Magna5
At the Helm of Driving Digital Transformation

Magna5 is a managed services provider (MSP) with two decades of vast experience and expertise in aiding companies to modernize their IT operations and embrace digital transformation. What makes Magna5 a vanguard in the space is its ability to bring every digital transformation initiative of organizations under one roof, from migration to the cloud, IT operations monitoring, and end-user support to cybersecurity services, data backup and recovery operations, and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) solutions.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Applications, Justin Cameron, senior vice president of IT services at Magna5, shares his insights on how Magna5 drives digital transformation for organizations by enhancing IT operations. He also sheds light on the significance of their data center services and how those services are facilitating organizations to navigate through the current IT operational challenges without breaking their bank.

How is Magna5 enhancing the IT operations of organizations and driving digital transformation? How has the company been positioning itself in the domain?

Our company was established to cater to the end-to-end IT requirements of organizations that do not have IT teams or need additional IT expertise to deliver services to their customers. Built around the 24/7 service model, Magna5’s service offerings initially supported clients’ server systems, cloud application network systems, and endpoint systems. Over time, working with businesses of all shapes and sizes, we recognized the technological gaps growing inside organizations. In the cybersecurity space, it was a lack of understanding regarding the security best practices and emerging technologies. Another challenge generally observed was in managing organizational data, as increasing data breaches and service outages were causing permanent data loss and costly downtime. As a result, Magna5 expanded its service portfolio and is currently catering to a whole range of services in cybersecurity, data backup and recovery, and the cloud.

Our expansive list of offerings lets us provide solutions that best fit our clients’ needs. In the cloud space, we have partnerships with leading cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle, and offer both public as well as private cloud services. Magna5 also has an enterprise-class facility to host the deployment and management of clients’ IT systems in these public cloud environments. At the same time, we offer Magna5 Private Cloud Hosting services for businesses that want a turnkey, fully-managed enterprise-class private cloud.

The capacity to offer such customized leading-edge offerings has enabled Magna5 to establish an extensive client base today, from public and government agencies to mid-market and large scale enterprises. Concurrently, thanks to our very committed investor NewSpring Capital, we are expanding with an aggressive mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy, acquiring organizations that have a unique suite of managed services offerings. Bringing them to the Magna5 fold allows us to expand our list of offerings.

What are some of the challenges enterprises face in the current business landscape, and how is Magna5 empowering enterprises to tackle them?

One of the significant pain points for organizations in the current business landscape is directly correlated to a major trend. If you look at the past year, global M&A activities have hit new highs, breaking all the earlier records. Consequently, organizations are expanding their IT operations and integrating new solutions to support the growing organizational structure and exponentially increasing end-users. However, this scale-up is happening against an ever-evolving cybersecurity and compliance backdrop. With the burgeoning volume and variety of organizational data, enterprises struggle to mitigate security risks and ensure compliance with corporate governance policies and litigations. This leads to costly operational and cybersecurity gaps in their services.

To help our clients bridge these technological gaps, we first conduct a baseline assessment from a technical perspective, which gives us a coherent picture of the clients’ IT systems and applications. Magna5 has best practices templates that help analyze how a client’s current operations are aligned with the highest industry standards. In addition, it is equally important to understand the organization’s business drivers. Are they trying to integrate the acquired company? Or are they going to partner with the acquired company, keeping it structurally separate and autonomous? After comprehending such operational requirements and organizational goals, we tailor our services to best suit them, allowing the organization to operate efficiently and consistently throughout its structure. Magna5 has also been adding former CIOs to its expert team to provide thought leadership to our clients on this front. Having been in that C-suite role in different organizations, their vast experience can be vital for organizations in their transitional journey.

Today’s businesses are leveraging Microsoft 365 premier cloud services to take advantage of its numerous benefits. How are Magna5’s Microsoft 365 managed services aiding the organizations in that regard?

We help our clients implement Microsoft 365 and manage it by offering maintenance and support services round the clock so that they can focus on their core business operations. The team at Magna5 also ensures that Microsoft’s service offerings are effectively lined up to cater to their specific requirements. Take the case of the latest cybersecurity updates in Microsoft 365 to mitigate the risk of dangerous phishing emails and potential malware attacks, for instance. Our team has been conducting several educational webinars and holding many discussions with our clients to help them understand how these new features could aid them in enhancing their security posture.

Another example is how we have been leveraging Microsoft’s Conditional Access policies to help clients in the wake of the remote work culture. By examining the business regions of the clients, we facilitated geo-blocking for them to prevent malicious logins from areas where they don’t have employees. We can also easily allow exceptions in that regard. Similarly, by offering additional security features like multi-factor authentication and educating the user base on the best ways to deploy them, we help companies optimize their operations according to any compliance requirements, be it payment card industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), cybersecurity maturity model certification (CMMC), or service organization control 2 (Soc 2).

What makes Magna5 stand out from the competition?

We are a large organization with well over 100 employees, including experts in cybersecurity, data backup and recovery, and the cloud. Magna5 thus has access to abundant resources to cater to the client’s requirements. Simultaneously, we are also small and agile enough to provide our customers with the attention they need. We can go out there and swiftly make the changes with respect to how the landscape is evolving in the MSP, cybersecurity, or cloud space. Magna5 thus brings the best of both worlds. It is also worth mentioning that we are very fortunate to have an expert and forward-thinking team on that front who are focused on changing the industry dynamics and solving the ever-evolving challenges of the IT landscape. Adding to it is our 24/7 presence to remediate clients’ technical issues and support the end-users.

It is indeed these competencies that have enabled us to establish a diverse client base in even the heavily regulated sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and finance, which necessitate round-the-clock uptime requirements and stringent compliance measures.