users and operators across their entire customer base.
There are four main features of the Dashboard:
- Management Across Multiple Enterprises: The Dashboard provides comprehensive insights into user experience, across multiple organizations and network domains. Details such as active sites, applications, switches, gateways, per-organization device inventories and subscription statuses are easy to view for every organization.
This makes it easy to review statutes uncover potential issues and solve problems faster and more efficiently. In addition, the Dashboard makes it easy to add new organizations or resources, and to organize them by vertical, size, scope or other desired categories.
- Consolidated Inventory and Subscription View: With the Mist MSP Dashboard, MSPs can review inventories and subscriptions either from an overall MSP portfolio view or from the standpoint of each individual customer. Total and in-use access points, switches and gateways can be quickly viewed and adjusted, easing the overall management process.
In addition, current and expired subscriptions, as well as compliance with subscription requirements, are visible on the Dashboard. MSP administrators can quickly assign or revoke subscriptions among its customers through the interface.
- Simplified Network Service Lifecycle Management: The Dashboard provides a simple yet powerful view into which devices are owned by each organization – and just as importantly, which are actually in use. This overall view makes it easier to understand performance in any domain (wireless, wired or WAN), speeding the identification and repair of any issues.
- Centralized Launch Point: With a single easy-to-use interface, MSPs can instantly launch a view into every customer they manage and every aspect of those customer organizations. This creates an easy, go-to location for all information and management needs including visibility into support ticket information.
Marvis Integration
The Mist MSP Dashboard has another advantage – it utilizes Marvis, Juniper’s Virtual Networking Assistant (VNA) AI technology, giving MSPs and their technicians not only a real-time view into their customers’ operations, but the ability to ask questions and receive suggestions for with specific actions to take to remedy them.
Incorporating the power of Juniper’s AI into the Dashboard speeds time-to-repair, but also means that there will never be an MSP technician scrambling to uncover the cause of a problem or quickly trying to learn how to fix it. Marvis helps technicians answer questions, make fixes and most importantly maintain customer service levels.
Why Mist MSP
The Mist MSP Dashboard can provide MSPs with the visibility and insight they need to better understand their own business as well as that of their customers. It improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of an MSP’s operations, while helping maintain (or exceed) the service levels customers have become accustomed to.
Problems are discovered proactively, time-to-repair improved and management across multiple networks, devices and domains becomes easier. With AI-powered technology and the Marvis personal assistant, problems won’t go undiscovered or unsolved.
On top of that, new customers can be added and managed with ease, giving MSPs the ability to scale without wondering if their team will be able to handle the extra work.
To learn more about how Juniper’s Mist MSP Dashboard can help speed the management and maintenance of current customers and establish a strong foundation to scale upwards, read the full solution brief or watch our recent demo.
