Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Being in IT can sometimes feel a bit like being a doctor—you’re often called upon to give people the bad news that their beloved computer isn’t going to make it. Other times, people think you’ve performed a miracle just by doing your job and saving their data. Then, there’s the Thanksgiving problem, where any time you’re at a family gathering, you get cornered by a relative wanting to talk about their tech problems, regardless of your actual area of expertise.

If you’re like me, you started your week by reading the Microsoft blog about Nobelium, an advanced-persistent-threat (APT) group that was actively targeting cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed services provider (MSPs) in a recent wave of supply chain attacks. Personally, I wasn’t terribly surprised. We all know by now that MSPs have a bullseye on them for adversaries wishing to target the supply chain. What’s different about this attack is the motive.

The Domain Name System (DNS) makes it possible for users to access websites using domain names, like wikipedia.org, in place of nine-digit IP addresses. Due to its ubiquitous nature, DNS can be used to block access to selected websites, which is commonly known as DNS filtering. Many companies see security and productivity benefits from implementing this strategy where appropriate. Read on as we explore some of the key details around how DNS filtering works and how it can be beneficial.

The new year is just around the corner, meaning we’ll be ringing in 2022 before we know it. So how did your MSP fair in 2021? Did you achieve the sales and revenue goals you set? Net new customer acquisition continues to be the #1 challenge facing MSPs today. And because most businesses already have an MSP they are using, the struggle is real. So the test becomes, how can I set myself apart?

First, welcome to the new security resource center for N-able. We’re excited to have an area where we can share security-related information with our partners. I’m Dave MacKinnon, chief security officer for N-able, and my role, simply put, is to ensure that we keep our organization, our partners, and their customers’ data safe.

A common cliché in cybersecurity is, it’s not a question of if you get attacked, but when. We witnessed this firsthand when our former parent company was part of a major attack last year. While N-able products weren’t affected, it was difficult to watch friends and colleagues deal with the aftermath of an event of that magnitude.

Managed service providers have to manage complex and diverse customer environments that typically include hybrid infrastructure and multiple monitoring feeds. They need to be able to discover and monitor these environments, correlate alerts from multiple systems into single events, and map business services to the infrastructure and application services that support them, building customer-centric dashboards for real-time service and application health in the process.

October doesn't just bring cooler weather, Q4, and Halloween, it's also National Cybersecurity Awareness Month — the only month all year long any of us are allowed to talk about cybersecurity. 😉