Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, an MSP SOP that outlines technical procedures is a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your business. Whether you’ve got existing MSP SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand-new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

I speak to a lot of MSPs every day, and I’m always asked for advice on meeting new prospects. Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges they all face. “Have you tried asking your existing clients for referrals?” is my stock answer. And for good reason—prospects referred to you by an existing client are four times more likely to buy than any other opportunities. Here are a few of my tips on how to generate client referrals from existing clients.

Distributed tracing is a method of tracking requests as they propagate through a distributed system. A trace is built from spans. Each span represents an interaction, like an HTTP request, a DB query, a serverless function invocation, etc. A trace is essentially a tree of spans. Based on the collected span data, a distributed tracing platform can capture all the interactions between the different architectural components and tie them together with a trace ID.

Does it seem like everyone’s talking about Zero Trust? Maybe you know everything there is to know about Zero Trust, especially Zero Trust for container security. But if your Zero Trust initiatives are being met with brick walls or blank stares, maybe you need some help from Gartner®. And they’ve got just the thing to help you explain the value of Zero Trust to your leadership; It’s called Quick Answer: How to Explain Zero Trust to Technology Executives.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. The mission of an SRE practice is to protect, provide for and progress the software and systems offered and managed by an organization with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance and capacity.1.

Everbridge partner Atos, a global leader in cloud and the digital workplace, recently published an interesting take on the future of work and how new technology trends will impact businesses and employees alike, now and in years to come. The company suggests that the combination of 5G and technologically augmented humans will drive some of the most significant changes in the way we work.

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.

Terraform and Pulumi are both Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. They allow you to manage, provision, and configure your infrastructure using code, which makes it easy to automate your infrastructure deployments and manage them in a version control system. Terraform is an open source tool developed by Hashicorp. It’s popular among developers because it’s easy to use and has a wide range of community-developed plugins and integrations.

As mobile networks evolved to 4G, network elements transitioned from hardware-based, often with proprietary chassis, to virtualized network elements. Communication service providers often implemented such technologies through private cloud infrastructures based on different flavors of OpenStack. On the other hand, 5G introduced microservices-based deployments with a service-based architecture.

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-first strategies, it’s important to have data stores that have internet-level scalability to power these cloud native applications. For applications running on Azure, the logical choice is Azure Cosmos DB.