Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome to March! It’s a new month with a new MSP growth habit to start focusing on. In January, I encouraged you to Never Stop Learning to kick off our list of 12 MSP growth habits. In February, I urged you to go out and Find Love in the form of updating your MSP’s social proof for your website and social media feeds. For March it’s all about stepping out of your comfort zone and exploring new market opportunities to help expand your MSP business.

In my first two blogs in this series, I looked at some of the obvious signs and not so obvious signs that it might be time to change your RMM. However, the reality is that most MSPs don’t want to change unless they really have to, and in many of the cases I’ve seen they’re prepared to let things be bad for way too long.

In my last blog I took a look at some of what I see as the most obvious signs that your MSP business might have outgrown its RMM. These included: In this blog, I’m going to turn my attention to looking at some of the less obvious signs to reconsider your RMM.

When thinking about your strategy around backups, recovery, availability, and business continuity, one part of the plan tends to fall by the wayside: backup retention. We focus so much on things like recovery objectives, SLAs, and tiers of data, that our thinking revolves around the need to potentially recover the backup that we just made a matter of minutes afterward. But there are data sets that need to be available weeks, months—even years—after they are made.

As your MSP business grows and develops, it’s highly likely that at some point you’re going to find that the tools you originally chose to support your business may not be enough for your current needs. Obviously, no vendor wants to lose customers, and we’d all rather make sure you’re using your existing tools to their full capacity. However, there are going to be times when your existing toolset will be holding you back, and you need to know how to spot that.

It is safe to say that anyone responsible for patch management will have had their fair share of issues with Windows Feature Updates over the years. These updates have amounted to new operating systems versions being released up to twice a year, and needless to say, could be huge in size—ranging anywhere from 3GB to 6GB. This resulted in not only long download times, but also lengthy install times—anywhere from one to two hours—that required multiple reboots to complete.

As the cyberthreat landscape is getting more sophisticated, the need for skilled cybersecurity professionals is also rising. The recent 2022 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study revealed that, in the past year, the cybersecurity workforce gap (the difference between the number of security professionals required and the number of suitably qualified people in the marketplace) has grown more than twice as much as the number of actual cybersecurity workforce hired, with a 26.2% year-on-year increase.

Last month, I introduced a new blog series for 2023 that aims to focus on how we can do a better job of making our New Year resolutions stick. Why do so many resolutions fail? Because we attempt to do too much, too quickly. We place too much pressure on ourselves to change EVERYTHING we don’t like, which can then become overwhelming to manage and keep up with.