With over 30 years of experience in the industry, OT Group is a leading provider of integrated business solutions, using the latest technology to give their clients a competitive edge. OT Group offers complete IT solutions and support—from initial design and planning through to installation and training.
Technology evolves at such a rapid pace that many businesses struggle to access, integrate, and manage the tools they need to keep operations running smoothly. OT Group addresses this challenge by providing their customers with expert IT strategy consulting, fulfillment, and managed services—including a managed cybersecurity service.
Now serving over 4,000 customers in the Ottawa-Toronto corridor, OT Group delivers reliable IT support for organizations with a wide range of experiences and needs.
“There’s a lot of MSP in what we do, but we also do a lot of traditional sitework,” explains Craig Bell, Vice President at OT Group. “We have customers that still have, believe it or not, dial-up or satellite [internet access].” As Craig focused on finding ways to enhance and expand OT Group’s offerings while growing the business, one issue kept rising to the top: cybersecurity.
Managed service providers everywhere face major challenges when it comes to protecting their clients against cyberattacks.
Threat surfaces continue to expand as technology changes. Many MSPs adopt new tools and technologies to better protect their clients’ data and operations, but more tools doesn’t mean better security.
“We had a managed antivirus offering that included basic antivirus and endpoint detection and response,” says Craig. “I wasn’t terribly happy because I wasn’t comfortable with the level of protection we were offering our clients.”
Craig understood the benefits and limitations of the tools used by OT Group but had concerns that his clients didn’t. It’s not uncommon for MSP clients to rarely see the behind-the-scenes details; for many, it’s the results that matter most.
“To use a cliché, I was staying up at night, worrying about what phone call I was going to get one day, telling me that [a client] had been infected with ransomware,” says Craig. “That was what really triggered me to start looking for a better security solution.”
That search led OT Group, initially, to partner with a security vendor that offered automated remediation, but it didn’t work out. “It actually compounded the problem,” says Craig. “It was notification overload, and the customer would not buy the automated remediation components because of pricing, and the sales process was brutally high pressure.”
OT Group discontinued the partnership and resumed their search for a more effective way to protect their customers.
Reaching out to his network, Craig looked for recommendations for potential partners.
When several people recommended Field Effect, he took notice, as they’d helped OT Group resolve a client’s cybersecurity issue in the past.
“Our first interaction with Field Effect was when a client we were onboarding on a Monday was ransomwared the Friday before we took over,” says Craig. “Our first work with Field Effect was an incident response event, and it just kind of blew us away.”
Craig and his team had previously worked with a number of incident response (IR) teams provided by their customers’ insurance providers but hadn’t been impressed by the time taken to get up and running again.
“It seems to me that Field Effect is focused on the end user,” says Craig. “There seems to be this tone where other organizations are working for the insurer and not the customer… Leaving a customer down for 30 days with no email is just not acceptable, in my opinion.”
From there, they reached out to Field Effect to learn more about Field Effect MDR. At the time, Craig and his team knew of a municipal client experiencing security challenges and saw an opportunity to both help a customer and assess Field Effect MDR's capabilities. OT Group’s experience with Field Effect MDR convinced Craig that partnering with Field Effect would help solve their security challenges.
“By moving to Field Effect MDR, we’ve been able to significantly reduce our tech stack, while at the same time bolstering the protection we provide our clients.”
That single source of protection also eliminated alert fatigue for the OT Group team. Layering too many point solutions frequently leads to notification overload as each tool may be reporting on the same activity because they don’t speak to each other.
Field Effect MDR’s approach to contextual notifications gathers telemetry from networks, endpoints, and the cloud, and triages security events to deliver alerts according to urgency—alongside the steps needed to resolve them.
“One of the things I really love about Field Effect is it’s not notification death,” says Craig. “When you get a notification [from Field Effect MDR], you need to pay attention, do not ignore it.”
This, coupled with the convenience of Field Effect’s MSP pricing model, has given OT Group the flexibility to better match services to a customer’s business.
“If the customer has 60 users, they pay for 60. If they have 63, they pay for 63,” explains Craig. “It’s huge for us.”
MSP pricing allows partners to deliver a bundle of Field Effect MDR licenses that exactly matches the size of a customer’s business. There’s no need to purchase a larger package than is necessary, and as the number of licenses increases, partners are able to drive better margins.
What’s more, the support offered by Field Effect’s experts has been indispensable for Craig and his team.
“Field Effect has the security staff that we don’t,” says Craig. “We know enough to know what we don’t know enough when it comes to cybersecurity. Field Effect’s team of Security Engineers effectively increases our cybersecurity expertise by hundreds of people that do know enough.”
The end result? Field Effect MDR helps OT Group provide a truly tailored security service, alongside peace of mind knowing their customers are protected.