Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

While MSPs have been making significant investments in security and offering services, it is a challenge to keep up with the frequency and evolving sophistication of today’s cybersecurity threats. Defense in Depth (DiD) is the foundation on which most MSPs have built a layered security approach for dealing with them.

If you haven’t started planning your marketing activities for 2022, it should be your number one priority this month. But what should you be doing and where do you start? To kick off 2022, I thought a post on the top marketing trends MSPs should watch for in 2022 would be a great springboard to get those creative juices flowing.

2021 was another challenging year globally. Despite this, the N-able™ Take Control team continued to deliver top-notch releases to increase product functionalities and improve customer satisfaction. In this blog, we’ll take a brief look at the key client-facing features we’ve delivered in the past 12 months.

The managed services provider (MSP) industry has been rapidly consolidating for the past several years as private equity (PE) firms buy up small IT firms and cobble them together into larger platforms. But that process is evolving quickly for two main reasons: there aren’t enough sellers of quality assets and PE firms have shortened how long they hold their investments. That means they need to hunt for bigger game—and with a rifle, not a shotgun—before they cash out and exit.

My mantra with regards to automation has always been, “If you do it more than twice, automate it.” And I stick by that, with a few exceptions. There are some things you should never trust to an automated script.

I often have discussions with N-able partners who need help capturing data for either regular reporting or just to have when a customer asks for it. Often people will use a tool like BrightGauge to pull data from their RMM platform and generate dashboards and reports. However, these can be overly complex if you only need to capture the data so you have it and can act upon it. What I regularly recommend is that you create a monitoring script to capture just the data that is needed.

The MSP sales process has experienced some serious disruption over the past couple of years as a result of the pandemic, and as we make our way through this fifth wave, it is still unclear how much more we will all have to endure. But your MSP business still needs to grow—and to grow, you need sales, so what are the top sales skills your team needs to generate success in 2022?

The state of backup technology has moved forward, and many of the old assumptions are no longer true. For years, image-based backup was considered the industry standard. But today’s IT professionals really need full-system recovery capabilities without the built-in inefficiencies of legacy image backup products. Image-based backup backups are far from ideal, especially for managed services providers (MSPs).

I don’t usually do blog posts on news stories, but this one has the potential to impact a lot of people, so I thought it was worth taking a closer look. The top-level story is that Microsoft announced it will not be releasing Hyper-V Server Free as part of Windows 2022. However, if you’re already using Hyper-V Server Free 2019, you can continue to do so until 2029. Hyper-V Server Free is basically a Windows Server Core on which Microsoft has pre-installed the Hyper-V role.