When I initially wrote my guide to blocking Microsoft’s auto-update to Windows 11—Windows 11: how to configure an auto-patch decline in N-central—I only had N-central partners and our N-central Patch Management in mind. However, after reading various other forums and discussions, I thought I’d take a more regimented approach to stopping or blocking Windows 11 from your machine.
As someone who has worked in an office environment for more than 20 years, I never considered the idea of working remotely. But as a result of what’s happened in the world over the past few years, like so many others out there, I find myself working from home full-time now. Don’t get me wrong, there are many benefits to working remotely—none more so for me than not sitting in traffic for an hour in what should have been a 10-minute commute.
Welcome to part 2 of our Patch Management Basics series. In part 1—Learn patch management—we covered what patch management is, how it’s different to vulnerability management, and what the components are that make a good patch management program. In this article, we’re going to go a step deeper and explore the features that make up the best patch management solutions.
Mac monitoring is still seen as something of a weird science by many MSPs, but it is going to be a growing issue if you continue to ignore them. We’re increasingly seeing unmonitored Apple devices on our networks, and the harsh reality is, if you’re not monitoring these devices on your customers’ networks you’re not only creating risk, you’re also missing out on a potential revenue stream.
Prior to joining N-able, I worked for MSPs that supported clients all over the island of Ireland. That career in IT started back in the last millennium (yes, I’m that old), when reactive support often meant hopping into the car and driving to a customer to resolve their issues in person and on some rare occasions jumping on a flight if the situation was that urgent.
Countless times in the MSP world I’ve had to ask myself, “why can’t the end users handle this?” Typically, the answer boils down to the fact that they are paying the MSP to take that stress and labor off their hands. However, there are occasions when end users, providing they’re properly trained, can legitimately take some of the workload off the MSP’s hands.
At our N-able Empower event held in Las Vegas last month, our CEO John Pagliuca spoke to more than 400 of our MSP partners about the fact that he while doesn’t believe anything is recession proof, he does believe that the MSP industry is recession resilient.
With customers’ Microsoft environments becoming more sophisticated, the days of MSPs being hired to ‘just’ service an organization’s Microsoft 365 needs are long gone. Pre-pandemic, tasks typically revolved around new client setups, migrations, and updating existing Microsoft setups. It’s a different story now. MSPs are focusing their time on digital transformation, which means that more processes are needed to manage tenants. So, how can processes be more efficient?
