Any business leader that’s shopped around for Managed IT Services has probably heard someone working at a Managed Service Provider (MSP) claim that they take a “proactive” approach to IT – but what’s behind this claim? In this blog post, we will take a deep dive into the types of services generally referred to as proactive and share what proactive IT is at Nucleus.
Proactive versus Reactive IT
Two different approaches to outsourced IT management emerged in the early 2000s. Proactive IT generally refers to technology management that focuses on anticipating and addressing potential issues before they cause significant problems or downtime. It is the opposite of a reactive IT strategy, where IT teams only address problems after they have occurred, and likely bill you on a Time-and-Materials basis (ad-hoc support).
The main goal of proactive IT is to ensure that systems, networks, and infrastructure remain secure, efficient, and functional, reducing the likelihood of disruptions. This commonly includes the following IT services:
Regular system monitoring: Continuously checking the health of hardware, software, and networks to spot early signs of potential issues, such as performance degradation or security vulnerabilities.
Preventative maintenance: Routine updates, patches, and optimizations to ensure that systems are up to date and functioning at their best.
Data backup: Ensuring that data is regularly backed up.
Cybersecurity management: Proactively identifying and addressing potential security risks before they can be exploited, including software vulnerabilities and emerging cyber threats. This is often referred to as Managed Security Security.
The fact is that most MSPs offer these “proactive” services; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to call their business an MSP. Moreover, they would most likely fall into the category of a reactive IT support shop; a business you call when you simply want a problem resolved, not the root of that problem addressed.
In the last decade, we have seen a major shift among MSPs to provide truly proactive services ranging from Virtual Chief Information (vCIO) Services to user training/support, business continuity and disaster recovery planning to compliance.
The Nucleus Way
Proactive IT at Nucleus means continuously embracing innovation and ensuring our clients are secure and in a good overall state when it comes to their IT maturity. Here’s how we achieve this:
Innovation
Our Research and Development (R&D) team is dedicated to analyzing the short and long term technology needs of our organization and is responsible for driving technology standards, best practices, implementing new tools and technologies, and accelerating the rate of innovation within our company. Demand for industry-leading response time and client satisfaction, ever-evolving cyber threats, and the need for more efficient operations, metrics, reporting, and automation means that MSPs, like us, must demonstrate their dedication to (and embrace) innovation.
Security
Nucleus has a Cybersecurity Division, comprised of a team of Security Consultants and a Director of Cybersecurity. This team is focused on delivering cybersecurity assessments, formalizing a client’s cybersecurity roadmap, and driving the improvement of every client’s overall security posture. Cybersecurity is not a ‘set-and-forget' model, it is an ongoing evolution of best practices, processes, and protocols, and requires constant tweaks to ensure clients are secure in the every-changing threat landscape. Some recent upgrades to our Security offerings include:
SOC2 Certification: In 2024, we initiated our SOC2 certification. The Service Organization Control for Service Organizations (SOC 2) attestation is one of several data security regulations that has become important in recent years. It is designed to help organizations demonstrate and validate how they protect sensitive data. While our vCIO team has helped many clients achieve SOC 2 compliance and successful audits, Nucleus Networks has decided the time is right for us to meet this recognized standard. We will be happy to present our SOC 2 Type II report to interested parties through our Trust Portal.
XDR: XDR is the next generation of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). It is a technological approach to security founded on the understanding that endpoint protection is not enough to protect most modern IT environments. XDR extends threat detection and response across multiple layers within a single tool, aggregating siloed data, providing greater visibility and faster automated analysis of cyber incidents of businesses’ complete technology stack.
MDR for M365: MDR is a security software solution that is backed by real people, a Security Operations Center (SOC) team that is solely dedicated to protecting a businesses’ Microsoft 365 environment. It integrates seamlessly with businesses’ Microsoft cloud environment to collect and analyze user, tenant and application data to more precisely review anything deemed suspicious and remediate threats quickly.
Standardized M365 Policies: We’ve recently started to standardize M365 policies so that we can easily bring clients up to our latest baseline standards and quickly identify clients out of alignment, add suggested policies, and accept specific deviations to bring them back to 100% compliance.
Client Health Audits
Nucleus conducts client health checks which provide a holistic overview of our client’s IT, highlighting opportunities and benefits, as well as risks.
By focusing on our client’s IT health, providing advanced security solutions and embracing innovation we can truly deliver proactive IT. Curious to learn more about the Nucleus way? Reach out to us to schedule a meeting!