Mischa Rohleder co-founded DATAPROTECT AG, a cybersecurity company that helps businesses become more secure and efficient and maximize their IT, especially Microsoft 365.
As a consultant, Mischa had seen many large organizations needing help with their Microsoft tenants. After handling complex issues for many years, he decided to start DATAPROTECT.
DATAPROTECT is an ambitious cybersecurity IT provider with plans to scale its clients efficiently in the future. But growing requires technical scalability, and Mischa was concerned about how a slow client onboarding process could bottleneck his ambitions.
“From the beginning, I knew our business would rise or fall based on our ability to scale. Spending weeks manually onboarding and configuring every new client was a serious concern. So, we decided from day 1 that we need to be able to efficiently reuse our knowledge.”
During his time as a consultant, Mischa utilized PowerShell to perform health checks for clients based on the CIS benchmarks, assessing their Microsoft 365 configurations. He also developed scripts to manage the lifecycle of guest users and to initiate decommissioning processes for inactive or orphaned users.
However, he began to worry about the maintenance burden of these scripts.
“My clients always want to get visibility of what is going on in their tenants. Previously I created PowerShell scripts that I could use to benchmark tenants against CIS recommendations or even detect and remediate guest users. But with Microsoft’s ongoing updates, keeping this functioning was taking up crucial time."
Another concern was the reality of configuration drift. Mischa had consulted large organizations that had experienced operational issues due to configuration drifts but had no way to quickly audit how changes occurred or roll back as part of the troubleshooting process.
“When configurations drift it is not unusual for security and operational issues to occur, but sometimes it can be hard to identify the source of the issue. Then your client can be left waiting a long time for a resolution. That’s not the experience they signed up for and it’s not going to help DATAPROTECT build our reputation. Our goal is to make things just work for our customers so they can focus on their core business!”
Without CoreView I can’t imagine how we would handle growth while giving our clients the premium experience they signed up for. We would spend all our time trying to make sure everything was properly configured and secure.
The DATAPROTECT team decided it was time to take action. PowerShell was out of the question due to scalability and maintenance issues. After trying Microsoft 365 DSC (Desired State Configuration), the team felt it was too complex, had poor performance and required an expert to maintain, and manage it.
It was after this that the team came across CoreView Configuration Manager. Configuration Manager lets MSPs automate the client onboarding process, perform health checks for new clients, detect configuration drift, and roll back to a previous state for troubleshooting and recovery
“We no longer have to choose between investing all our time into the client onboarding process and scaling our business. Without CoreView I can’t imagine how we would handle growth while giving our clients the premium experience they signed up for. We would spend all our time trying to make sure everything was properly configured and secure.”
CoreView’s out of the box CIS (Center for Internet Security) configuration template can be used as a baseline, allowing DATAPROTECT to provide an instant health check for any new client’s tenant, and once they are onboarded, CoreView monitors the tenant for configuration drift and provides a full audit and roll back capabilities, making troubleshooting effortless.
As well as this, CoreView is allowing DATAPROTECT to save time in rolling out configuration updates across multiple clients.
“CoreView Configuration Manager puts us in a position to be very efficient for our clients. It’s not just that we can automate the onboarding process, it’s also going to save us time rolling out new configurations for existing clients. CoreView lets you template your ideal configurations for any element of Microsoft 365 and roll that out to any client without having to do the configuration manually. That’s time saved for us, and a better experience for the client too.”
With the success of CoreView Configuration Manager, the DATAPROTECT team are now looking at the new CoreView ONE Platform with anticipation.
“Being able to have the configuration management capabilities in the same platform with CoreView’s security and task automation capabilities is really exciting for any Microsoft 365 service and security provider. I’ve already started creating workflows to automate tasks, and I’m excited about the guest management and app permission scanning abilities too. Being able to offer this next level of security will help us enhance our positioning in the market and most importantly improve the service and security for our customers.”
As we wrapped up our conversation, Mischa shared his concluding thoughts on CoreView:
“What makes CoreView so powerful is the huge amount of time you’re saving. As an IT provider, we plan to work smart, but you can’t work smart when you’re overwhelmed by tasks. You will bottleneck your ability to scale, but you will also make dangerous mistakes that your clients will hold you responsible for. In the end, every provider wants to deliver the best possible service to their clients, and with CoreView we do that. As a company that needs support with Microsoft 365 I’d look for a service provider that makes use of these capabilities as this will make the service much more cost-efficient.
I’m excited to work with CoreView and I am looking forward to helping many clients together.”