The alerts started showing up almost as soon as new clients came on board. Word documents and Excel spreadsheets were sitting quietly on endpoints with passwords stored inside them.
For Zachary Hamblen, founder of Your IT Guys, that was an early look at what the Huntress Agentic Security Platform could do. Huntress was immediately surfacing the small, everyday habits that could later hand an attacker an opening, giving his team a chance to fix them before they escalated into bigger problems.
"Huntress is not only checking for the malicious things," Hamblen says. "It's also checking for the little details."
Hamblen founded Your IT Guys in 2009, after spending years in IT for a dental supply company. What began as a one-person operation is now a trusted managed service provider (MSP) with over 75 clients and nearly 1,000 devices under management.
Your IT Guys works almost exclusively with dental offices. That specialized focus means they have to understand the software, workflows, and compliance rules their clients deal with every day.
Challenge | A growing MSP held back by scattered tools
As Your IT Guys grew over the years, their security stack became harder to manage. The team had pulled products from several well-known vendors, and each one handled a particular job. That left Hamblen juggling separate portals, logins, and configurations, and, most time-consuming of all, alerts.
"Almost none of our alerts were actually actionable alerts in other systems," he says. "I'd estimate only one in a few hundred were quality."
While he was buried in false positives, Hamblen was also watching client security incidents climb. Many started with a phishing message sent from a legitimate account that an attacker had already broken into. The recipient would follow a link, install remote-access software, and hand the attacker a direct path onto the machine.
That pattern had become so prevalent that it became clear Your IT Guys needed better coverage without burying their technicians in more tools and notifications.
Solution | Bringing the stack under one roof
Hamblen had reached a familiar fork for MSPs: hire more internal staff, or find another way to strengthen the help desk and keep up with demand.
That led Your IT Guys to The 20 MSP, a peer group that lets independent MSPs pool resources, processes, support, and vendor relationships, as well as access pricing usually reserved for much larger providers. Hamblen describes The 20 MSP more like a "co-op" that helps Your IT Guys expand what they can deliver while staying the trusted team their clients already know.
"We're drastically changing our service delivery method, our service packages, basically what we offer to our clients as a whole," he says.
The move solved the capacity problem, and it reintroduced Hamblen to Huntress, one of The 20 MSP's preferred cybersecurity vendors. Through Huntress' commitment to a channel-first strategy, Your IT Guys could get Huntress' volume-based pricing despite only managing hundreds of endpoints rather than tens of thousands.
"We slapped Huntress in there, and we're like, can this do everything we want it to do?" he recalls.
Hamblen got his answer quickly, and within a week, Your IT Guys started moving clients onto Huntress Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Managed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Managed Security Awareness Training (SAT), and Managed Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM).
Before Huntress, rollouts for newly implemented solutions were slow. Setting up an EDR or a SIEM meant configuring each on its own, then connecting the tools and working through the Microsoft environment by hand. With Huntress, most of that work is handled by a single process.
"We could literally roll out Huntress in 20 minutes for most sites," Hamblen says. Previous deployments could take several hours.
The Huntress SOC—a 24/7 team of threat analysts backed by AI—gave Your IT Guys another layer of support without piling more low-value alerts onto their technicians.
"I've worked with other EDRs and SOCs, and none of them were flagging the little things," Hamblen says.
Managed ISPM also gave Your IT Guys an easier way to apply Microsoft security best practices. For most clients, Hamblen says, they can turn on a broad set of recommended policies in about five minutes.
The Huntress dashboard helps technicians catch issues that don't warrant an urgent ticket but still need attention, like disabled firewalls, unmanaged devices, or outdated antivirus software that's getting in the way of protection.
Hamblen says Huntress gives his team a "wider view" of when something is clearly wrong across their clients' environments, including the smaller issues that wouldn't generate a ticket on their own.
Results | Fewer alerts and faster onboarding
The clearest benefit for Hamblen is a "quieter workday." While speaking with Huntress reps about his experience, Hamblen opened his dashboard and saw that the Huntress SOC had already investigated 28 EDR signals in that time.
"I had no idea," he says. "It wasn't even something that came across my desk."
That's precisely the kind of behind-the-scenes support Your IT Guys wanted. The SOC can investigate activity without pushing every signal to the team's technicians, leaving them more time to focus on the findings that call for real conversations and action.
Password-file detections now result in practical recommendations, like moving clients to password managers and assigning appropriate awareness training. Automated phishing simulations through Managed SAT have prompted users to slow down and report suspicious messages before clicking.
Deployments got easier, too. Your IT Guys is moving clients over as service agreements renew, often around a dozen endpoints a week. One button deploys the core protection, and the team can connect a client's Microsoft environment without rebuilding several separate systems.
Managed SIEM gives Hamblen another layer of confidence. Because dental practices operate in healthcare, extensive logging is required for compliance, so if an incident ever needs a deeper investigation, the information is already collected and ready to share, rather than scattered across a dozen products.
"Anytime I can eliminate steps in an onboarding process, it makes everyone's life easier," he says.
Your IT Guys is the team dental practices count on to run their technology and step in when something goes wrong. Huntress simply helps them do that work with less noise and a 24/7 SOC investigating activity in the background.
Today, the value shows up in faster deployments and fewer pointless alerts. It also shows up in the small warnings that help Hamblen's team address risky behavior before it becomes a real problem. Those details give Your IT Guys a fuller service to stand behind, and more confidence in what happens when a threat gets through.
As Hamblen puts it, the new setup means clients are less likely to run into trouble, but "if you do have an issue, then it's very easy to remediate."
