Now that we have entered the back half of the year, this is a good time to do a self-check on yourself, your team, your customers and your overall MSP business.

As many workers have shifted to working in offsite locations, the need for secure remote access for remote support and device management has never been greater. IT teams need It can be difficult to securely access and control all your organization’s endpoints, but secure remote access solutions simplify and streamline that process.

With the continued focus in our space on the movement from MSP to MSSP, it’s crucial to remember that products alone don’t necessarily make you an MSSP. For smaller customers, although you might be able to provide a range of security solutions (like EDR and backup) and compliment these with an RMM to provide insight and control over end user devices, this is not enough to call yourself an MSSP.

For many companies, the beginning of October is also the beginning of the fourth and final quarter of the fiscal year. In IT, it’s a time to prepare for the new year by defining our priorities and setting our budget. COVID-19 threw a wrench into all of our 2020 plans last year and a lot has changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for a network monitoring system in your software stack.

You’ve heard the term IT help desk. You’ve probably also heard of IT service desks. They’re pretty much the same thing, aren’t they? They sound similar enough, so when people start throwing around mentions of help desk vs service desk, you don’t raise an eyebrow. After all, you don’t want to seem like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s the thing: an IT help desk differs from an IT service desk.

Data loss events frequently occur, but it seems that a good portion of companies are not fully prepared for these damaging events. An Avast report states that 60% of all backups performed are incomplete and restores fail 50% of the time. An increasing number of organizations depend on digital data, so data backup and recovery should be a top priority to potentially minimize both downtime and loss of data and ensure continuity of business operations.

According to the 2021 Cost of Data Breach report, the average attack “dwell time”—the period between an attacker’s breach of an organization’s network and the point at which the organization finds out about it—is 287 days. During this time, the attacker can stealthily look to gather valuable information to steal or compromise data, incurring huge costs for affected companies.

Agent-based and agentless monitoring are the two main approaches network monitoring tools use to capture and report data from network devices. As the names suggest, the difference between the two is pretty simple: someone has to install extra software(the agent) for agent-based monitoring to work. But, that doesn’t explain why an IT team or an MSP would choose agent-based or agentless monitoring.

I’ve written extensively about the technical aspects to consider when expanding your horizons and embracing the Mac platform. What I haven’t covered much up to now is why. Why bother learning an entirely new skillset, targeted at supporting a minority platform, when you’ve got your hands full just keeping up with Windows?

In today’s Geo Economics and a truly globalized world, it has become easier for products and services to reach consumers and industry alike. To reach the customers and consumers directly can be expensive and an operational challenge as it would require a large workforce to sell, deploy, and service the products/ services. For a growing organization, the initial focus is towards acquiring customers, expanding market reach, providing a good customer experience, and containing costs at the same time.

A while back, we wrote about the differences between backup and data protection. While the points made there are still valid, the industry’s definitions of these terms have continued to evolve, as has our thinking on the topic. At N-able, we’ve settled on a definition shared by analyst firm William Blair in a recent report: data protection solutions should include backup, disaster recovery, and archiving/retention of backups.

Microsoft’s OneDrive has proven itself a reliable platform to store and share files, and considering its ubiquity among Windows users, it’s often a small business owner’s first foray into leveraging the cloud for their operational needs. That familiarity leads many end users to wonder if OneDrive can be more than a file storage and sharing app -- could OneDrive also help me backup and protect my files?

The help desk can be both a vital part of a user’s experience and help to increase revenue, especially if it operates efficiently. Sitecore reports that you can triple a return on investment if you invest in help desks. Help desk reporting is an excellent tool used to identify ways to improve your help desk.

You’ve been waiting and planning all year. The sunscreen is packed, the neighbors have a spare key to water the plants while you are away, you made sure to set your out-of-office notifications, and emergency contact information has been updated. It is time for vacation season!

If you have been following the financial news lately, you have surely become all too familiar with the challenging economic conditions that have emerged in 2022. As rising inflationary concerns put pressure on the bottom line, decision makers within businesses of all sizes are suddenly having to re-evaluate strategies, forecasts, and expenses. This pivot to a more conservative outlook is not unlike the approach adopted by businesses at the onset of COVID-19.

There is no escape from the need for patch management and updates. It is true that operating systems and software vendors are getting better, faster, and more efficient about how they make and deploy patches. However, for businesses, patch management remains a time-consuming necessity that has big impacts on security, compliance, and day-to-day operations for IT teams and the businesses they serve.

Healthcare IT is simultaneously one of the most complex and sensitive networking systems there are. Aside from the wealth of confidential data they process and store, these networks must be highly available to support life-saving procedures and diagnostics programs. This makes proactive healthcare network monitoring—staying ahead of little issues before they become emergencies—an absolute necessity.

In Information Technology terms, a disaster is any kind of event that disrupts the network, puts data at risk, or causes normal operations to slow down or stop. A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is created to address the risks and possibilities of these types of events and minimize the damage they cause. Common disasters that are included in a DRP include.

