I just recently DM’d over Twitter regarding this topic and you advised to bring the conversion over to your forum - thanks for the indulgence!
I am a huge fan of your content and appreciate your security posture and approach. However, I’m curious as a Unifi fan and user how companies are ensured their networks don’t get extended to your hosted instance(s) and how you assure their security?
Please don’t take my question the wrong way as I’m not trying to have you divulge any customer information or your company processes. I’m just very interested in what you’ve accomplished (others in this space too) and do aspire to move in the same business direction but struggle to understand how companies bring up this topic to you or how you address it to them. In a world of seemingly endless compliance programs companies need to be concerned with, it’s just top of mind.
The only companies that have asked to have the controller on site have their own internal IT departments to handle it. If we are managing the systems and network it goes in our controller.
I have some years experience with Unifi among other things and recently I took a job with a small MSP. Together we have recently started branching out from their existing RMM offerings (Patch Management, AV, AM, and scripting) to also offer Unifi on our own hosted controller.
In my last job, it was all under one company (110 locations on one Unifi Controller) so this leads us to the part I DON’t know.
My questions are as an MSP:
Do you charge for Unifi as a “managed network”(Assuming the customer purchases all the hardware), and if so, what the heck would you charge? $15/month if I bundle it with our other stuff? It’s not like it’s labor intensive after the setup but I could be missing something.
and
Do you lock down the firewall? (allow 80, 443, and block everything else?) - I have never tried this but have heard of providers practicing it).
I’d recommend you use hostifi.net or some other cloud server , so you’d need to recoup those costs.
In my old place they use to add on a decent management fee, of say 30-40 per month if the contract was just WiFi but would come right down if they were also using us for RMM etc and the customer was negotiating, because as you say it’s barely any work.
You’d look to make money also on the install and reselling the hardware.