UniFi’s “Cheat Code” for MSPs: Faster Training, Deeper Skills, Lower Cost

There’s a shift happening in the MSP/MSSP world, and it isn’t just about features on a firewall. It’s about something far more practical—and far more expensive: how quickly your team can learn, retain, and confidently manage the platform you standardize on.

That’s why I believe UniFi is revolutionizing the MSSP market, and why both MSP owners and technicians should pay attention.

The hidden cost of traditional firewalls: training time (and bottlenecks)

For a long time, many MSPs (including us) relied on “traditional” firewall vendors. We were a SonicWall shop for over a decade, and like many in the industry, we also had experience with other major players like Sophos.

Here’s the issue we repeatedly ran into:

Those products can be difficult to train staff on—at scale.

Back in 2012, our peer group even sponsored formal SonicWall training. It was high quality, but it came with real overhead:

• employees had to travel to places like Dallas or Miami,
• the course cost thousands,
• and even after training, retention wasn’t great.

The result is a pattern most MSPs recognize immediately:

You end up with one or two “experts” who really know the platform, while everyone else escalates tickets when things get complex. Those escalations create delays, reduce consistency, and concentrate risk in too few hands.

And the bigger lesson? Classroom/lab learning isn’t how great engineers are built. You configure something once, you pass the course, and you forget it later. Real expertise comes from repetition and experimentation.

UniFi’s evolution: from prosumer roots to serious MSP contender

To be clear: UniFi didn’t start as the obvious enterprise firewall choice.

Early on, UniFi gateways and routers felt more “home/prosumer,” and many people (myself included) wouldn’t have put them head-to-head with SonicWall, Sophos, WatchGuard, or Meraki.

But in the last couple of years, UniFi has advanced rapidly—to the point where it’s now much more reasonable to consider it on par with the mainstream options for many MSP use cases.

And that evolution is exactly what creates UniFi’s biggest advantage.

UniFi’s unfair advantage: usability + rapid development

UniFi has two things going for it that matter enormously in the MSP world:

1) A user-friendly UI that accelerates learning

UniFi’s interface is approachable. That sounds like a “nice-to-have,” but it directly impacts the most expensive MSP cost center:

Labor.

The most expensive barrier to adopting any platform isn’t the hardware. It’s the time it takes for technicians to learn it well enough to troubleshoot confidently without escalating.

2) A platform that keeps improving quickly

UniFi develops rapidly. Features and options expand over time, and the experience keeps getting better. In a world where many firewall vendors feel slow and heavy, UniFi’s pace is part of the appeal.

Put simply: a strong firewall with a great UI, improving quickly, is a massive advantage for MSPs trying to scale capability across a team.

Our approach: put UniFi in every technician’s home lab

If experimentation is the best teacher, the obvious question becomes:

How do you make experimentation easy, safe, and repeatable for your staff?

For us, the answer has been straightforward:

We issue every one of our technicians a UniFi firewall.

Specifically, we use the UKG Fiber, and it hits a sweet spot:

• It can run UniFi apps (including Protect),
• it supports 10-gig,
• it’s powerful for its size,
• and at $279, it’s practical to deploy as a standard internal “training tool.”

Even better, it’s similar in look and (largely) workflow to UniFi’s higher-end gateways. Hardware varies in feature sets, but the day-to-day navigation, policy management, and configuration patterns translate. That means a technician who learns the UKG Fiber well can step into more advanced UniFi deployments with far less friction.

Why this works: curiosity without consequences

When the device is in a technician’s house, something changes.

They get to play with:

• WANs and LANs
• NAT
• firewall rules
• VPNs
• VLANs
• IDS/IPS

…and they get to do it when it’s fun, when they’re curious, and when breaking something doesn’t risk a client environment.

They can break things, rebuild, and internalize the “why,” not just the “how.”

That cycle is what builds real engineers.

Certifications still matter—just not as the first step

We value certifications. They’re important.

But there’s a reality in hiring and training that every MSP has experienced: people can pass exams without truly understanding the product.

In our experience, certifications land better after hands-on familiarity. Once you understand the platform in a practical way, formal training and certs become amplifiers instead of crutches.

The overlooked benefit: it’s also a trust signal to employees

There’s another upside that doesn’t show up on a spec sheet:

Giving a technician a firewall to learn on communicates:

• “I trust you.”
• “I’m investing in you.”
• “I want you to grow.”

That’s a meaningful perk—and it helps teams build a shared language around the technology they deploy every day.

The takeaway

If you’re an MSP owner trying to get your team:

• up to speed faster,
• more capable across the board,
• and less dependent on a few experts…

…UniFi may offer a legitimate “cheat code”: lower training friction and faster skill ramp.

And if you’re a technician looking for a marketable skill with a realistic path to mastery, UniFi’s ecosystem—especially with an accessible home lab device like the UKG Fiber—can be a no-brainer way to level up.