The ultimate goal for any service provider is to become a trusted adviser. This is the high water mark in any professional relationship where the client turns to their service provider as the unquestioned authority on specific issues. Why?

Because the customer gets peace of mind. The service provider gets ongoing and usually higher-value work.

Managed services is no different. But how do you become a trusted adviser?

For starters, you need the ability to reliably deliver a broad range of services. These include monitoring, reporting, patch management, secure remote access and others. All of that’s critical. But, truthfully, they’re table stakes. Here’s why.

There’s a ton of RMM tools and services available. Some of them are good. But the road to trusted adviser status and providing peace of mind is not about touting the merits of bits and pieces of technology. It’s about the end-customer relationship and building systems integrity effectively.

When you can show you have systems integrity, you build trust in your ability to provision managed services efficiently.

What do I mean by ‘systems integrity’? It means all services are provisioned through one seamless solution that you—the MSP—own, lock stock and barrel.

In contrast, many MSPs resort to so-called ‘RMM solutions’ that are little more than a series of cobbled-together tools. Peel the onion a bit and you discover critical services like NOC are outsourced. Ouch. This is a recipe for service delivery issues. It is not the path to a trusted adviser relationship!

Think about systems integrity as a complete shield for your customer. If you’re missing something or are dependent on outsourced relationships, your shield lacks system integrity and you’re vulnerable. If you can’t show integrity, it’s is going to be more difficult to become a trusted adviser and benefit from that flow of recurring revenue.

The key to systems integrity is an integrated solution with tools and services that are purpose-built to work together. Based on our discussions with global Partners, systems integrity must include content filtering, secure email, secure remote access and alerting, automation, antivirus, patch management, online backup and mobile device management.

When these services are part of an integrated umbrella solution with the flexibility to deliver individual point solutions to meet specific customer needs, you have systems integrity. You have the critical foundation for becoming a trusted adviser.