ITs-plus: A Growing System House with a Desire for Clear Standards
ITs-plus GmbH & Co. KG was founded in 2006 in Mainz and supports companies with employees ranging from ten to 800 — including nonprofit organizations, medical facilities, educational institutions, and classic mid-sized businesses.
In recent years, the team has continuously expanded its MSP structures while aiming to make its service quality measurable and consistently improve it. But one thing became increasingly clear: the tools they had been using didn’t provide a complete picture of the security situation.
The RMM reported installed patches, but it couldn’t always detect when devices hadn’t been restarted for days — a real-world issue with major consequences. Software outside their own patch management or solutions from other service providers also often remained under the radar. They knew vulnerabilities existed, but not where or to what extent.
The Turning Point at the MSP Conference
The idea of using lywand wasn’t new. ITs-plus had already looked at the Security Audit Platform one and a half years earlier — at that time with the intention of creating their own “Managed Security Audit” product. But the approach wasn’t ready yet: Sales struggled to position the service as a standalone product, and many customers didn’t immediately see the benefit.
“We definitely mentioned it to customers, but the response was more like… ‘We’ll think about it’ — and then radio silence,” says Sebastian.
Only at the MSP Conference 2025 — an event hosted by our distribution partner Fokus MSP GmbH — came the decisive idea: not to sell lywand as an add-on, but to integrate it directly into existing maintenance contracts. This removed every sales hurdle, because it eliminated the discussion of whether a customer “wanted” the product or not.
From that moment on, lywand was no longer an add-on — it became a tool for ITs-plus: a reliable, neutral auditing instrument that makes the quality of their services visible and transparently complements patch management.
Rollout to 130 Customers in Record Time — and the First Results
The rollout itself was rather unspectacular: within just a few weeks, around 130 customers were equipped with the lywand agent.
Sebastian describes the process as “technically trivial: export customer list, upload CSV, distribute the agent via RMM — and that’s basically it.”
The effort wasn’t in the technology, but in the decision to actually do it. All in all, the initial effort to onboard all customers into lywand, including the agent rollout, was about four hours.
The fear of uncovering countless vulnerabilities was, of course, present initially. But once the actual data was visible, the uncertainty faded quickly and turned into relief: everything was finally on the table — no more assumptions, no more blind spots.
Lywand guides the technical team, automatically prioritizes, and makes it clear what truly matters. The Renovation Plan in particular helped the team avoid being overwhelmed by numbers and instead work through the issues that really count.
One of the most revealing insights: many systems that appeared “patched” in the RMM were not actually protected, because the patches had never taken effect due to missing restarts. Lywand made this visible at a glance.
Two “Favorite Features”
#1 The Security Cockpit
For ITs-plus, the Security Cockpit is the starting point for analysis. The bird’s-eye view across all customers immediately reveals patterns, process gaps, and common weaknesses. Instead of checking customers individually, issues can be identified across the entire customer base and solved with a single measure for many customers at once.
#2 Managed Services Filter
At the same time, the clear separation between their own responsibility and customer-specific software provides orientation. Everything included in the MSP package is continuously checked and any security gaps are resolved.
Everything beyond that appears in the “Unmanaged” section and is discussed directly with the customer. This differentiation brings structure to the technical team’s work and gives Sales a strong foundation for customer conversations.
