In this episode, Jake discusses the robust functionalities of Inforcer, a software platform designed by and for MSPs to manage Microsoft policies across customer tenants. He elaborates on the platform’s role in centralising policy management, enabling time savings, reducing risk, and creating new revenue streams for MSPs. Jake explains the challenges MSPs face without such a tool, the competitive landscape, and how Inforcer complements rather than competes with tools like Octiga and CIPP. He addresses the need for MSPs to educate their clients about the evolving security landscape and how Inforcer aids in policy enforcement and compliance. The conversation also touches on the importance of continuous improvement, client education, and setting appropriate expectations in a managed service environment.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:24 What is Inforcer?
01:21 Market Position and Competitors
02:56 Business Case for Inforcer
05:50 Revenue Streams for MSPs
09:08 Pre-Sales Auditing Tool
11:20 Challenges and Solutions
15:35 Microsoft’s Role and Future
18:04 MSP Market and Security
21:16 Client Expectations and Education
28:19 Conclusion and Contact Information
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Jake Webber-Cadby on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-webber-cadby-92477a111
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Dan: Jake, great to have you with us after a couple of full starts, but you’re here with us today. So, so great to,great to get stuck into what for some will actually be an entirely new topic or subject. And,others of course will always be ahead of the curve and, well, On the curve and,but Adam and I, maybe we’re a little bit behind sometimes.
Dan: So, perhaps you could just kick us off with like, what exactly is it that Inforcer does?
Jake: Yeah, absolutely. And firstly, gents, thanks for having me and bearing with startup life is has got my calendar a little bit hectic at the moment. so do appreciate it. But yeah, ultimately, Inforcer is a software platform built for MSPs by MSPs. And we are laser focused on helping MSPs manage Microsoft policies across all of their customer tenants.
Jake: There’s been, and there still is, an innate challenge in doing this. where MSPs have to manually configure every single one of their customers Microsoft tenants one by one. So, C Inforcer is a platform that sits on top of all of those tenants and provides a centralized place for that. manage service provider to keep those tenants up to a certain security standard.
Dan: Okay, super. And.pro, pro probably the place I’m going with, to, to sort of work out where you sit in the market. and in fact, we’ve had,Andrew from MSP Z Tools on the podcast, before,we know of like Octiga for example. And, and actually,just last week we recorded another episode, on CIPP.
Dan: so, how does that position with Inforcer.
Jake: Yeah, I think that the first thing I always ask msps when they ask me that is I kind of say People like octega and cipp. They’re not competitors of ours. We work hand in hand together So there’s actually a lot of Inforcer clients who will use tools like CIPP to help with things like user provisioning within Microsoft or helping apply certain permissions to different users within GDAP, which has been a big push in the MSP space as well.
Jake: Whereas Inforcer is laser focused just on the policy level at the moment. on the tenants, those come, those companies definitely do a bit of policy support as well. So from within CIPP, for an example, as an example, you can deploy certain policy types, but really at Inforcer, we are covering pretty much every policy that an MSP would use.
Jake: So it’s really that centralized place for the policy management. And then people would use things like CIPP to help with some of the administrative tasks. Same applies for Octiga as well.
Dan: Okay. And, from a business case perspective, so like for example on the CIPP,episode, like we were really quick to establish that this is a time saver and therefore the business case well, a very low slash cost product. Anyway, and,and so, you know, very easy to get to a business case.
Dan: So, It feels to me like the centralized policy management topic is actually probably something that MSPs. should be doing or their clients think they should or are already doing it, but they’re not. is this, is this a shoring up of perception or is this like something new that the MSP can go to the client and say, actually, this new thing is now with us and here’s how we’re gonna, here’s how we’re gonna solve that problem for you.
Jake: Yeah, I think,we align in, in some respects with that, with the CIP piece around time saves. There is a really clear and obvious business case around time savings. we’ve, we actually summarize it by the three R’s is what we call it internally. So, resource risk reduction. and revenue streams.
