This is the first in a four-part series focusing on the findings from our 2023 Network IT Management Report. We surveyed 4500 IT professionals from internal IT teams and MSPs across North America to gauge where their organizations are heading from a network management perspective. In part one, we’ll detail the overarching needs network professions across all industries to have in common. You can read the full 2023 report and compare your own IT statistics here.

Black Kite reported that 53% of organizations were hit by ransomware attacks in 2021, and that number was expected to increase to 69% in 2022. Cyberattacks show no sign of slowing, so it is critical that organizations have necessary cybersecurity precautions in place. One of the best ways to protect your IT environment is with an endpoint security process.

Very early in my career, a mentor taught me an extremely important lesson: “There is no substitute for talking to your customers.” No market research, focus groups, or surveys can take the place of getting face to face with your customers and having an honest conversation.

Microsoft Windows, one of the world’s most popular operating systems, has declared that support for Windows 7 - 8/8.1 operating systems will come to an end. In the next few weeks, this update will drive significant changes for both IT professionals and MSPs. Mark January 10th, 2023 in your calendars because that’s when the era of Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 will come to a close.

What’s the difference between a successful MSP and a very successful MSP? While it might seem like technology must have something to do with it, quite often the answer is far more human and interpersonal. It’s far too easy to forget that an IT business isn’t just about the IT -- and that the business component is very reliant on communication. From generating new leads, to closing deals, all the way to serving and retaining clients, you have to talk the right talk.

Major enhancements rolled out to APAC and EMEA customers in Q4 of 2022 hit the NA instance in early January, including support for Mac third party application patching and Linux OS patching. These new features represent a significant increase in NinjaOne's multi-OS patch management capabilities and allow for a truly robust patching strategy across endpoints. We also released the following updates to our CA and APAC instances. These enhancements will be released to EU and NA instances soon.

Over the past year, the job market has experienced a great amount of fluctuation, with more people joining and leaving companies than in years prior. There are a few reasons why you may be seeing a constant flow of new employees and have been on more goodbye happy hours than usual.

Over the past decades or so, social media has developed into one of the prime selling channels for business-to-business marketers. So much so that today most marketers believe social media marketing is the most effective tactic to use to improve lead generation quality, and drive net new leads.

Tolly’s 2022 Network Visibility Capabilities Report demonstrated how Auvik delivers industry-leading time to value. The report takes a deep dive into how Auvik stacks up to the competition across a variety of criteria. Which is all well and good from a purely analytical standpoint, but what does it mean for your day-to-day? After all, we’re IT pros, not accountants.

When you’re operating heads-down on your business, it can be easy to get caught up in the grind and lose sight of whether you’re focusing on the top things that truly matter. Tracking the right metrics can help keep you focused and alert you to what needs calibrating and how urgently. There’s no lack of possible metrics and KPIs (Brightgauge shares 70 here), but to help you stay focused, let’s step back and review the top 20 critical business metrics for MSPs.

It’s challenging to manage laptops, computers, smartphones, tablets, and other IT endpoints all at once, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. Cybriant reveals that there are at least 5.8 billion enterprise endpoints in use, and that number will continue to surge as the remote workforce increases. To manage, monitor, and secure all these endpoints effectively, organizations rely on unified endpoint management (UEM).

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful and relaxing holiday season. I can’t believe it is January and the start of another brand-new year. Best intentions are at their peak this time of the year as we want to focus on improving certain aspects of our professional and personal lives. Like many people, I set resolutions every January, but usually find by mid-February they are but a distant memory.

Whether operations are running smoothly or you’re running into a number of hiccups, the question to IT is always the same – “What do we even pay you for?” Rather than viewing IT as a vital piece of the puzzle, organizations often view IT as a cost center, leading to warped perceptions of the importance of IT.

This article is based on a webinar conducted by NinjaOne and is intended as a companion piece to help our users follow along. You can watch the full webinar here. Onboarding new endpoints can be a particularly time-intensive task. Fortunately, the steps take to configure, secure, and setup the endpoint can often be standardized and automated to dramatically decrease the time investment required. With the right tools, you can even automate customized device setup at scale.

Success in this modern age of digital services and operations is found when businesses are able to prioritize effective digital processes. Because of this, IT teams are constantly looking for ways to improve their IT operations by making them efficient, reliable, and scalable. One way this is accomplished is through site reliability engineering (SRE). LinkedIn listed SRE as the 21st fastest growing job in the U.S. in January 2022. What is SRE, and why is it in such high demand?

Vulnerability management should be among the highest priorities of organizations, especially within their IT environments. Skybox Security reports, “vulnerabilities have more than tripled over the past ten years.” With this exponential increase, they also report that cybercrime has continuously evolved and become a more complex threat. Vulnerability management aims to assert a level of control over this ever-present issue in the IT space.

I recently delivered an N-able N-central Bootcamp called 15 things you can (and should) automate, shortly after that I also delivered another bootcamp called 15 MORE things you can (and should) automate. After doing a little prep for the second on, this reminded me of a particular automation policy we have in the Automation Cookbook that allows you to remove Bloatware from your customers’/end users’ computers.

January has always been a time when we look back at the previous year and ask ourselves ‘What could I have done differently?’. This can often then lead us on to setting some new year’s resolutions, which we hope will make the coming year much better. Sadly, for many of us these have fallen by the wayside come February.

The office network has been in a near-constant state of evolution since dumb terminals and token rings. MPLS unlocked the ability to connect LANs. VPNs allowed end-users to work remotely while still being behind the firewall. Wi-Fi made intra-office travel easy and lessened reliance on extensive cabling. The WAN is slowly giving way to SD-WAN. New software and cloud-based networking componentry are allowing vendors to reimagine firewalls and routing.

When IT teams and departments aren’t on the same page, they unintentionally create blockers and other issues that negatively affect the entire organization. To prevent these troublesome issues from occurring, CIO recommends looking into a few ways to make IT operations more efficient, such as automating processes or adopting a new IT approach.

Most modern organizations would benefit from the use of an endpoint management solution. Any business that uses computers, printers, tablets, or other such IT devices -- the titular endpoints -- need an efficient and reliable way to maintain, monitor, and secure those devices.

Up until recently, you may have felt that it was easy to ignore Macs on your customers’ networks. Particularly if there were just one or two in the marketing department or maybe a handful in a graphics team somewhere. Maybe the person in charge of those devices had even been on Macs since the 90s and had got used to supporting themselves.

A ServiceNow study carried out by the Ponemon Institute reports, “An alarming 57% of cyberattack victims report that their breaches could have been prevented by installing an available patch.” Patch management is the process of organizing, testing, and applying patches to your organization’s assets.