Why to Trust Your MSP
(or, Is My MSP Going To Rat Me Out?)

There’s a natural anxiety that crops up a great deal with small and medium business customers who are considering hiring an MSP, be it Deep Core Data or anyone else: will they discover my secrets and rat me out. Or on a more specific topic, will they MSP report the fact I’ve been cheating on my licensing and and could be facing big financial penalties as a result.

First, let’s talk a bit about Deep Core Data’s fundamental principle of business: we are an agent of our customers, not of our vendors. That is to say that while we have a Partner relationship with some companies, and we are required to do our best to respect our agreements with them in terms of not circumventing their policies and licensing schemes, we work for our customers. We aren’t a free email service or social network where our customer data is sold to advertisers,marketing firms or data aggregation companies. All of our revenue comes from the organizations to whom we provide IT services, ranging from simple email to vast custom system integrations. That’s it. If there’s a conflict between our customers and our vendors, we’ll side with our customers every single time. Short answer, we represent our customers.

That said, a lot of customers come to us who are using practices they know, or suspect, would get them into trouble if they were ever audited by Microsoft or Dell. For example, we have had customers who used a shared user account across five computers so they only needed to buy Office once for half a dozen employees. We’ve had customers who just kept reinstalling evaluation versions of software over and over again. And I cannot count how many customers have bought a personal license or downloaded a personally licensed piece of software and used it for commercial purposes. This kind of thing, intentionally or unintentionally, happens all the time.

Let’s be super clear here: we’re not going to squeal on you if you’re a customer coming onboard. Our job is to make sure you’re in compliance with the licenses for the software you’re using and that we’re responsible for. That’s one of the reasons we use fixed-price, per-user and per-machine pricing: We take the downside risk of spending too much on your licensing, since we’re the ones in a better position to understand and handle those licensing complexities. In most cases, if your company is going through contortions to save money on licensing individual products, you’ll find your users with a more and more secure experience after hiring us and letting us get you set up in a compliant way…and in the long term, more cost efficient.

We’ve dealt with customers being audited before, and as a general rule that’s handled almost entirely by our team; we usually only need a sign-off from the customer at the end of the process. No matter how extensive, no matter how blatant, your skirting of requirements is, we won’t turn you in for coming to us. We are here to help you. You need to trust your IT provider as much as your trust your lawyer or your accountant, and we will work to get you in compliance, and make sure you can sleep easy knowing you are in the good hands of a provider who is looking after you.