Lansweeper Provides Data Foundation for Acora’s Managed Services
Based in the UK, Acora’s mission is to unleash the potential of people through amazing IT experiences. Their Experience Led Approach focuses on striking the perfect balance between frictionless user experience and best-in-class security. The foundation of that experience is a wide range of market-leading IT and cybersecurity managed services, Microsoft-centric business software, and cloud solutions to more than 300 ambitious organizations.
In 2022, Acora acquired Secrutiny and, in 2023, Infosec Partners, to provide customers with access to a team of security experts to help deliver prevention, detection, response, and recovery services. As a result of these efforts, the company has been ranked among the top 10 Managed Service Providers globally and number one in the UK, and was awarded Best Companies ‘One to Watch’ status.
Thomas Walker, Head of Technical Operations, is responsible for overseeing Acora’s tooling and technical services that underpin their IT-managed service offerings, which include asset management as well as vulnerability patching, performance and capacity monitoring, and more.
While some of Acora’s customers may have a very small IT department with just one or two employees, others have a large IT team that performs numerous services. Regardless of size, creating an IT asset inventory is essential. “Whatever the situation, when we onboard a new customer, the first thing we need to do is determine how many devices they have deployed across the network,” Walker said. “It’s about knowing what they’ve got and where they’ve got it – that’s the first step. Underpinning that capability is a solid asset management system. For us, that system is Lansweeper”
ACORA holds a Cyber Essentials certification, which Walker says is a big driver in the UK. “Underpinning that capability is a solid asset management system,” he said. “For us, that system is Lansweeper.”
“It’s competitively priced while providing advanced features lacking in other discovery solutions… Other tool vendors claim to provide robust asset management when you run those solutions side-by-side Lansweeper, their limitations are obvious.”
Results
- Time to value < one day before they can start billing customers
- Integration into ServiceNow enables accurate and complete CMDB
- Leveraging Lanweeper’s Reporting & Diagram features
Best-in-Class IT Discovery
Walker evaluated other solutions prior to choosing Lansweeper but found many to be limited and difficult to use. “Other solutions would have been time-consuming to set up at scale across all of our customers,” he said. “They are pretty pricey, as well, and those prices tend to ramp up, year after year.”
While Walker said he can collect a basic set of data from ServiceNow, it lacks some key features. “We wanted warranty and end-of-life information, for example, and with ServiceNow, we would have had to buy another third-party tool and bolt it on,” he said. “That means you’re managing two tools and two sets of information.”
Walker said Lansweeper’s agentless scanning and discovery capabilities set the solution apart from others because it enables him to manage everything – from assets to devices, warranty information, certificates, and more. And because Lansweeper data is fully extensible, Acora can leverage Lansweeper’s asset data as a single source of truth when populating their customers’ ServiceNow CMDBs, for example, or when creating custom reports in Power BI.
Ultimately, it was the option to access Lansweeper in the cloud and the ability to use Lansweeper asset data for a wide variety of use cases that swayed Walker to choose Lansweeper. “Being able to access Lansweeper data using a simple web browser and provide customers detailed reports with a few clicks eliminates time-consuming manual work while reducing the number of questions and tickets we receive,” he said. “Lansweeper makes it easy to collect, share and act on a wealth of information – from servers and workstations to vulnerabilities and patch reports, information from Active Directory, and more – all from a single tool.”
No Hidden Gaps
Today, roughly 20 Acora customers benefit from Lansweeper’s market-leading IT, IoT, and OT discovery and inventory capabilities. The company plans to add an additional 3-5 customers monthly as they roll out their managed services more broadly. And according to Walker, Lansweeper’s level of accuracy and detail provides a competitive advantage. “We can right-price our services based on an accurate count of assets on the network,” he said.
This is important because determining what assets are on the network isn’t always straightforward. “Customers usually underestimate the size of their IT estate,” Walker said. “There are usually shadow IT and home devices that IT doesn’t know about. Since Lansweeper collects data using a variety of proprietary scanning services, there are no more hidden gaps, and we can quickly provide a nice, clean report because we’ve got the information on hand.”
Lansweeper helps Acora reduce costs, as well. “It’s competitively priced while providing advanced features lacking in other discovery solutions,” Walker said. “Other tool vendors claim to provide robust asset management; when you run those solutions side-by-side Lansweeper, their limitations are obvious.”
«The breadth and depth of the data Lansweeper provides will open up new capabilities and service revenue opportunities for ACORA moving forward.”
A Great Partner
As a Lansweeper MSP partner, Acora benefits from a unique pricing model that meets customers’ needs and helps to ensure accurate monthly billing. This is especially true when it comes to providing estimates to new clients.
“Clients’ IT estates can expand and we’re not likely to deploy everything at once,” Walker said, adding that you can’t base the services estimate on the number of employees because most people have multiple devices. “Lansweeper’s MSP program enables us to meet changing customers’ needs and account for new devices as we add them.”
According to Walker, Lansweeper can be deployed in less than a day, often within hours. “From the minute you sit down to get it set up to when you actually have all the data is less than 24 hours,” he said; adding speed to asset discovery is advantageous since they’re charging by the asset. Lansweeper’s quickstart guide internally ensures all deployments are consistent across customers, and a variety of pre-existing and custom reports help to keep Acora’s customers up to date and informed about the state of their IT environments.
“With Lansweeper Reports, we can find and remediate service issues quickly or even proactively,” he said. “No service issues equals happy customers, and the breadth and depth of the data Lansweeper provides will open up new capabilities and service revenue opportunities for ACORA moving forward.”