Jake: So that is where Inforcer can really help a managed service provider depending on where they’re at in their Microsoft journey. So for us, the business case closely aligns to the maturity of the MSP and how much of the Microsoft technology they’re consuming today and how many of those policies are they configuring one by one for their customers.
Jake: So highly mature MSPs, people like Infinity Group, who we work with, because they had a whole service wraparound on top of Microsoft, they were spending hours in senior consultant resource, manually doing this work. So the business case for them was very clear. A MSP who’s really early on the Microsoft journey.
Jake: and they’ve sold a lot of third party products to deliver the security services. for them, we’re going to speak to them about future proofing that business and adding additional revenue streams through more value ads on top of Microsoft technology. and then in terms of risk reduction, as you mentioned, Daniel, a lot of MSPs just haven’t got the time to put the right policies in place and then more importantly, track those policies against the certain security level to ensure that their customers aren’t deviating away from that.
Jake: So Inforcer gives them Daily visibility into what is changing across all of their customers. So if an engineer is tweaking something, when a call comes into the help desk, that MSP is getting notified of that change. so that risk reduction is a key piece as well, because no users are going to get left out of a MFA policy, as an example.
Adam: and Jake, you mentioned the revenue stream. So my eyes lit up on that one. So the first two make complete sense. I get that. just talk a little bit about how MSPs then can exploit this and make it a revenue stream.
Jake: Yeah, so if you think about what a lot of MSPs have done over the past couple of years, there’s a lot of them have tried to take their customers through that journey of the basic Microsoft licensing up to a business premium Microsoft license, which is the license that actually includes a lot of the great technology, such as endpoint security, email security, all of those components.
Jake: Now, MSPs have shied away from leveraging all of those elements of the license and what they’ve ended up doing is just selling a license and applying a bit of margin because Inforcer allows them to effectively deliver more services. They can now go to their customers and be like, okay, not only are we taking you up to business premium because it includes X, Y, and Z, we can also unlock the security components of it.
Jake: So our messaging is How can we help you as an MSP unlock business premium for your customers? So we’ve got customers who will provide things like Microsoft secure score as a service. Now, secure score is a metric that Microsoft are marketing to the whole world. And it’s really going to be there. It’s going to be that silver bullet because that metric is closely aligned to basically how much Microsoft technology do you consume? The higher your secure score, the more of that technology you’re consuming. So we’ve got MSPs who are exploiting that and delivering revenue streams on top of that, and then using Inforcer to just help them manage those services in the background.
Adam: So, if I understand it correctly, to some extent, this is about enabling, The. the efficiency of the margin on those other apps upsells effectively. your resources aren’t gonna be eaten away by managing a whole, you know, ecosystem of complex Microsoft products.we can do that with this solution and, you know, keep, keep those margins secure effectively.
Jake: That’s exactly it. Yep. That’s it. And, you know, if you look at the MSP space at the moment, it can be really hard to differentiate yourself. So really going, and rather than just speaking about a Microsoft license and applying small bits of margin, going to them and talking about how they can take them on a, Security journey through leveraging things like Microsoft secure score is really powerful because think about the credibility and name like Microsoft has when you’re delivering services to a small business, rather than all these third party MSP tools that really the end users don’t care about.
Jake: They’ve never heard about them.
Adam: and we used to, I think we used to use Microsoft Secure Score back in the day as a, you know, an opportunity creator or try and try and win some new business off the back of it. can your tool help us in that process at all?
Jake: yeah, definitely. So we’ve. Yeah, so we’ve got a pre sales auditing tool available from within Inforcer where an MSP can essentially do an audit of the prospective client’s Microsoft tenant. And we’re going to flag certain things that fall out of compliance with things like CIS recommendations. So it will show that end client or prospective client, their secure score.
