An IT director and an MSP walk into a bar… Well, it wasn’t actually a bar, it was a panel session on the second day of the Protect & Streamline Summit for IT Leaders. And they didn’t so much walk in as hit join meeting from their respective home offices. Nevertheless, the discussion between Bryan Schultz and Bob Coppedge, moderated by Datto’s Rob Rae, felt a lot like a candid conversation between friends.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in IT have the unenviable task of hastening the digital transformation in companies, especially during these trying times. It becomes even more onerous, considering that the hardest-hit segment of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are their major customers. According to the Global State of the MSP report, cloud migrations and security are expected to be the top drivers of MSPs growth for MSPs in 2020.

Automating client onboarding can eliminate the tedious task of cloning dashboards, creating group directory structure, setting up reports, and configuring access roles. All of these tasks are prone to human error and to put it mildly, not really fun to do. In this blog, we’ll walk through a PowerShell script to automate some of these tasks.

Organizations have doubled down on remote working, digital transformation, and cloud adoption to cope with the sudden onset of a global pandemic. An S&P Global survey in March 2020 found that 41% of enterprises were already “experiencing increased strain on internal IT resources” due to the coronavirus outbreak.

OpsRamp’s recent survey found that 91% of IT operations teams were looking to increase spending with managed service providers (MSPs). The major reasons for working with MSPs to monitor and manage hybrid infrastructure were technical expertise (63%), security know-how (52%), and cost optimization (50%).

In the effort to streamline operations and enhance cost efficiencies, organizations large and small are turning to managed services providers (MSPs) to outsource key IT activities. In fact, this shift is so broad reaching that the global MSP market is expected to exceed $375 billion by 2025! Indeed, outsourcing to MSPs brings many advantages.

Managed service providers (MSPs) have been around for more than 20 years, and my how things have changed since they grew out of the original application service provider (ASP) model. Until recently, MSPs have focused primarily on remote monitoring, security, network management and other routine IT tasks that CIOs would rather outsource for cheaper than they can run internally.