Acme’s finance lead signs in to the client portal on the first of the month to check an outstanding invoice. The login is “acme-portal”, the password is on a sticky note in their office, and the same login is used by Acme’s IT coordinator, who raised three tickets last week. The finance lead finds the invoice. They also find the full device list, the open ticket about a compromised laptop, and a knowledge base article with the Wi-Fi credentials. Nothing was leaked. Nothing was recorded either, because as far as the portal is concerned, “acme-portal” did all of it.
Because it makes the client one person, and a client is never one person. A billing contact needs invoices and contracts. A technical contact needs tickets and devices. An executive sponsor may need project progress and nothing else. One login means everyone sees the union of all of it, and every action is recorded against the login rather than the human who took it. When something goes wrong, you cannot say who raised the ticket, who read the credential or who approved the change.
In the Guardian PSA client portal, each of the following is switched on per contact, so a billing contact and a technical contact need not see the same things.
Contracts and invoices, and probably nothing else. They need to know what is covered, what it costs and what is outstanding. They do not need the device list, and they should not see the ticket about the compromised laptop. Switching off tickets for a finance contact is not distrust; it is the same courtesy you extend to your own finance team by not copying them on every alert.
Tickets, the live device list and the knowledge base articles you have chosen to share. A technical contact who can raise a ticket, reply to it and attach a file stops emailing the technician directly, which means the conversation lands on the ticket where the history is append-only and the SLA clock is running. Whether they also see invoices is a decision for the client, made once per contact rather than once per company.
The executive sponsor is the third common case: project progress and contracts, so they can see that the migration they signed for is moving, without the noise of individual tickets.
Because the portal is reading Guardian RMM’s records directly. In a stack assembled from separate products, the service desk holds a copy of the device list, synced overnight, and the portal shows the copy. It is wrong by however many machines joined or left since the sync ran, and two products disagreeing about how many machines a client has is why someone reconciles a spreadsheet every month. In Guardian Plus there is no copy. The devices a client sees in their portal are the devices being monitored right now, because the modules share a platform. We wrote about the sync problem in The device list in your service desk is lying to you.
Deliberately, and with an end date. Guardian Vault lets you give a named client contact access to a specific article or credential through the portal, with an expiry, or with a share that burns shortly after first view. The Wi-Fi credentials in the opening scenario would be a shared item to one named person, for a set period, recorded when it was viewed, rather than an article anyone with the portal password could open.
Everything a contact does in the portal is recorded against their own name rather than a generic customer login. A ticket raised, a reply posted, a file attached, an article read, a credential viewed: each has a person on it. Service desk history is append-only, enforced by the database rather than by application code. We will not call the audit trail tamper-proof; it is append-only and not hash-chained, and we say so plainly on the security page.
Every question a client emails because the portal did not show them what they needed, or showed them so much that they stopped using it. Every password reset for a shared login when a contact leaves. And, once, the conversation where a client asks who at their company viewed a credential, and the honest answer is that the portal cannot tell you.
Bring a billing contact and a technical contact in mind. We will set the switches for each and show you what they see.