Jake: How many users have. Not got MFA enabled. how many global admins have they got so that the MSP can start highlighting some of the gaps in their security posture, and then talk about the proactive services that they would deliver that perhaps the incumbent isn’t delivering at the moment.
Adam: Yeah, good. Makes sense.
Dan: And,for that tool,
Dan: for that tool, what would, what would the, client need to provide in terms of permissions for that tool?
Jake: So for prospective clients, they would need to be pretty far down the journey because the MSP would need to access, they would need the global administrator access to be able to run that report because it obviously needs to do a scan of that Microsoft tenant. now with that being said. If the MSP is clever about it, they can offer it as a free assessment or risk assessment or audit.
Jake: Whereas a lot of other MSPs are charging that as a service. So when you position it like that, of course, a prospective client’s not going to mind giving you know, the access to see where they’re at in their journey now for all paid tenants within Inforcer. So for all of your existing clients, you can just run that report periodically and then you can sit down.
Jake: The account management team can show that. Existing client. Here’s where you’re at three months ago. In the last three months, we’ve deployed X, Y, and Z policies. We’ve increased your secure score from 50 to 75 percent and you’ve shown that continual value to your existing client as well as using the prospecting element.
Jake: As well.
Dan: two, two, two questions then that follow. the first is, interesting to hear the viewpoint on, Not charging for that initial discovery. and,in some ways I would see perhaps arranging,administrator access that the harder challenge than, then perhaps releasing some money,and demonstrate the value of it.
Dan: for example, where we don’t have the details, our MSP looks after that. We don’t have a global, you know, how do we go about that? so any tips there would be appreciated. And,and then in terms of the. I really like the idea of providing that, that journey progress, you were here and now you’re there, and almost becomes the gamification.
Dan: So, you know, next quarter, we’re going to, we’re going to do another five points or whatever. but, talk us through what’s perhaps involved in making that progress in deploying these policies and how. How much, knowledge and experience the MSP needs of what they’re deploying, like, is there like a playbook that you provide along with the tool to make it happen?
Dan: or do we need to have some really clever Microsoft, people, Still involved in it.
Jake: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I suppose. So, so back to your, first point around the prospective auditing and the, the rights in it to actually do that. The reality is we are a tool for an MSP to look after existing clients. So it is more of a nice to have within the platform.
Jake: So there’s no real. You know, I don’t have a silver bullet answer in terms of how would they get hold of that globe, that GA access. The reality is that’s the only way in which the report could be run. but yeah, I guess if you do position it as a paid service and not in addition to the report, you deliver some other things in that pre sales standpoint.
Jake: And it’s a bit later on in the sales journey. maybe that the trust has been developed a little bit more. and then. To your second point, that is, I would really say a unique differentiator in the market is the expertise we bring above and beyond the technology and the laser focus we have on customer experience.
Jake: So just tomorrow we are running a webinar for all of our existing customers to speak to our 365 consultant who has 10 plus years of experience in just working with Microsoft and they can come on and they can increase their own internal knowledge. Absolutely. To get the most out of Inforcer, there needs to be a certain level of Microsoft expertise internally.
Jake: You can’t, which, let’s be honest, the majority of MSPs do have an understanding of Microsoft, so we don’t require them to be MVPs or absolute experts in the space, because we can help them get to a certain level as well, just through the exposure we give them. And then on the ongoing security journey, we actually even provide a policy library, which we’re constantly building in where a MSP who let’s say is a bit more early on in their journey, they can use the policies that we suggest and they can build that into their own baseline.
Jake: So even if it’s not really well defined what they have in place today. They can use us and our community to bulk up their offering so they can deliver more proactive services and a better level of security to their customers.
Adam: I just wanted to circle back, to the point you made a couple of minutes ago, Dan, about the struggle with getting the administrative access on the network. and I’m just coming back to this because I’d be interested in our audience’s feedback or thoughts. On this and what type of approaches they have in general.
