Start with full MSP model
“Freez.it performs a standard checklist for customers for system administration every year. Someone always visited the customer for backup checks, encryption keys and the like. A list with about 30 points. At the moment, we have now automated 25 of these 30 points. This saves Freez.it 1 FTE per year in work through the use of NinjaOne.”
– Jan Scholte, R&D Manager at Freeze.it
Jan talks about the period before Freez.it worked with Ninja, “We were actually transitioning from break/fix to full MSP model. This was the vision of the management at the time.” This is one of the most common reasons MSPs decide to deploy NinjaOne. Jan continues, “We were looking for a management system that suited us and could help us with this. At the time, we had an earlier system from N-Able, GFI. But one customer had it and the other didn’t. In the end, we wanted to put together a standard package to really unburden the customer and then we finally ended up with NinjaOne with some help from Google and Reddit. One of the things that appealed to us at the time was the party itself. We had very good contact with the team at Ninja when we started in the spring of 2017. As a result, we immediately had a good click with the company.”
After an initial introduction, the technical side was also examined by Freez.it. Jan explains, “We just found the interface effective and it appealed to us at the time that Ninja’s vision was not to buy up companies, but to develop things ourselves. The roadmap also looked good and to us it came across very much as a very innovative company. That’s how we are set up. We want to move forward, come up with new things and keep up with the times, that was a match between Ninja and Freez.it”
For Ninja
Implementing an RMM like Ninja gives MSPs and IT teams a selection of options. Jan explains what a situation looked like before the implementation. “Without the checks that we now have running in NinjaOne, you have greatly reduced visibility of your work, for example. For example, a customer recently did not have a Windows firewall actively running on a few servers. There had been no automatic checks for Ninja to fix that immediately. There was no central system to check everything and you had to go everywhere by hand. If there was an exploit, like the ‘print nightmare’ we saw recently, we would have had to go through every server.”
Fixing an exploit with about 450 servers is quite a task within the break/fix model or working without RMM. “We should have changed the rights everywhere,” says Jan, “run a script and move on to the next one. At the time, we didn’t have the solution to write a script in an hour that we now use with the Ninja automation engine that goes through all 450 servers at once. So we would have been busy with four or five people for more than a full day.”
Efficiency and proactive action
NinjaOne helps MSPs and IT teams work more efficiently and shift from reactive to proactive action. Doing more with less, but also improving the quality of work. Jan says: “The numbers we can now handle with a single support agent are now much larger than before Ninja. We do a lot of checks with conditions that we get from Ninja. And because Ninja has the ability to add its own scripts, we monitor everything that is necessary for us with Ninja and the scripting engine.”
Proactive action starts with automation and monitoring. This is widely used in Freez.it. Jan mentions a number of examples they use: “For example, we monitor disk space, create accounts, check whether accounts are blocked and passwords that are about to expire. What we are really happy with is our ransomware detection. If a certain extension is triggered on a server, Ninja blocks it. And then we were also inspired by Kelvin Tegelaar of Lime Networks. He had written a powershell code for ransomware alerts that we adapted to our situation and ran Ninja. He has helped us many times.”
Ransomware detection
Jan talks about the importance of checks for ransomware at Freez.it, “If that message is not detected, the ransomware will start encrypting files. And then you’ll have to start restoring from backups. That is a costly task. The status of Freez.it’s backup system is also monitored via Ninja. Jan says, “And that saves quite a lot of time. There we can immediately see on our dashboard whether there is something wrong with a backup. Depending on the customer, snapshots are taken up to every 5 minutes. But often you also see that a ‘critical AD group change’ is carried out by the ransomware that tries to obtain admin rights or a local admin is created. That is also an option. With NinjaOne, we also automatically check for that every five minutes.”
API, Antivirus & Documentation
For Managed Services Providers, it’s an advantage to have multiple tools needed in managing customers in one place. For example, in addition to Data Protection and RMM in Ninja, there is also a possibility to manage Antivirus from the Ninja client. Jan explains, “We now also have our antivirus arranged with Bitdefender via the Ninja console. That also saves us a lot of time. Proactive monitoring helps us to stay ahead of certain things. It’s not always very big, spectacular, complex things that save you the most time. With Ninja we can set up simple checks that prevent us from having to manually take over the computers or manually fix things afterwards and that’s where the time savings lie. NinjaOne detects something and you can, for example, run a script before it becomes a problem, or Ninja can tackle it immediately by auto-remediation. “
Jan continues, “Automatic documentation is also a good example. The status of an AD server, for example, or network information, all of this is automatically written to Freez.it. And we can now save all of this in the Ninja Documentation. That just makes it very pleasant to work.”
