Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network management is the ongoing monitoring, administration, and maintenance of any networked system of computers. That said, networks have grown beyond the desktop computer, now encompassing all manner of end devices — mobile devices, laptops, printers — and the hardware that facilitates their interaction.

This is the first in a four-part series focusing on the findings from our 2023 Network IT Management Report. We surveyed 4500 IT professionals from internal IT teams and MSPs across North America to gauge where their organizations are heading from a network management perspective. In part one, we’ll detail the overarching needs network professions across all industries to have in common. You can read the full 2023 report and compare your own IT statistics here.

Tolly’s 2022 Network Visibility Capabilities Report demonstrated how Auvik delivers industry-leading time to value. The report takes a deep dive into how Auvik stacks up to the competition across a variety of criteria. Which is all well and good from a purely analytical standpoint, but what does it mean for your day-to-day? After all, we’re IT pros, not accountants.

The office network has been in a near-constant state of evolution since dumb terminals and token rings. MPLS unlocked the ability to connect LANs. VPNs allowed end-users to work remotely while still being behind the firewall. Wi-Fi made intra-office travel easy and lessened reliance on extensive cabling. The WAN is slowly giving way to SD-WAN. New software and cloud-based networking componentry are allowing vendors to reimagine firewalls and routing.

It’s no secret that there is a lot of money involved in cybercrime. With McAfee estimating the annual global cost of cybercrime at just under $1 trillion, the dark side of tech is big business. Clearly, those losses have an impact on the global economy. It’s also become a pressing question to see if macroeconomic/geopolitical trends impact cybercrime.

Rolling out enterprise Wi-Fi to your organization—across an office, or across multiple campuses—has quickly become a standard practice for MSPs and on-staff IT teams. That said, it may be a process that’s relatively new to someone (or some team!) that’s spent years focusing on the wired world.

“All happy successful MSPs are alike—each MSP fail is a fail in its own way.” That IT spin on the Anna Karenina principle pretty much sums up what we’ll cover here (but keep reading, it’s good stuff!). To be a successful MSP, you have to nail the financial, marketing, customer service, and tech sides of the business. All successful MSPs are “alike” in that way. On paper, that sounds simple enough.

Everybody agrees network documentation is extremely important, but there tends not to be a lot of agreement on what that documentation should include. The short answer is that it should include everything that’s relevant—but what that means varies between networks. For example, in a really small network with one switch and a firewall, and perhaps a single wireless access point, there isn’t much to document. It might be enough to put everything in a single diagram.

Try Googling “Ways to up your sales game” and you’ll find thousands of articles from experts touting claims that their MSP sales process is best—with no shortage of buzzwords to hook you in. But in both selling to, and selling with, MSPs over the years, I’ve found that chasing buzzwords and buying into the latest craze both dilutes and compromises an authentic experience with a prospective customer, and the worst part is the customer can feel it the moment it happens.

According to Veeam’s 2022 Ransomware Trends Report, less than 69% of data stolen during ransomware attacks in 2021 was ever recovered. Ransomware is big business for bad actors. In 2021, the average ransom demand was $247,000, up 45% higher than the previous year. Considering that 76% of the victim organizations surveyed admitted to paying the ransom, it’s likely that the total cost of ransomware to businesses globally was in the billions.