Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Bubble wrap®. That obsessively addictive plastic material, made up of hundreds of small air-filled bubbles we all love to squeeze. Although I tend to think of Bubble Wrap as the original fidget toy—melting away our anxieties with every satisfying pop—most people associate it with helping to protect their most precious collectibles when in transit or being placed in long-term storage.

The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is a security framework implemented by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to improve protection of the defense industrial base. Like other security frameworks, the CMMC has a collection of controls for processes and practices with the goal of achieving a certain level of cybersecurity maturity.

Oh, happy days—it’s October 5 and Windows 11 release day! We have tested remote control, agents and probes, and monitoring and management functions, which all appear to be working seamlessly. However, there are still many good reasons for your MSP customers to wait to upgrade from Windows 10.

As an MSP owner or manager, you want your teams to be continually improving and increasing efficiency. To make that happen, you know you need to be tracking MSP KPIs—after all, what gets measured gets improved. But which numbers do you track, how many do you track, and how do you actually use them to get better?

The service-level agreement (SLA) is a key component to any master service agreement (MSA) for any MSP looking to set clear guidelines with their customers on the services offering. Most of the MSAs I have reviewed outline exactly what the MSP is contractually obligated to provide the customer or business. The SLA is part of the contract where both the provider (you) and customer (them) agree on the IT services delivery model.

We’ve all seen the headlines. It’s no secret companies are being forced to re-examine the employee experience and what the future of work will look like in a post-pandemic world. With the adaptation to remote work, the pandemic created a new normal—where office and home life are blended, and people became accustomed to more flexibility. Now that flexibility is a benefit people don’t want to lose.

The changing dynamics of the modern workplace are creating new opportunities for MSPs to grow their list of services to aid customers in optimizing workforce productivity.

I came across an interesting sales stat in a 2020 report from Sales Insight Lab. They interviewed 400 sales professional and found that 71% of respondents said at least 50% of the prospects they were engaged with were NOT a good fit for what they were selling. This tells me there is a lot of wasted time and effort trying to convince incompatible businesses to sign with you. So how can you improve your odds of converting prospects?

When was the last time you thought about your backup process? Is it one of those things you’ve just accepted to be the way it is? If so, your backup may be consuming more time and resources than it should. The state of backup technology has moved forward, and many of the old assumptions about it are no longer true. N-able recently interviewed about a dozen MSPs from around the world and heard first-hand what they discovered when they took a fresh look at backup.