Customer Story: NetCenter Technologies

NetCenter Technologies

NetCenter Technologies is a Fargo-based managed service provider (MSP) offering end-to-end IT support for organizations across North Dakota. While most of their clients are local small and medium-sized businesses, they also support regional hospitals and other critical infrastructure. Serving as an extension of each client’s internal IT team, NetCenter handles everything from system monitoring and maintenance to user support and cybersecurity.

The Challenge: Manual Monitoring Left Cloud Environments Exposed

Joshua Grimstad is one of two IT Security Engineers at NetCenter, working alongside Tony Loegering. He primarily manages day-to-day operations, including employee training, system monitoring, Microsoft configuration management, and task automation.

Prior to Blumira, NetCenter lacked a centralized tool for cloud monitoring. While they had some security measures in place, there was no dedicated system for continuous threat detection or log analysis. Grimstad was manually checking systems daily, logging into various accounts to review activity; a time-consuming and inefficient process. As a result, security incidents in cloud environments like Microsoft 365 had to be identified by correlating events from external monitoring systems, rather than being directly detected and reported within the cloud environment.

“The firewalls, hardware components, and antiviruses handled monitoring for physical devices on the network, but there wasn't anything specifically monitoring the cloud environments,” Grimstad said. “You'd have to log in every day to watch everything, but that isn’t necessary when you could just have a SIEM.”

Grimstad briefly considered Splunk, but ultimately found it too complex and not worth the additional effort required to implement, especially given the challenges of getting smaller organizations to adopt or transition to new tools.

“I looked at [Splunk] but it looked overly complex for SMBs, because getting [our clients] to change or add [a new tool] like that is more effort than it's usually worth,” Grimstad said.

The Solution: Delivering Robust Integrations with a Simplified Experience

NetCenter chose Blumira for its balance of easy deployment, strong cloud integrations, particularly with tools like Microsoft 365 and Webroot. Blumira provided the right mix of functionality and predictable pricing to meet the needs of both NetCenter and its clients.

“It’s something that works, integrates, but also isn’t going to break the bank for smaller customers who aren’t accustomed to spending more than a couple of grand a month on high-end managed services,” Grimstad said.

Today, NetCenter uses Blumira and ConnectWise SIEM (formerly Perch), but they are steadily transitioning more clients to Blumira. Grimstad noted that many of NetCenter’s earlier service agreements lacked built-in security components, making Blumira a critical addition moving forward.

“We have Blumira and ConnectWise right now, but we're moving more people to Blumira because there wasn't really a lot of security stuff originally built into [Connectwise],” Grimstad said. “All of our new agreement structures include Blumira as a baseline.”

Grimstad noted that while ConnectWise has its strengths, he found the user experience to be underwhelming at times, given the tool’s capabilities.

“[ConnectWise] has its ups and downs. I'm not as big a fan of it because it seems very rudimentary. You get these emails that look like they just copied fields out and dropped them into a spreadsheet, “ Grimstad said.

“Sometimes more information just bogs down what you're trying to find. I just need to know what got hit, the user, the account, and the IP address. Rather than this long JSON list of all the information that also goes into it,” Grimstad said.

In addition to appreciating Blumira’s streamlined alerting, Grimstad also highlighted its cost-effectiveness compared to ConnectWise.

“ConnectWise is markedly more expensive than the XDR for Blumira per user. So [Blumira] is definitely a much less expensive option and it does what it needs to do,” Grimstad said.

Rapid Detection and Response Out-of-the-Box

Grimstad found Blumira’s standard monitoring features to be highly effective. He noted that Blumira often detects suspicious activity quickly, sometimes within minutes of deployment.

“Right away, I got [a notification] of a suspicious inbox rule creation within 15 minutes. Without [Blumira], someone could have been in that account for however long, and done much worse," Grimstad said.

He emphasized that these valuable detections come from Blumira’s core, out-of-the-box capabilities, without requiring any special add-ons.

“These detections are base features and [Blumira] has done a lot of work to get things in a pretty good spot for monitoring, and they've caught a lot of stuff," Grimstad said.

By detecting and stopping threats early, Blumira has significantly reduced Grimstad’s team’s workload, minimized customer impact, and helped proactively protect clients before major issues arose. 

"It's less work for us and less of a headache for the customer. We see the issue and fix it before they even know there was a problem," Grimstad said.