Why The Suite dropped their MSP and rebuilt IT in-house with Rippling

The challenge

When Mariah Gillespie began leading the People and Business Operations team at The Suite, she inherited an IT setup that had grown organically alongside the company.

Her teammate Chelsey, the Business Operations Manager, had managed IT as part of a broader operational role, and the company had recently brought on an MSP to scale that function.

Which didn't work out as planned.

“The reality was [our prior MSP] answered a lot of things very confidently wrong. And so confidently wrong that they created downstream mistakes that our team then had to fix.

Mariah Gillespie

People & Business Operations at The Suite

Rather than taking IT work off of Chelsey's plate, the MSP was generating more work than it eliminated. The math didn't add up.

"We asked ourselves, why are we spending $90,000 a year to spend more time on IT?"

The Suite offboarded their MSP and decided to bring IT back in-house with specific criteria: manageable by non-IT specialists, reduced administrative burden, and support for an upcoming SOC 2 audit. And the tool they chose had to be something they could stick with and scale with.

"This was especially important to us after doing the change management to bring on an MSP, and then to offboard that MSP," Mariah says. "When we make a choice, it has to be the right choice."

After evaluating their options, Rippling IT's overall accessibility moved the platform to the top of the list.

“We wanted to drive an automatic car. Rippling IT is our automatic.

Mariah Gillespie

People & Business Operations at The Suite

The results

With Rippling's device management in place, troubleshooting transformed from a guessing game into a data-driven process — at a level Mariah could parse as someone new to the IT function. The visibility gave her the confidence to scope and solve problems quickly.

"You know how there's that magic IT person where you have a problem, they stand next to you and it's just fixed? I now find myself having that magic where I show up in a thread and the problem just ends."

The Suite's newfound control over their device fleet extended to offboarding too — a piece of tech debt they hadn't resolved.

Reclaiming devices from departing employees had meant shipping laptops to whoever was willing to receive them, which in practice often meant Mariah's home.

"I had a small pile of old laptops under my desk, always at risk of being accidentally damaged by my sons, who regrettably play basketball and golf inside of the house."

Rippling's warehousing tools gave them a way to reclaim and redeploy devices remotely, introducing a net-new way for the company to save time and money.

Finally, when The Suite went through their SOC 2 Type I audit, Rippling IT made it easy to establish device controls — from disk encryption to antivirus enforcement and beyond — automatically collecting evidence all the while.

“Before Rippling IT, I had no way to truly enforce controls around device compliance. Now I can.

Mariah Gillespie

People & Business Operations at The Suite

With their Type I report in hand and their Type II observation period underway, The Suite is all the more confident heading into the next phase of their compliance journey.