Adam: Cause I think it is an issue. and one of the things we did is we said, Oh, well, you don’t have administrative access to your own network. Only your it firm have this. Well, that’s red flag. Number one, you know, this is your network. You own it. They don’t own it. Surely it’s like giving your front door key to your neighbour and not having one yourself.
Adam: You know, is this really what you want or your locksmith, you know? So, so that was the approach we took on that. and that was kind of the red flag number one approach. So, which I think kind of worked, but certainly interested to knowof other approaches out there on that one. Jake, just a question, a wider question. it’s probably a really obvious answer, but why wouldn’t Microsoft look to build this themselves?
Jake: I think the
Adam: Or maybe they will,
Dan: Yeah. Don’t tell them
Jake: so no, Microsoft do have, Lighthouse, which, is essentially their It’s their version of a multi tenanted management platform, within their ecosystem. The reality is it’s been around for years and it’s been incredibly slow to develop and give MSPs truly what they need. I think, you know, if you look at the space, And it’s been the age old story, Microsoft are leaning on people with dedicated expertise in the MSP space to help them out a little bit rather than putting that as a real huge focus area within their business.
Jake: you know, you look at the work they’ve done with people like ConnectWise, where they, ConnectWise now have an entire security wraparound service on top of Microsoft technology. with their SOC team and Microsoft really worked very closely with them to, to drive that forwards. so I think, you know, there’s always a place for companies in the MSP space who really understand the innate challenges that come within those companies.
Jake: You know, if you look at the founders of our business, Rich Thompson owned an MSP and sold it. Rory McInerney, who’s our technical director, he really built and thought about the foundations of Inforcer, from within the MSP space as well to solve some of his own challenges. and the reality is Microsoft are trying to focus on everyone.
Jake: So it’s again, it’s that same story of just that focus purely on MSPs. And as they evolve with their services, we’ll continue to evolve and give them what they need.
Dan: I always liken it to,a whale swimming along and there’s a lot of smaller fish, sort of,going along with the whale. And,over, over the years, it’s always been the case that, that there’s an opportunity. it, it won’t be handed to you on a plate and maybe it’s a little bit awkward to,to find that opportunity.
Dan: But, but yeah, Microsoft can’t possibly.reach all the places that every MSP can. and, and so, yeah, it’s great to hear that,that there are, products like Inforcer that are supporting and enabling the next generation of MSP. so I think generally the market accepts that, security is where we’re, is where we’re going.
Dan: it’s been support plus security. I think, I think it was Dan Scott that I first heard, say this quote,it used to sell support with security and now you’re going to be selling security with some support maybe. And,and so, so yeah, and this sounds really interesting because I know a lot of the MSPs I talk to, they, they are advocates of the business premium, offer, and,but equally don’t have enough experience of deploying it.
Dan: You know, maybe they have one or two really good clients, but as most MSPs do tend to normally have. sort of reliance on a few clients that where they really get to get in deep with the technology and then others that perhaps don’t have the budget or the inclination that mean they don’t really get the depth of knowledge in deployment so great to hear that there’s that sort of support environment as well as the tool to to help help sort of grapple this this next generation of MSP.
Jake: yeah, absolutely. And I think that The reality is right. If you look at what tools like ours are doing, when we get up to a certain size, Microsoft will probably be very thankful because we’re actually helping one of their core initiatives as a business is driving people up through the licensing and Inforcer is an aggregator and an enabler to help an MSP sell more of the value to their customers as to why they should take that step up in licensing rather than just saying, You know, here’s business premium.
Jake: It’s got more functionality. It’s going to cost you X amount per user more. If you can go and use Inforcer to say, well, actually through going to business premium, we’re going to keep you more secure. We’re going to have daily insights into anything that’s changing. We’re going to apply best policy practice on the latest recommendations from Microsoft and NIST 2 frameworks that are dotting around the place in certain geographies.
