The latest News and Information on Managed Service Providers and related technologies.
With the complex and chaotic nature of IT services, MSPs often stay ‘afloat’ by concentrating on day-to-day operations. In doing so, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger growth opportunities. Scaling is a challenge many MSPs face. Some struggle to develop a clear strategy, while others don’t know the focus areas to help them succeed. If you’re not built to scale, you could miss out on opportunities to win market share.
There’s more to running a cloud service provider (CSP) business than simply offering an excellent service. Chances are, in time, you will want to grow and scale. However, for many, this is intimidating. Where do you start? How can you create sustainable profit? Even the most progressive CSPs face challenges; they haven’t just built a high-quality customer base out of thin air.
For managed service providers (MSPs), business revolves around their clients. Tasks like endpoint management, network monitoring, IT security enhancement, and SLA management are routine in the life of an MSP technician. Most standard tasks are handled through two major tools, namely remote monitoring management (RMM) and professional service automation (PSA) tools.
It’s common for an MSP to question the value of Microsoft Intune when it comes to managing their customers. There are a few common concerns that tend to come up, including the pricing structure and the lack of multi-tenancy. It’s also something new that the MSP and their staff may need to learn. With that said, is MS Intune bringing value to the MSP’s table? Is there some potential to be leveraged out of using Microsoft’s MDM as a managed service provider?
As MSPs begin to grow and mature their businesses, resource efficiency is a common area of focus. It makes sense: if you want to deliver the same high service level (or better) to more customers without making huge investments in staff and equipment, efficiency and standardization are clearly the way forward. Backup is an area that is especially ripe for improved efficiency for most MSPs.
There is an increasing amount of technology used by businesses, from applications to entire networks. More technology means that there are more opportunities for errors or vulnerabilities in these systems to be exploited. With all those opportunities, it’s no wonder why these technological errors continue to be exploited by experienced hackers. What’s worse is that, according to Ponemon, 37% of businesses aren’t even scanning their IT environment for these vulnerabilities.
“I’m not a big enough business… I’m too small… no one will want to hack me.” “I don’t have anything of any importance that anyone would want… I’m not terribly concerned.” “It hasn’t happened to us yet, so it isn’t something I’m worried about.” “What you’re proposing seems like overkill to me. And besides, we don’t have the extra funds in our budget anyway.