Virtual IT Department doubles endpoints as automation cuts escalations

Partnership with NinjaOne was foundation to standardise workflows and create capacity for growth.

With MSPs under pressure to grow while facing ongoing skills shortages and rising customer expectations, Virtual IT Department has doubled its managed endpoint estate over the past 12 months while reducing service desk escalations by 8 percent.

Virtual IT Department partnered with NinjaOne as the foundation for its endpoint management platform and leveraged automation and standardisation across its workflows.

“The partnership accelerated growth without introducing the operational complexity that can sometimes accompany rapid expansion,” said Liam Furlong, co-owner, Virtual IT Department.

The business redesigned its automation strategy, treated issues before tickets are created and replaced dozens of customer-specific deployment scripts with a single reusable workflow.

“Internally, we made a conscious decision to reduce variability across customer environments and invest heavily in automation and operational maturity,” Furlong said.

“The result was that we could onboard and support more endpoints without creating a corresponding increase in operational overhead,” he added.

Automations the key to scale

The turning point for Virtual IT Department came when the team noticed the growth curve and the technical headcount were beginning to diverge during a quarterly planning sessions.

“We started seeing that many of the repetitive activities consuming engineering time could be automated, standardised or moved earlier in the lifecycle before they became customer-facing issues,” Furlong said.

At the same time, they were measuring time savings from automations across the broader tooling stack, multiplied across thousands of endpoints and hundreds of recurring activities.

“We could see hundreds of small efficiencies accumulating every month,” he told CRN Australia.

“The real signal for us wasn't the individual automations. It was seeing the combined effect across multiple platforms and workflows and realising we were creating capacity faster than growth was consuming it,” he added.

In addition, automation removes a significant amount of repetitive administrative work, allowing technical specialists to focus on architecture, security, problem solving, customer outcomes, and continuous improvement.

“For us, it's not simply been about reducing recruitment pressure. It's also helped with engagement and retention. Most engineers don't get excited about manually performing the same repetitive task hundreds of times. They want to solve interesting problems, improve systems and develop new capabilities,” he said.

Lessons for MSPs looking to harness automations

For other MSPs looking to improve their operations through automations, the Virtual IT Department shows some important lessons.

“We often talk about the ’10-10-10 principle.’ If a task takes less than 10 minutes, happens more than 10 times a week and is done by 10 people, it's worth investigating whether it can be automated,” said Furlong.

Instead of automating the most complex processes first, Furlong has found the quickest return often comes from removing the hundreds of small repetitive activities that engineers perform every day.

For example, patch management, endpoint health monitoring, software deployment, compliance checks, device onboarding and common remediation activities are all strong candidates because they occur frequently, follow predictable rules and scale across large numbers of devices.

“Every minute saved on a task that's performed multiple times quickly compounds. That's when automation stops being an efficiency project and starts becoming a genuine growth enabler,” he said.