“… not only can we do more with fewer people with Ninja, but we can also act much faster and more adequately and proactively. To put it simply, Ninja is actually the most powerful tool we have in our arsenal here.”
IT systems are becoming increasingly important
Jan indicates that he has seen changes in the market for IT service providers in the past five years. “Without Ninja, we wouldn’t have been able to serve the same number of customers as we have now with the same size of the team. And it’s not just about the number of customers, but IT systems are increasingly crucial for businesses. That it keeps running. Jan gives as an example, “If a problem arises and the entire production line is down, the impact is immediately enormous due to an ever-increasing degree of automation. This used to be less of an issue than it is today. Not only can we do more with fewer people with Ninja, but we can also act much faster and more appropriately and proactively. To put it simply, Ninja is actually the most powerful tool we have in our arsenal here.”
ISO-certificering en cybersecurity
Voor een potentiële klant voor een Managed Service Provider is in de huidige tijd cybersecurity een kritiek punt. Jan vertelt hoe Freez.it zijn leveranciers beoordeeld op veiligheid. “Ik heb heel veel kritische vragen gesteld aan Ninja. Ik ben ook coördinator informatiebeveiliging bij Freez.it en wij hebben onze ISO 27001, ISO 9001 certificering en NEN 7510 is daar recent nog bijgekomen. En daar komen vragen bij naar voren waarbij leveranciers beoordeeld moeten worden. Daarbij hebben we Ninja streng moeten beoordelen om te zien of de manier waarop gewerkt wordt, waar de data staat, hoe er beveiligd wordt, is het bedrijf SOC 2 compliance enzovoort. Hier kregen we hele nette antwoorden op terug en Ninja voldoet aan deze standaarden. Maar Ninja heeft daarnaast ook een eigen RED-team en dat is voor ons ook een dikke plus. Dat zij zelf hun eigen systemen laten pen-testen, maar ook onafhankelijke partijen hiervoor inschakelen om te zorgen dat het veilig is.
Daarnaast geeft Jan aan dat het belangrijk is bij de selectie voor een leverancier om te kijken naar hoe het bedrijf zich ontwikkeld heeft en welke plannen bestaan op het gebied van verdere ontwikkeling. Jan zegt hierover, “Iets dat mijn gevoel bevestigd dat we goed zitten bij Ninja zijn de zaken die je op de roadmap ziet verschijnen. Recent bijvoorbeeld IP-restrictie voor logins en andere zaken die helpen om het goed te beveiligen.”
Een FTE per jaar besparen met NinjaOne
Hoeveel tijd een goede RMM kan helpen besparen is soms lastig in te schatten vooraf. Jan geeft daarom hier een goed tastbaar voorbeeld vanuit de situatie van Freez.it. “Freez.it voert voor systeembeheer jaarlijks een standaardchecklist uit voor klanten. Er ging altijd iemand bij de klant langs voor bijvoorbeeld back-up checks, encryptiekeys en zulke zaken. Een lijstje met ongeveer 30 punten. Op dit moment hebben we nu 25 van deze 30 punten geautomatiseerd. Dit scheelt voor Freez.it 1 FTE per jaar aan werk door de inzet van NinjaOne.”
De toekomst voor Freez.it en NinjaOne
Het gaat altijd door, we hebben op dit moment geen break/fix klanten meer, maar de stack zal nog uitgebreid worden en contracten worden geüpdatet. Ook binnen Ninja blijven we bezig met nieuwe punten implementeren en zullen we onze security blijven versterken.
Het contact is super en het is gewoon heel makkelijk schakelen als er wat is met de collega’s bij Ninja. Jan over zijn ervaring met de support afdeling van NinjaOne, “Ik heb zelf eens gehad dat er echt iets aan de hand was. Dan ben je blij als je binnen 20 minuten wordt teruggebeld en het probleem wordt opgepakt. Bij Ninja tel je als bedrijf gewoon mee. Er zijn ook wel andere RMM’s die ik heb getest in de afgelopen jaren, maar voor mij wordt het niet iets anders, Ninja is simpel gezegd ‘goed spul’.
