A managed service provider platform is the set of software that an outside IT firm uses to act as the IT department of many small companies at once. Such a firm is called a managed service provider, or MSP. The platform watches every client's machines, holds the clients' tickets, bills each client, and supplies the security products that the MSP resells.
Why do MSPs exist? A company with 20 or 200 staff needs working laptops, email, backups and security, just as a large company does. But it cannot hire a full IT team. So it pays an MSP a fixed monthly fee, often per laptop or per user. The MSP's technicians then do the IT work, every day. This arrangement is a managed service.
Consider a chartered accountancy firm in Vadodara with 35 staff. It pays an MSP in Ahmedabad a monthly fee for each laptop. The MSP has 14 technicians, and it looks after 80 such clients, with about 2,500 laptops and servers in all. On each client machine, the MSP installs a small program, an endpoint agent, which reports to the MSP and carries out its instructions. One afternoon in July, during the busy tax-filing season, the endpoint detection and response (EDR) software on a partner's laptop blocks a harmful file. The alert appears on the MSP's screen in Ahmedabad. A technician cuts the laptop off from the network, removes the file, and restores two damaged folders from the night's backup. The partner is working again within an hour.
The platform has three main parts.
The first is remote monitoring and management (RMM). It watches every client machine from one screen. It also installs software fixes through patch management and runs scripts that fix common problems without a visit. When a technician needs to work on a machine directly, remote desktop software lets the technician control it from Ahmedabad.
The second is professional services automation (PSA). This runs the MSP's own business: each client's contract, the tickets, the technicians' time sheets and the monthly bills.
The third is the security products that the MSP resells to its clients, such as EDR software and backup. The MSP buys the licences from the security company each month and adds them to the client's bill. If an attack locks a client's files, the backup is used for ransomware recovery.
One risk comes with this model. The MSP's tools can reach every client's machines. So an attacker who breaks into an MSP's tools can reach all its clients at once. This has happened: in 2021, attackers used a flaw in one RMM product to send ransomware to the clients of many MSPs. MSPs therefore protect their own logins with multi-factor authentication, and they limit what each technician may do.
An MSP is different from a large company's own IT team, which uses unified endpoint management (UEM) for its own devices. An MSP platform is built to keep many separate clients apart, each with its own machines, tickets and bill.