Reliable Networks Standardizes Application Stack with N‑able Products

The company had been using Connectwise Automate for over 10 years, and while it was functional, the team at Reliable Networks felt that they weren’t innovating and adding new features. “The way we do business has changed from 10 years ago. We needed something that could provide us with monitoring for all our network devices which was one of the big things that N‑central ticked the box for,” Gregory points out.

Following extensive testing and evaluation of a number of different tools and providers including Atera, Ninja One, Kaseya, and Datto RMM, as well as going through reviews from other MSPs, Reliable Networks chose N‑able to standardize their application stack and business offerings.

“The management of multiple different solutions and the licensing, security, and training for our team was quite a complex process. Now we only need to talk to one person about the process as the solutions are all integrated and work together really well,” Gregory comments. “All we need to do is click a button instead of spending hours doing the configuration of those integrations and then troubleshooting and managing them going forward.”

A smooth transition

There was a lot of thought and worry put into the migration process, notes Greg. “It took us about three to four months to get to the point where we were comfortable with who would take us to next level,” he says. “There are obvious risks involved because we were embedding a new RMM into our existing ecosystem. This meant we not only had to retrain all our engineers, but also change how we work with our users—right the way down to explaining the different icon on their taskbar. We needed to have engineers at the point of transition to be able to perform to the same level as they did before.”

Reliable Networks opted for N‑hanced Services to help onboard staff and ease the migration process. “It was great to have someone to guide us through the setup, train us on the products, and help us get to know and understand the products and best practices that would make us successful,” Gregory says. “The training process is much easier as well because everything is in one interface so we’re only training them in one product. That’s saved us probably two to three days of onboarding easily. In the end, the actual migration process was really, really smooth.”

Greater visibility and control with N‑central

The N‑central platform is an essential component through which Reliable Networks delivers most services. Having everything integrated in one interface has simplified the IT team’s day-to-day operations as they no longer need to go to different places to monitor networks, check backups, and create reports. Reliable Networks can now easily view their customers’ entire IT infrastructures from a single, central dashboard. If something needs attention, a glance at the dashboard helps them quickly note the issue, investigate, and remediate the problem.

“Having that unified interface for backups, for network devices, for servers, for workstations, and being able to manage all of that from a single place has been a game changer,” Greg points out. “We estimate that in itself has shaved off at least 10 hours a week of our engineers time.”

Reliable backup with Cove Data Protection®

With Cove Data Protection, the N‑able cloud-first data protection solution, Reliable Networks can now offer appliance-free, direct-to-cloud backup for servers, workstations, and Microsoft 365 data. Including data backups, disaster recovery, and archiving, the solution allows Reliable Networks’ technicians to spend up to 10x less time on administrative jobs, since Cove handles the updates, patching, and maintenance.

“I think that having our backups integrated in one interface is a massive plus as far as how all our engineers and how the business as a whole operates,” Greg comments. “We find that the way Cove handles all of our backups, restores, and reporting is so much clearer and easier to show to our customers than with our previous solution.”

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) with Sentinel

Reliable Networks is now able to offer more robust protection and faster incident response than traditional AV and show how they are keeping clients safe with straightforward attack visualizations and forensics reporting.

“The SentinelOne EDR solution has simplified our approach and allows us to offer more robust protection and faster incident response than with our former traditional AV solution,” Greg notes. “Being able to create and deploy policies, typically in minutes, allows us to manage our customers’ endpoints and leverage EDR integration with N central to gain holistic monitoring and management capabilities.”

“I estimate that response time has decreased by at least 25% on the monitoring side and up to 50% on network endpoint monitoring,” he adds.