Automated data analysis surfaces potential issues at a glance, eliminating time spent scouring data
Prevent critical data from slipping through cracks in your processes. Don’t wait for problems to arise and put out (metaphorical, or worse, literal) fires! :fire:
There’s a lot of detail to unpack, so here’s what you’ll find:
ScalePad Insights uses rule-based data analysis to automatically highlight potential issues in the client environment, eliminating the manual task of exporting and searching through data. Insights is found on the new Strategy dashboard for your organization overall, and on the Clients dashboard for each client.
Insights uses the same asset and lifecycle data that powers the new Digital Maturity Index (DMI™), but for a different purpose. Where the DMI™ provides a single score for benchmarking, Insights automagically provides four panes of summary information that enable you to quickly drill down to surface specific problem assets in just a few clicks.
Insights are binary rules-based: an asset is either compliant with an insight's rule or it is not. The predefined rules have been set to reflect best MSP practices. There’s nothing that requires any tweaking or configuration — it all just works right out of the box!
For your team:
For your clients:
The most critical issues are surfaced and displayed as High-risk insights, and secondary opportunities for hardware modernization, software modernization, and warranty coverage are also shown as panes on the new Strategy dashboard tab.
ScalePad Insights’ four panes are:
We’ll break down the details of these panes below, but it should be noted that not all insights require immediate action. For ease of use, insights are color-coded for quick identification:
High-risk insights are the most important. The focus is on four critical server and security issues that could create significant downtime if not addressed:
Identifies servers over 7 years old and workstation assets over 5 years old.
For servers, 7 years was deemed to be the maximum age where risks begin to increase to an unacceptably high level. Even well-specced workstations typically begin to feel long in the tooth by the time they reach the half-decade mark, so 5 years was set as the point when workstations would likely be degrading in performance and negatively affecting your clients’ users’ experiences.
Machines that are old break more often and decrease the productivity of individual users and the environment overall. Servers present an especially high risk as multiple users depend on them.
Software that is old or missing degrades both the performance of the machine and the user's productivity. There are two key software-related insights here:
The first identifies workstation assets with an unsupported Operating System installed. Like servers, workstations with unsupported OSes will no longer receive security updates, and become a significant risk factor for your clients. ScalePad pulls OS support information directly from the OS developer.
The second finds desktop installations of Microsoft Office that are not cloud-based Microsoft 365. While extended support is available for Office 2016, mainstream support ended over a year ago, on October 13, 2020. In Microsoft’s own words, “Older products may not meet today's more demanding security requirements,” and known and unknown vulnerabilities in desktop Office present an attractive attack vector to malicious actors. Cloud-based Microsoft 365 offers a much broader array of security features.
These are workstations and servers that have ScalePad and OEM warranties that have either expired or are about to expire. These devices present both a risk — servers that are out of warranty are a risk for the client, even if they are relatively newer machines — and an opportunity to mitigate that risk. If a device without warranty coverage fails, it’s your team diagnosing the issue, your team procuring replacement parts, and your team doing the fix. Warranties protect your own productivity as much as they do your clients’.
If you’re already a ScalePad partner, simply sign in and start using the Insights today. If you are not a ScalePad partner yet, sign up today or book a demo with our Partner Development team.
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