For managed services providers (MSPs), providing the highest quality returns on your customers’ investments is always a top priority. There are many reasons for a business to hire an MSP, but increasing IT productivity and strengthening their bottom line tends to be at the core. While many practices are essential to achieving that goal, few are more important than IT documentation, which can increase productivity, boost quality of service, and heighten consistency.

For a managed services provider (MSP) business, building a great relationship with customers is the ultimate way to secure continued business and build your brand. Every strong customer relationship centers on one key concept: trust. Without trustworthy correspondence between you and your customers, you can’t do much to prevent your end users from switching to another MSP team.

From navigating the latest big announcements from Microsoft to finding ways to attract top technicians and avoid "the great resignation," find out what topics and tips MSPs gravitated toward most.

The MSP sector currently finds itself in a difficult situation: While the industry is growing, many are finding it increasingly hard to hire skilled techs quickly enough to fill their increasing knowledge gaps. We frequently hear from our partners that there just aren’t enough skilled techs in the market, and things are moving too quickly. This is particularly true in security, but it’s certainly not limited to that area.

Following my previous blog post (which you can read here), I’m continuing to look at marketing and lead-generation activities for small MSPs. Here are my remaining tips on how to effectively market when you are an MSP of one.

I’m probably dating myself, but I used to love the television show The A-Team when I was little. Every week, the team would be put into the middle of a problem and work together to overcome some challenge. Plus, they had Mr. T and a really cool van.

The channel has spoken! A total of 7,000 MSPs, VARs, resellers, and distributors voted in 13 vendor categories at this year's ICT Channel Awards, choosing NinjaOne (formerly NinjaRMM) as the #1 MSP software. "We are very proud to have achieved first place in the MSP category at the ICT Channel Awards," says André Schindler, General Manager EMEA at NinjaOne.

With the end of another year, and a bright, shiny new year just ahead, many businesses take stock to reflect on their accomplishments and what they still need to do. In this vein, I have been getting quite a few questions lately about marketing and lead generation—specifically, how to conduct marketing when the MSP is small, without a lot of time or money to devote to such an initiative.

With news breaking re: Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) and exploitation attempts becoming widespread, MSPs and IT teams have been working nonstop to scope their exposure, scan for potential IoCs, apply mitigations, and patch.

NinjaOne released our custom field functionality in 2021, adding a new level of flexibility, customization, and automation power to our platform. Custom fields are an advanced feature that requires set up to use, but once you start, the power and flexibility of this feature is almost limitless. In part one of this guide, we’ll walk you through two powerful use cases for custom fields in NinjaOne.

Onboarding is an in-depth process that sets the stage for relationships with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and their customers. Perfecting the onboarding experience will give customers the confidence that choosing an MSP to manage their IT was, and is the best choice. A poor first impression can damage credibility, so it’s vital to have a solid plan in place.

Imagine the scenario: you get an urgent call from one of your customers. All her files seem to be corrupted. And then there’s that email demanding payment via Bitcoin for restoration. She needs your immediate help to get her business up and running. Later on, she’ll demand to know how you let her business be vulnerable to this attack. You had installed firewalls, required strong passwords, and conducted email phishing drills—and still your customer was attacked.

SAP is one of the most business critical enterprise applications. As a result, keeping it secure is a top priority for managed service providers. In the last year SAP has notified its customers of multiple high risk vulnerabilities, through its SAP HotNews email alerts, which require urgent patching – but the challenge for MSP clients is to know “do these impact me?”

Automation has become the backbone for businesses wanting to stay afloat in the highly competitive markets today. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are among those reaping heavily from IT automation processes. The benefits MSPs obtain from IT automation include lower costs, reduced errors, and increased productivity. With automation, MSPs can acquire better data, become more reliable, and scale their operations.

In their effort to protect their customers from a range of modern threats, managed services providers (MSPs) may encounter a strategy known as credential stuffing. This hacking technique involves rapidly inserting large numbers of usernames and passwords—often collected from corporate data breaches—into the login fields of other sites and digital services.

My previous blog was, “I’ve never used a Mac, and now I need to manage them.” For the second installment of this series I will highlight some key tools and resources for the new Mac admin.