Scott Riley is the founder of Inside Agent, a platform that makes complex M365 security an absolute breeze for managed service providers.

His journey has taken him from being Chief Strategy Officer at one of the UK’s largest MSPs, then running his own successful cloud solution provider business, to building this platform that helps MSPs work smarter, not harder.

An Interview with Scott RileyWhy Scott Started Inside Agent

The best tools often come from a need a company has identified it has, and that other people probably do too. Inside Agent is designed as a single place for MSPs to manage Microsoft 365, get updates and security insights that they can use in real time to support their clients.

“At Cloud Nexus, we did a lot of 365 security assessments, and that was two days of consultancy. We’d white label them for MSPs and find that they’d only run an assessment on one client, rather than all of them. It became clear that there had to be a way to automate these audits so MSPs could offer them to all their customers.

“We know that every customer who runs 365 is at risk of being breached, and assessments shouldn’t only be available to those who can afford them or request them. So we decided to build our own, and make it a separate product to Cloud Nexus. And we’d offer it to MSPs to use however they like.”

How Inside Agent Keeps Client Data Safe

The platform uses Microsoft Secure Score, which is a way to benchmark security. For business licences, a score of 80% or above is good. “Most MSPs find that their clients score around 50% at first, but they need to help them improve.

“The dashboard displays the Secure Score for every tenant, and alongside that is the Inside Agent Compliance scores. These are our internal metric of how well we think it’s set up against our best practice. You know, Target and our CIS controls and all those sorts of things. Sometimes our score is lower, because we look more holistically at all the information.

“We include admin groups, conditional access, MFA and so on. We want to make sure the right devices and the right people have access to things. This is important because if you’re not careful, anyone can access your data. Our tool adds an extra layer of security.”

How Inside Agent Helps with Consistency

Scott explains that some of their users are in the tool every single day, and they give feedback on how it helps them. “For instance, when you offboard a user, you need to remove the licence, the shared mailbox, OneDrive and so on. There’s lots of parts to it. But Inside Agent takes care of all of that.

“We’ve got an Intune module that looks after policies. Rather than giving people all the policies at once, which is overwhelming, we give them a way to roll them out as needed. They click what they want and away they go.

“We also learned that MSPs have created their own policies or Intune templates. So we’ve made it easy to import the documents and reuse them with other customers. All of these things save them time and make them more consistent.”

The Value of Running Client Reports Yourself

Another popular feature of Inside Agent is that MSPs can run their own client reports. Scott says that when he did it on their behalf, it was two days at a rate of £750 a day. “And now they just log in themselves and run the reports themselves and it’s completely free.

“We’ve also added CIS reporting, which includes all the latest benchmarks. A CIS report is very detailed and it takes a lot of effort to pull out all those specific things to hit those exact metrics from the Centre for Internet Security. It’s quite expensive having those done for you, but again we offer them for free.

“Of course, CIS guidance says there are some checks you have to do manually, but we’ve automated everything we could. And for those we can’t, we explain how to do the manual checks and offer a place in the portal to upload your findings. We’ve made it as simple as possible.”

Learnings from a Challenging Time

In a previous organisation, Scott went through several mergers and acquisitions. “We were a big MSP buying other MSPs, and I was on the management team at that point. I was responsible for the due diligence, which sometimes meant getting rid of teams and offices.

“And because we had private equity, there were expectations that we would deliver more profit. If you wanted to do that, you had to cut costs, and in an MSP the biggest costs are systems, premises and people. But it was awful to acquire a company and immediately get rid of half of their staff.

“That’s not nice. And the more you do, the more disposable people become. You’re not valuing them at all, which is awful. So when I started Cloud Nexus, I flipped it. I didn’t make the customer the king; I made people the priority. Because they look after the customers and help the company to grow.”

Why You Need to Value Your People

Scott chose to value his people over pushing for bigger profits. “I get why businesses do that. But for me and the people on my team, we’ve found the route we’d rather have. It’s slower and steadier, with customers and colleagues they like. And they enjoy their work, too.

“Yes, it’s a job, but I want people to like spending time with each other and have a laugh. There’s always office pranks going on here. But you have to value the people. And I think that that is one of the biggest lessons I learned from those other companies.

“They are the biggest asset of your company. And I think the more that you can spend making their life easier, the better. Sometimes we’ve had people off for extended periods, and the team pulls together to pick up the slack. Nobody complains because they’re helping their colleagues.”

How to Connect With ScottInside AgentFollow Inside Agent on LinkedInSubscribe to the Inside Agent YouTube channelCloud NexusConnect with Scott on LinkedInHow to Connect With MeSubscribe to TubbTalk RSS feedSubscribe, rate, and review TubbTalk on iTunesSubscribe and rate TubbTalk on SpotifyFollow TubbTalk on iHeartRadioFollow @tubblog_msp on InstagramMentioned in This EpisodeAI tool: ChatGPTAI workflow automation: n8nAutomation platform: ZapierSpeaker and author: Karl PalachukMSP expert: Erick SimpsonAI tool: ClaudeDocumentation Software: IT GlueMicrosoft Secure ScoreBearded 365 Guy: Inside Agent video demoMSP community: The Tech TribeIT expert: Lyle KirschenbaumIT expert: Dan BairdYou Might Also be Interested inPodcast: Microsoft Stack and Why MSPs May Consider an Alt Service Desk10 Handy AI Resources to Help Your MSP Clients Grow Their BusinessesSchedule Thinking Time for MSP Business Growth