Managed Service Providers or MSPs in asset management, which started as remote IT support and troubleshooting in the 90s, have evolved into one of the most prominent IT business models. According to a Statista’s report, the global MSP market share was valued at 152.02 billion USD in 2020 and is expected to grow close to 274 billion USD by 2026. Rather than just troubleshoot or monitor remote IT systems, MSPs these days offer services that manage the IT infrastructure for organizations entirely.

The pandemic has rapidly advanced the adoption of remote work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies have shown that many employees prefer the hybrid work model — it makes work more flexible and often more enjoyable. Despite some companies starting to return to the office full-time, many companies are adapting to meet their employees' changing expectations and have made hybrid work a permanent solution.

Network redundancy is process of providing multiple paths for traffic, so that data can keep flowing even in the event of a failure. Put simply: more redundancy equals more reliability. It also helps with distributed site management. The idea is that if one device fails, another can automatically take over. By adding a little bit of complexity, we reduce the probability that a failure will take the network down. But complexity is also an enemy to reliability.

One of the top priorities for MSPs is optimizing their workforce. The current industry-wide level of workforce attrition is distracting business owners from being able to focus on growing their businesses, forcing them instead to be tied up with repeatedly onboarding and training new technicians. This can result in inefficiencies, knowledge gaps, sub-optimal use of resources, and messy operations.

According to recent polls, at least 67% of consumers choose to use self-service options rather than speaking with a company rep. This leaves many businesses -- especially those in a service industry -- wondering how to provide quality support for their customers without making them get on a phone call. These situations are where self-service options come into play. Such resources make it easier for customers to find the help they need in the manner they choose.

As an IT solution provider, you must walk a fine line between generating revenue and maintaining your team while providing the best possible service for your clients. However, you must have a sufficient budget and develop long-term strategies to attain all of these. Furthermore, when you’re operating on a break-fix model, all these tasks can be challenging.

Since the release of Ninja Ticketing, one of our partners’ most frequent requests has been to add ticketing functionality to the Ninja mobile app. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Ninja mobile app now includes key ticketing functionality, including the ability to: This new functionality comes to Ninja on top of existing capabilities for endpoint management, including: App Store or Google Play.

You have made the decision to finally start taking the marketing and lead gen activities of your MSP a bit more seriously, but, as the business owner, you recognize that you don’t have the time or energy to take this initiative on yourself. So, what do you do? Do you decide to hire internally and build your MSP marketing department from the ground up? Or do you decide to outsource the marketing function to a third-party agency and have them manage it all for you?

The managed services provider (MSP) industry is at a pivotal moment in its history. With data management, security, and privacy regulations getting strengthened and added to the books all over the world, and with awareness of the risks associated with those issues on the rise, MSPs must take their role in compliance seriously. Any failure to do so will put individual MSPs at a competitive disadvantage, and incidents involving MSPs will be a stain on the industry’s reputation.

“You can’t get this kind of stuff for free,” says Manuel “Manny” Lloyd, founder of Wilmington, NC based CyberSleuth. “I know technically MarketBuilder isn’t free, because you have to be an N-able partner to use it, but at the same marketing can be expensive and MarketBuilder gives you all the tools you need to create targeted, MSP-specific marketing campaigns.”

With the surge of remote workers and a need for increased flexibility, the traditional workplace is a thing of the past. According to Slack’s Future-Forum Pulse Report, the percentage of people working in hybrid and remote arrangements has increased to 58% in the United States. This means that organizations will need to adapt to a hybrid model to maximize employee productivity while supporting collaboration in and out of the office.

“Just one more tool…what’s the harm?” Because MSPs tend to be technophiles in some measure, we can sometimes be lured in by shiny objects known as “the newest and flashiest solution”. While this isn’t catastrophic in its own right, the “just one more tool” effect is compounding in nature, and so are its dangers.

Regex—short for regular expressions—is a way to describe a search pattern. They can be used to find a text pattern or string (character sequence) within a larger body of text, such as a sentence or paragraph, but even entire documents and databases. They can be used to quickly find specific text in a text document like a configuration file for a network device. Need to know what IP addresses a device has? What VLANs are on a switch? What devices are using a deprecated DNS server?

Over the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed a rapid adoption of endpoint detection and response (EDR) in the MSP space. An increasing number of managed service providers are choosing to leave behind legacy antivirus (AV) solutions in favor of EDR security. The differences between the core functions of AV and EDR are easy to understand and many see EDR as an obvious choice. However, some still believe that AV is enough because the customers they support have a low risk profile.

We live in a world where 83% of security professionals believe that employees have accidentally exposed customer or business-sensitive data at their organization via email (Business Wire). This sheds light on a great vulnerability faced by MSPs and internal IT businesses worldwide: once you share critical information with your end users, that data is no longer in your hands, hence your security does not extend to it anymore. If only there was a way to prevent that! Luckily, there is.