Importance of RMM integrations for MSPs

IT environments have become increasingly complex in recent years. This can be attributed to factors such as distributed work environments applying hybrid work models, the increase in the number of devices, and the growing number of systems to be managed. This complexity makes it increasingly difficult to provide a good service to your customers effectively.

As an MSP, one way to address this challenge is to streamline and centralize your management through a robust and secure remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution. Adopting RMM can give you a significant competitive advantage over your competitors as it automates certain management tasks on devices, enabling you to deliver a better customer service, improve the efficiency of your operations and cut costs. Hence taking this step can lead to further growth and success for your business.

Why are tight integrations with RMM important?

MSPs typically build their service offerings by incorporating solutions and technologies from different vendors to adapt to changing market conditions. As a result, these interactions can gradually create silos and add complexity to your architecture and environments. However, if you want to operate effectively, your tools and solutions must be well integrated. Otherwise, you’ll get tied up in manual processes leading to errors that have a negative impact on customer service.

Kaseya’s 2023 MSP Benchmark Report found that 90% of MSPs stated that integration between applications is crucial for their business. 63% of respondents said that integrations enabled them to take on more customers and expand their business, and 54% noted that fewer technicians were needed to manage the workload.

In other words, tight integrations with RMM can boost your business, as well as cut your operational and management costs through:

Better decision-making: with unified dashboards for your entire portfolio, you can monitor the status of all your services from a single panel. This gives you a more accurate and complete picture, which enables you to make better decisions, while gaining agility and achieving a more reliable and easier-to-maintain system.
Improved customer experience: with customized reports that are sent to your customers in an automated way, you improve customer experience by offering them a smoother and more personalized service.
Increased functionality: thanks to integration, the platform can handle new types of data and support new business processes. This means that you can generate reports in your ticketing system following your own processes.
Increased efficiency: by automating the deployment of all solutions with the tools you use to deploy software; you achieve greater efficiency.

Advantages of integrating endpoint security into your RMM

Integrating a security solution at the endpoint enables data synchronization between the two solutions, enabling your team to provide robust protection for your customers' endpoints while increasing the efficiency of your IT operations by delivering the following benefits:

Making deployment agile: Automated agent deployments or remote on-demand deployments increase your efficiency.
Simplifying management: you can initiate on-demand endpoint scans, quickly identify devices with security events that require administrator attention and take responsive actions such as isolating and de-isolating devices.
Monitoring: this enhances visibility and control of critical information such as inventory of unprotected machines or servers, knowledge of any malware, indicators of attack (IoAs) and overall protection status.

At WatchGuard we have developed several integrations with WatchGuard Endpoint Security for leading RMM tools in the market such as N-able N-central, N-able N-sight RMM, ConnectWise Automate and Kaseya VSA to help you automate deployments and simplify security management of multiple client devices for more efficient monitoring and protection. In addition, we have recently developed a series of scripts for NinjaRMM to allow NinjaOne's RMM tool to install our protection on demand or in an automated fashion.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to improve the operational efficiency of your MSP business, be sure to check out the following article on improving operational efficiency: the biggest challenge MSPs face.