How AlignLayerNine Took Reporting from Hours –> Minutes with Petra

About AlignLayerNine

AlignLayerNine (aka ALN) is a fast-growing global MSP based out of Glenview, Illinois led by Bill Hunt.

ALN has been providing best-in-class IT support for over 10 years, and prides itself on leveraging the right strategic vendors––pairing them with AlignLayerNine’s incredible customer success to act as an extension of the client’s team.

Petra is MSP-only. To get best-in-class cyber services (including Petra) from a world-class MSP with excellent support, visit https://aln.co or email hello@alignlayernine.com.

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Pre-Petra

AlignLayerNine's Bill faced a common MSP challenge: security tools that created more work instead of less.

Account compromises are by far the most common cyber incidents clients face, and for the well-equipped MSP, a quickly handled account compromise can be a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the hard work their MSP’s cyber team does on behalf of the client.

But, showing this value requires a great incident report.

Previously, Bill was using another prominent MSP cyber company (that also handles Google Workspace) as the primary method of generating these reports.

"We'd get incident reports that were technically accurate… but completely unusable for client communication.”

“After every incident, I’d spend a few hours creating a separate document to explain what actually happened."

The challenge was universal across platforms - most security tools produced reports that were technically accurate but unreadable for clients. Bill explained: “With some of the other platforms, the challenge is that because reports are so technical up front, they take an explainer. We often had to independently rewrite a separate report for the customer."

Not only did this drain focus and slow client communication, it also claimed dozens of high-value billable hours. Tier 1 analysts especially struggled with this technical communication, so Tier 2 and 3 analysts were often brought in.

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With Petra

Using Petra, Bill was able to completely automate this work.

“Petra’s reporting is a lot easier to visually understand––for both clients and Tier 1 techs.”, says Bill.

The biggest difference is that it turned client conversations from "Let me explain what this means..." into "Here's what we protected you from…”.

Account compromises happen so often that every attack stopped became a new opportunity to solidify the client relationship and showcase how much AlignLayerNine does to protect their clients.

“It does such a good job showcasing the work we do for our clients—the cyber competitive differentiator we’ve worked so hard to cultivate. It's why our customers trust us to manage their mission-critical systems and people."

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Bill categorizes the business impact like this:

• Time Recovered: Hours of billable time reclaimed on every account compromise, especially for Tier 2 and 3 analysts.
• Team Efficiency: Junior analysts can handle incident communication without senior intervention.
• Better Client Conversations: From "Let me explain what this technical report means..." to "Here's how we protected you..."
• Security Reviews Become Sales Tools: AlignLayerNine gets to show off their cyber expertise, tee-up for other important cyber conversations.

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And in Excel

Another big feature that Bill and his team get value from is the Excel Export functionality, available instantly when an incident occurs.

"The Excel dump of accessed data within the breach time period is for us super valuable. When a client gets phished and we stop it, our customer cares most about seeing exactly what was accessed.”

“The Excel sheets, categorized and broken down by what was accessed over time, are probably the most helpful thing that Petra does. We can provide that great intel to the client directly."

Cherry on Top: Detection Speed

Reports matter for clients, but arguably, catching the incident fastest (and before the attacker is able to access sensitive emails/documents) is most important.

"When we started working with Petra, I put a client into three different tools at the same time, all of which supposedly have similar capabilities. And then we waited for an incident to happen."

Detection Speed Results:

Bill evaluated Petra alongside that other large MSP cyber vendor, which he also uses for his Google Workspace identities.

Petra contained breach 85% faster than the other vendor on those M365 identities. Another even larger platform failed to alert on the attacks at all.

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Recap: Why ALN’s Report Quality Drives Revenue

Client Retention: Clear incident reports build trust and justify continued investment in security services.

Value Reinforcement Opportunities: When clients understand what threats they're facing, they're more receptive to having a proactive conversation and adding more security layers.

Competitive Differentiation: While other MSPs struggle to explain complex incident reports, AlignLayerNine delivers immediate clarity.

Team Efficiency: Less technical (read: expensive) team members can handle client communication without senior analyst intervention.

The Bottom Line

From Bill: “If I had to sum it up, I’d say that Petra is stellar.”

“From my testing, it’s 2x faster and has better reporting than anything I’ve ever seen."

If you’re an MSP and want to see client-ready reporting in action, Start your 14-day POC.

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AlignLayerNine (aka ALN) is a fast-growing global MSP based out of Glenview, Illinois led by Bill Hunt.

ALN has been providing best-in-class IT support for over 10 years, and prides itself on leveraging the right strategic vendors––pairing them with AlignLayerNine’s incredible customer success to act as an extension of the client’s team.

Petra is MSP-only. To get best-in-class cyber services (including Petra) from a world-class MSP with excellent support, visit https://aln.co or email hello@alignlayernine.com.

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