Take Control of Expirations Management with Automation and Actionable Alerts
As business operations continue to migrate to the cloud, and with organizations embracing the new, hybrid and distributed workforce, managing domains and security expirations is becoming a larger part of an MSPs to-do list. What was once a few yearly calendar reminders when renewals came up is now a complex coordination of multiple domains, dependencies and security protocols for every site and app that you manage for your customers. And with major internet browsers now restricting uncertified sites, the list of SSL certificates to track is going to continue to rise—in fact, the number of SSL certificates on the internet nearly doubled last year to nearly 170 million. That’s a lot of calendar reminders!
Without an easy way to keep track of these dates, your MSP is just one missed expiration away from creating a problem for your customers that can impact their business, and your bottom line. The U.S. government found that out quickly during the 2018 shutdown, when more than 80 TLS certificates used for .gov sites expired, leaving those who visited the sites not only frustrated but vulnerable to security attacks.
When it comes to expirations for TLS/SSL certificates, domain names and other items, the stakes are high—for you and your customers. You can approach MSP expirations in one of two ways: reactively or proactively. One can cause chaos that stalls your growth, and the other can create opportunities that grow your business.
Reactive Management Leaves You Playing Catch-Up
Every MSP has gotten the call: a customer’s website has been down for hours and they are panicked, thinking about lost leads and sales. When you investigate, you discover that the domain has expired—you forgot to set a reminder, and now your customer is left without a working site until you can fix it.
The repercussions of missing a domain expiration can be huge: your customer can lose business, a competitor could purchase the expired domain and redirect it to their own site, or a squatter could buy the domain and demand payment to release it back to your customer. All of these scenarios will have a dramatic effect on your customers business, but even in a best-case scenario where the site is only down a few hours, you may have irreparably damaged the trust relationship you’ve been building with your customer. Their frustration and lack of trust and can lead to them dropping your MSP as a vendor.
The more clients your MSP has, the more common a missed domain or security expiration can be; it’s a lot of dates to keep straight across multiple client systems, and if you’re only ever reacting to expirations as they happen, you’ll always be playing catch-up.
Proactive Management Helps You Standardize, Secure and Scale
To avoid missed expirations, having a plan for tackling your growing list domains and security certificates is crucial. Proactively planning for expirations will save your team time and frustration in the future and let them focus on other customer projects. And by proactive planning, we don’t just mean adding more calendar reminders—real proactive planning needs the right tools: automation and alerts.
Automation helps streamline the entire process of expiration management. Imagine the time your team will save not having to check each separate system for domain and security expirations. With Liongard’s automation and Unified Visibility platform, systems data—including expiration information—is automatically pulled for all your customers’ systems and displayed in your main dashboard. No more digging through data, and no more manual expiration checks.
Alerts mean never setting another calendar reminder, and never missing another expiration. Automated alerts do the tedious work for you, saving time and allowing you to focus on growing customer relationships. With automated and fully customizable Actionable Alerts, Liongard lets you track systems, users and changes proactively. We’ve got over 300 IT alerts for managing critical systems, so you can finally feel confident you’re on top of every detail, every time.
Along with the time and resource savings provided by automation and alerts, you can the systems data provided by Liongard to show your customers how outdated security protocols are endangering their business and use it to upgrade their systems or upsell them to a fully-managed IT security offering.
Want to learn more about how automation and Actionable Alerts can take your MSP from a reactive game of catch-up to proactively leading the field? Schedule a demo today for a 1:1 walk-through of our platform.