Jake: so. it gives the MSP much more compelling reasons to take their customers on that journey and ultimately reduce risk because they’re putting more security protocol on each of their customer tenants.
Adam: and when you’re approaching the MSP market on this, are you approaching, well, who’s your champion here? is it the sales director or is it the tech director? And,
Jake: A tech director. Yeah. Yeah. tech director, managing directors or CEOs in smaller MSP MSPs because they’re closer to the problem that, you know, that their team is spending time on it. and then in some of the real large. You know, more mature MSPs, they’ll have dedicated cloud consultants, they’ll have security teams.
Jake: And again, we can kind of piece into all of those. I spoke to an MSP yesterday, 200 plus employees, they have a project team, a SOC team, a. Managed services team and then a compliance team and Inforcer can help all four of those teams. So now it’s about going and speaking to each of those and really understanding the challenges and the time saves we can give each of those departments.
Dan: One thing I mentioned earlier,and it’s just, I can’t quite get it out of my head and that’s this, topic that perhaps the MSP’s client already assumes that this is happening, like we manage your 365, we look after your 365 tenant, well, I assume you do everything then, right? and of course the client won’t necessarily have the knowledge to.
Dan: Challenge the MSP to say, Well, when you say manage our tenant, what exactly are you doing? so is there a playbook to help the MSP educate their client. and again, from a new business perspective, even more so like, here’s some questions to ask your MSP. How do you apply best practice, policies to our tenants?
Dan: and how do you know if,if a user is taken out of MFA, for example,like to create that tension in the relationship and perhaps to bring the doubt in that say, Oh, well, actually, yeah, if they’re not doing that for us, what else aren’t they doing? any thoughts around that?
Jake: Yeah. So, so we work closely with all of our existing customers on helping them drive new business. so ultimately we. Enable them to ask exactly like you said certain questions and use things like the tenant audit report to educate that end client on the innate challenge that their current MSP might have with managing their Microsoft tenant. And that leads to gaps in X, Y, and Z area, which is why we as the new prospective MSP leverage tools to help us manage that in a more efficient way to ensure that there aren’t any gaps for existing customers. It’s always the same challenge, right? it’s like MSPs who have to go back and sell the latest endpoint security solution when they’ve had the antivirus in place for five years.
Jake: it’s a really difficult conversation and I’m not gonna, I’m not going to be one of those people that’s going to say anything otherwise, because there’s plenty of people that kind of talk as if it’s such an easy task, but it’s definitely not. So, for those ones, it’s really about to educate the existing client base.
Jake: I think the ones who are doing it well are aligning two frameworks. So they are talking about how we can now deliver a proactive service based on the CIS benchmarks and what they suggest, which is basically a governing body that touches loads of different components of other things like cyber essentials and HIPAA compliance in the US.
Jake: So those MSPs having a lot of success where they’re taking their customers through a never ending journey of cyber security. through things like compliance or through things like, tenant hardening as a service, secure score as a service. Those are the ones that are having a lot of success.
Jake: And if their end customers are pushing back on, well, aren’t you doing this already? The kind of position back is absolutely. We’re doing as much as we can to secure your Microsoft tenant. The challenge we have is it is a beast, and we are now looking at solutions to better secure your tenant as the landscape is changing.
Jake: And these are the things that we can now offer you on top of the services we did for you before. but yeah, not an easy one at all.
Dan: No. and of course The Microsoft 365 that you initially subscribed to a decade ago is very different to the one that We now have and in fact, it’s not even called that It was called you bought office 365 and now it’s Microsoft 365 So not only the name has changed but lots of bits in the background and yes different marketplace and i’m, sorry Mr.
Dan: And mrs. client, but In a year’s time, I’m probably going to come back to you and say there’s now something else that we’ve got to, that we’ve got to talk about. but the good news is, the problem we had last year is now much more commoditized and efficient. And,and so, you know, there, there will always be, there will be this constant, one of the things I’ve said.
