By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
You may know NetAlly as the provider of slick hand-held Wi-Fi and multi-protocol testers used by thousands of network engineers around the globe – and that still holds true. But now the company is honing its mission: Empowering MSPs and ISPs to deliver the best in service quality as well as high operational efficiency. Meanwhile NetAlly is preparing the IT world for the imminent introduction of EU’s new NIS2 directive.
For years NetAlly has been the purveyor of perhaps the most useful item in a network engineers troubleshooting toolbox: The AirCheck and CyberScope handheld testers. But despite the unquestionable utility and popularity of NetAlly’s testers, the company now believes their value is much more pronounced when viewed as a part of a wider quality and efficiency strategy for MSPs and ISPs.
“We’ve always known that our testers represent some of the best Wi-Fi testing technology on the market. But a recent survey among more than 130 of our customers was an eyeopener. It confirmed what we suspected: The Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is reduced by 20-60% when using our testers. We also found that support call escalations can be reduced by up to 30% simply by empowering frontline technicians with the right tools. Finally, the survey showed that the connectivity experience for network end users is vastly improved,” says Nathan Collins, NetAlly Regional VP for EMEA.
NetAlly says such results demonstrate the business value of NetAlly’s testing solutions especially for ISPs and MSPs. “Support costs incurred by ISPs and MSPs can quickly spin out of control and erode profits away. At the same time it is not an option for service providers to field an army of highly paid experts to take on for example Wi-Fi troubleshooting in the field, which is why our Link-Live solution delivers big value. Link-Live means remote technicians can be supervised by centrally located experts, who guide and execute tests on the device. Such features are business critical for service providers who want to deliver guaranteed service levels without running undue risks,” Nathan Collins says.
He also says about 25% of NetAlly customers are ISPs and that testers such as the AirCheck and CyberScope are already being used by ISP field technicians to ensure the quality of – for example – premium home broadband installations. Another quickly emerging growth opportunity for NetAlly in Europe is compliance with the EU’s new – and for many dreaded – NIS2 (“Network and Information Systems 2”) cybersecurity directive.
NIS2 is the EU’s sweeping new directive that will impact IT infrastructure management among a vast number of companies and organisations of which many have not been required to comply with NIS directives before. In a nutshell NIS2 is a broad new framework that requires organisations to upgrade cybersecurity contingency plans, monitoring, and reporting. Some of it will be procedural but companies will in general be expected to have a detailed understanding – for example – of what devices connect to their networks. That sounds simple enough but the reality is that this is not always be obvious, NetAlly says.
“Not all centralised networking monitoring is able to identify all network end points – which is a critical requirement for NIS2 compliance. And that’s precisely one of the things our CyberScope tester excels at. It’s all about organisations being confident that they are aware of everything happening on their network including any potential weaknesses in their cybersecurity defences. Right now many organisations are experiencing a ballooning number of end points as – for example – headless Wi-Fi-connected IoT devices proliferate,” Nathan Collins says.
NetAlly has named their approach to NIS2 compliance mission possible in answer to most IT managers’ less than enthusiastic – to say the least – response to the new EU directive. Read more about NetAlly & NIS2 here. Also don’t miss experiencing NetAlly in person at Wi-Fi World Congress USA in Mountain View, California, on April 28-30. For more about the event read here.
/Claus.
