Many people are familiar with the stories of coal miners using canaries to detect carbon monoxide and other toxic gases as a warning system for when they should evacuate. Even though cybersecurity is far removed from coal mining, it has an equivalent “canary in the coal mine” that takes the form of indicators of compromise, or IoC for short. So why should an MSP be concerned with looking for IoCs?
In the workplace, certain web pages can be a distraction for employee productivity—or worse, a disruption. If you’re a managed services provider (MSP), your customers may be interested in finding a way to control the types of websites their employees can access during the workday. One viable option for them to utilize is a DNS block to restrict access to certain web addresses on a given server. This article will help you understand what DNS block is, who uses it, and how it works.
Email blocked listing is a major problem, but sometimes overlooked in the conversation around spam and email threat prevention . The impact on a business can be devastating if it isn’t caught in time, especially if the company relies on email marketing for lead generation and customer correspondence. While it’s possible to recover from the effects, it’s a complicated process and may set back productivity in the meantime.
Mobile device management (MDM) is a key aspect of your enterprise mobility management approach. This guide will help you understand it, outline why having a robust enterprise MDM strategy is so important for managed services providers (MSPs), and offer tips on how to improve it.
Happy New Year everyone! Don’t worry, I’m well aware it’s only August and we still have another four months or so before the “official” new year arrives. But with the winding down of summer and the commencement of the school year, I tend to view September as a type of New Year as well. September has always been my favorite month of the year.
Sometimes it makes sense to switch your RMM vendor. For example, if your services have evolved to new requirements or you know there’s a good vendor who can really help your business. But I often see MSPs consider it for the wrong reasons. They think they’ll find a silver bullet in the next technology solution, not realizing their technology issue may actually be a deeper business issue. This is where having an MSP vendor who truly treats you as a partner can matter.
The N-able Head Security Nerd, Lewis Pope, just published a blog outlining the top 25 cybersecurity bad practices demonstrated by MSPs today. To accompany his post, I wanted to add one more risky bad habit to his list. It’s something I commonly see being practiced by too many MSPs from a business perspective—allowing a customer’s budget to dictate what a cybersecurity offering should look like.
The CISA (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency) recently started an initiative to create a catalogue of exceptionally risky cybersecurity bad practices. While this will be a welcome and very useful tool once it is complete, only two practices are currently listed. Since cybersecurity and business decisions can be time-sensitive, we wanted to expand on the CISA’s list.
Following the security issues in the MSP market over the past 24 months, our customers, who are understandably concerned, have been asking what we do to keep the N-central® appliance (hosted or on-premises) updated and secure for them. I will do my best in this short article to outline how our engineering team keeps up with security. Please note this is valid as of the time of writing, but can change at any point.
Managed services providers (MSPs) juggle a lot of responsibilities. They have to address rapidly changing customer demands while still providing high-quality service, managing increasingly complex environments, evolving their service offerings, and much moreyou’re your business scales, it’s hard to accomplish these goals without the help of professional services automation (PSA) software.
As managed services provider (MSP) technicians know, remote access gives an authorized user the ability to enter another user’s computer or network through a network connection. This access is often established via a remote desktop protocol (RDP), which is a network communications protocol from Microsoft® that is specifically designed for remote management.