Dan: to be in this industry is, we constantly invent new problems to solve. so, you know, there, there is, there is endless opportunity, but, there’s endless risks. So, you know, you have to, you have to accept that and,be proactive and setting the right level of expectation with your client.
Dan: at minimum though, Having that conversation and saying there is this new level of tenant management, tenant hardening, secure score as a service, et cetera. There is this new level that we need to take you to. However,if you don’t want to go on that journey, then, then, this is, we’re now setting this as an exclusion.
Dan: So we cannot be under any illusion that we are doing these things for you. We’re saying that we’re not, and we advise that we do. and this is the additional price for doing that.
Adam: and that’s document that exclusion is documented on their roadmap planning. it’s interesting, isn’t it? Cause it’s just like the war in Ukraine. You know, how sort of technology’s going crazy, on that battlefield. and I only just read the other day about the fact that now they’ve got these.
Adam: Tiny little drones, which costs like 300 quid each or something like that. And they strapped some explosive to it and it can take a helicopter down. So, so now you’ve got the cost, crazy, a crazy, different commercials going on where instead of spending 30 million or 3 million or something on a huge drone, they’ve got 300 quid ones and they can take a helicopter down.
Adam: So they’re not quite up there ready for jets. but apparently, yeah, with all this remote control technology, they can just go smash themselves into a helicopter and bring it down. So, and that’s happening, right now in, in Ukraine. And, you know, we’re going to, it, all these things accelerate the speed, don’t they, of innovation.
Adam: and that’s, what’s happening in it with security all the time. And I think there’s just some really good metaphors there for you can use with your clients about the rate of change, but, And where’d you want to be? You know, do you want to be left behind or do you want to be still in business in three years?
Jake: Yeah, I think it’s, you know, I think that’s storytelling is really powerful. and I think, you know, for any MSP that is driving new businesses, setting those expectations from day one, like you said, Daniel, it’s don’t be annoyed when I keep coming back to you with new suggestions, because guess what? The threat actors every day are looking at new ways to exploit.
Adam: and actually that’s what you’re paying us for as well. You’re paying us for, you’re paying us to come back to you to say you need to spend more money.
Jake: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. it’s a managed service and if that managed service has to be tweaked and move and be agile to, to deal with the landscape, then so be it. I think another, you know, another story MSPs can say is if we were sat here five, six years ago, what would we have said about things like electric cars?
Jake: I saw an Instagram video of someone, yesterday in a self driving car in, sat in the back in, in LA.you know, we would have never thought that. So it’s a, it’s the same thing. But yeah, storytelling is really powerful.
Dan: really good. And,we’ve covered a huge amount of ground and I really appreciate your time. The quick fire round, I thought you dealt with very well. we’d normally at this point in an episode, hand over for a shameless plug, but,again, I think there’s lots of great,great points that you’ve made about Inforcer and what you’re doing.
Dan: if anyone wants to carry on the conversation, how best do they get hold of you?
Jake: Yeah, absolutely. So reach out to me on LinkedIn, Jake Webber-Cadby. Or can, you know, if people are interested in seeing the platform, you can book in directly on our website. Inforcer. com. So, yeah, that’s nice and simple. And another great thing is we’re doing some event planning this morning. I think we’ve got about 17 events that we’re going to be attending between now and the end of the year.
Jake: So, I’m sure people can meet us in person at places like it nation in Orlando. We’re at Dato con in Miami. We’re going to be at all the Huntress roadshows across the country. we’re going to be at PAX 8 in Berlin. So lots of places that people can get to know us in person and really see what we’re about.
Dan: Super. Well, I’m sure we’ll meet you out, out and about on our travels as we’re about to get into, event season yet again. and, yeah, I really appreciate your time and, thanks so much for joining us.
Adam: Yes. Thanks,
Jake: Thanks so much guys. Take care.