The number of IT assets organizations possess is growing rapidly, but managing this growth doesn’t have to be complicated. Efficient IT asset management comes down to having a process and plan in place to quickly and consistently track all assets. With this in place, you can improve the speed and delivery of IT services across organizations.

Paul Dippell is the co-founder and CEO of Service Leadership, Inc., a company that measures IT and managed service provider (MSP) performance across the industry and annually publishes the results as the Service Leadership Index®. In this interview, we ask about his work using operational maturity in benchmarking managed service providers.

Automation is critical to unlocking efficiencies in your MSP business and helping you grow. By creating scripts and policies that can remediate some of the most common problems your customers face, from enable and monitor bitlocker or checking battery health to monitoring backups, you’re freeing your techs up to deal with bigger issues. This effectively allows you to be able to do more with what you’ve got and take on additional customers without having to employ more techs.

A well-run IT team keeps track of every asset in their domain, including hardware, software, and licenses. The specific task of managing hardware assets is known as hardware asset management. This involves keeping tabs on hardware from the time it’s requested and purchased to when it’s phased out of use and disposed of. As you can imagine, this can be a daunting task when handled manually.

Earlier this month, we were delighted to have been awarded Gold for IT Department of the Year at the American Business Awards®. Last year (2021) was a transformative year for N-able and the award was received for the IT Department’s ability to spin off, revamp, and rebuild a whole IT infrastructure for a brand-new public company and be fully operational within an impressive timeline of only 10 months.

The pandemic may have accelerated the need for enterprises of all sizes to move towards digital transformation, but the need for cyber security has existed since before. However, with new actors or hackers, malicious software has also evolved and expanded the cyber threats to a larger attack surface. While enterprises need robust digital solutions, implementing them may make your enterprise more vulnerable to security threats.

The IT Europa Channel Awards reward excellence in European software development, and IT and telecoms solutions. The panel of judges from the MSP and IT community voted for the best solutions across 4 categories, with NinjaOne winning the Best Remote Management Solution in the Solution Provider section at the awards ceremony in London on May 19th 2022. NinjaOne collecting the Best Remote Management Solution at the IT Europa Awards.

IT software deployment is a necessity in any organization’s IT environment. Software deployment can either make or break the transitions between software, which significantly affect business operations. That is why it’s essential to have a solid software deployment process in place.

There was an IT Salary Report 2022 that was recently completed by a Facebook group that our #HeadNerds team is a part of called “This Is an IT Support Group”. Although the survey asked for salary information for IT personnel, there was also a section in the survey where the respondents were asked, “What is the biggest pain point you have working in IT?”

Network monitoring is vital for operating an IT environment at optimal performance. As a result, organizations can improve operational efficiencies with a well-managed network while proactively maintaining a secure network. While remote work has made the network monitoring process more challenging, new cloud-based tools have extended IT teams' reach into home and remote offices to ensure employees are secure and productive.

As a business, we talk a lot about automation as one of the key ways to drive efficiency and growth within an individual MSP. By automating the response to and remediation of some of the more common IT issues customers face, technicians are freed up to spend more time dealing with bigger issues. Ultimately, this means the business is able to handle more customers without having to invest in growing its technician base.

Each device's overall health and security affect the overall organization, and if an endpoint is not in good health, it could be a significant security risk. For example, the IDC discovered that endpoints such as laptops, desktops, or mobile devices are the origin of 70% of successful breaches. Because those endpoints often serve as a gateway for a security breach, robust endpoint management is essential for today’s modern organizations.

MSPs have a fantastic opportunity now. Many businesses are offering their employees a hybrid work model — the opportunity to split their time between working in the office and at home. The age of hybrid work is here and, as it appears, here to stay. For many businesses it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s also necessary to satisfy current requirements and attract and retain employees.

Vulnerabilities within an IT environment pose a big security risk and are a threat to digital data within an organization. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by others, or a lack of necessary precautions can result in damaged or lost organizational data. Therefore, it is essential to have a vulnerability management process in place for these reasons.

One difficult part of taking on a new role, especially a technical one, is learning all the jargon. Listening in on a conversation among specialists in any field you’re not intimately familiar with can be highly confounding. It sounds like they’re speaking English. At least some of the words are English, but you’ve never heard them put together in that particular order before. I heard someone mention SMB and SME? Is that a Small to Medium Business or Small/Mid-sized Enterprise?

In my final blog as the Head Nerd for N-central and now your newest Product Manager for N-central, I thought it would be time to update my previous blog from July, 2021 and provide a few more details as to why hardening the N-central server—and for that matter any on-premises server that has an operating system—is critically important.

With the constant shifts in the IT landscape, your IT teams must remain agile and adaptable. While it can be incredibly beneficial for a large organization to have in-house IT talent who can manage your IT infrastructure, many are unaware of how difficult it is to maintain that expertise. Whenever you’re responsible for minimizing the downtime of your business-critical services, you need to consider whether your in-house IT resources are up to the job.

The last few years have thrown about everything they could at the status quo. Shifting climates, political instability, and a global pandemic have all contributed to a broad host of network device supply chain issues. Consumers all over the globe are still affected by computer chip shortages and many other items delayed by supply chain issues. And it’s not expected to end anytime soon.

In honor of World Password Day, we asked our Head Nerds for their top password-related tips and thoughts. One thing they could all pretty much agree on is that passwords shouldn’t be replaced, but that they should be supplemented with MFA. Here’s what else they had to say.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are charged with protecting their customers from all of the threat vectors that target devices, networks, and applications. The diligence required to provide this level of protection for customers is unending. However, if an MSP is going to properly secure their customers’ environments, they first must secure their own, which is why NinjaOne has collaborated with the cybersecurity company SaaS Alerts to better protect MSPs from RMM supply chain attacks.

Patching devices, whether you’re an internal IT team or an MSP, is something that takes time, costs money, and honestly isn’t a particularly pleasant job. Different products do different jobs at patching, but no matter what you use, you should always make sure you patch in a timely manner. If we go back ten years, it used to take upwards of 30 days for people to exploit security vulnerabilities, but in recent years, we’ve seen that decrease to 15 days.

Working at N-able for over 17 years, I’m not really considered a “spring chicken”. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the fact that I am getting older and I have learned to embrace this. It has been said that after the age of 40, a women’s metabolism decreases by 2% a year, and women lose muscle mass to the tune of 1% a year. What does this mean?

In the years that I’ve worked with large technology vendors and an MSP provider, there were a few common denominators between the ones that were successful. Partners that were consistently at the top of the food chain were the ones consistently providing value to their customers in some area other than just one specific product or service that was being offered.

With a constant stream of new technology and customer questions, it can be challenging to manage it all while keeping up with all the necessary tasks to ensure things are running smoothly. For example, help desk asset management software was designed to help with providing IT support services to customers while also managing company assets.