Why Is the Asio Platform Important for Your MSP Business?

Many organizations are pursuing significant technological change to navigate a disrupted environment and build greater agility and resilience. They’re accelerating digital transformation and modernizing IT to enable new business models, support their remote workforces, enhance their security, and more. And to achieve their goals, they’re leaning harder than ever on managed service providers (MSPs). 

In this environment, the opportunity to grow your MSP business is significant. But are you prepared to quickly deliver what your current and prospective customers are looking for? You’ll need to review your offerings, and to fill gaps, you may need to scramble to find solutions. No doubt, you’ll need to spend more time doing demos and technical trials. Also, you’ll have to dedicate more time for onboarding talent, integrating solutions, and providing training on stopgap measures. 

Positioning your MSP business for growth means amplifying your operations and innovating faster so you’re positioned to speed service delivery and increase customer satisfaction. But it can be a heavy and costly lift if you don’t have the IT management software and solutions in place to help your business run more efficiently, maximize automation, streamline functions, and enhance security. 

Enter ConnectWise Asio™. It’s the foundation for the future of ConnectWise—and it can revolutionize how you run your MSP business. In short, we’re innovating with Asio, so you have more resources and flexibility to innovate, too. 

How Asio Can Help You Keep Pace—and Get Ahead 

Asio (pronounced AZE-ee-oh) is a modern, unified IT management platform that can help you reclaim time and budget for your MSP business while reducing workloads and stress for your team. We introduced Asio to our partners at IT Nation Connect  in November 2021, and a lot of exciting things have been happening with the platform since.  

ConnectWise was inspired to create Asio to help our partners, and our own business, more confidently meet the challenges of rapid change and growth head-on. We understand the issues that your MSP business is likely struggling to solve right now. For example: 

• You need to have the right technology at your fingertips at all times because it’s essential to the success of your MSP business. However, many tools you need to use daily have long development cycles, and vendors don’t release new and better features quickly enough to keep up with your business needs. 

• You want to avoid the costs and headaches of having to rip and replace tools your business has outgrown—yet you find yourself doing exactly that time and time again. 

• You’re saddled with time-consuming, duplicative work assigning permissions and setting up user management when you’re integrating multiple tools via APIs. 

• You need a more seamless and efficient process to get your new employees ramped up faster, so they can start contributing and helping you grow your bottom line. 

And finally, there’s the issue of security. Not every tool is created equally when it comes to ensuring information security—and that’s a problem given how cybersecurity is becoming increasingly more important to your MSP business and your customers 

The ConnectWise Asio™ platform can help you address these and other challenges, which is why we’re confident we’re the only partner your MSP needs for IT management technology now and in the future.  

First, here’s an overview of what’s in the platform: 

Asio allows for rapid innovation and eliminates the need for duplicate development efforts across legacy code bases.  

Currently, ConnectWise has over 20 different products in our portfolio. Each product has its own development team, its own quality assurance (QA) team, and so on. As our offerings move into Asio, the platform will provide a common code base across all our products that our various development teams can use. That means no more duplication of work and more time to focus on creating new, remarkable innovations and features. 

To understand the power of Asio to accelerate product development, consider our remote management and monitoring software, ConnectWise RMM™, which offers out-of-the-box automation solutions for MSPs to deliver customized services to their customers. ConnectWise RMM was the first solution we built fully on the Asio platform. And since we unveiled it at IT Nation Connect last fall, ConnectWise RMM has seen over 450 releases. That’s over 450 release items in roughly 37 weeks—or about 12 release items per week, on average. We think that’s a pretty good record out of the gate. 

Built with a Security-First Mindset on a Fully Scalable Infrastructure 

ConnectWise Asio is fully dedicated to protecting data, applications, and infrastructure. With our heavy investment in proactive and preventive protections, IT solution providers (TSPs) can be confident that data and systems are safe.   

We have also implemented mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) for ConnectWise SSO to ensure our partners’ environments are harder to compromise during login.  

Additionally, the Asio portal—our go-forward portal for the ConnectWise Asio platform—will allow administrators to restrict login access based on IP address ranges. This allows our partners to set stricter access policies and gain peace of mind that employees accessing the system are doing so safely and securely.  

The Asio platform is also infinitely scalable. It’s built on a microservices infrastructure so that it won’t have the performance problems historically associated with monolithic programs. ConnectWise Asio can automatically allocate more resources to itself whenever it needs to. 

For your MSP business, that means there is no limit to the amount of customer information or endpoint data you can manage. Asio will scale right along with your business as you expand your offerings and customer base, allowing you to reach your growth objectives faster. 

There’s much more to come with Asio: Stay tuned for new features 

We’re excited to offer this modern IT management platform to our partners so you can start solving the problems that accompany using disjointed systems, including inefficiencies and redundant tasks. Eventually, all ConnectWise products will be built on or will integrate with this future-forward platform. 

Meanwhile, more new features are emerging on the horizon, including: 

• Company and site management in the Asio Portal: The company and site core entity for the Asio platform will give users a central data store for ConnectWise and ecosystem products to easily relate data, features, and history to the customers that TSPs serve. This initial release will allow users to create companies with multiple sites in the Asio Portal. As we build out the rest of our products in Asio, this is a foundational building block. It will provide one centralized store of all companies and sites that all products can reference. This means that in the future, you won’t have to make sure companies and sites are updated across multiple tools.  

• ConnectWise SSO login and user management: Soon, the Asio Portal will use ConnectWise SSO for users to log in. This will create a single-user login experience across all our applications and allow user management within ConnectWise Home. It also makes assigning users and onboarding employees easier as you grow.  

This year also marks the beginning of the evolution of ConnectWise professional services automation (PSA)—a reimagination of today’s functionality built on the Asio IT management platform. Over the next few months, a lot more information will be coming about some of the innovations for ConnectWise PSA™ (formerly Manage) as we reimagine this solution in Asio.  

If you’re ready to amp up your business operations, supercharge your service delivery and customer satisfaction, and equip your team with the latest cybersecurity tools to protect your clients proactively—all with less effort—then check out the ConnectWise Asio platform. It’s helping us to innovate faster than ever, and we can’t wait to see what it does to help your MSP business grow.