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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

“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.”

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.