The public sector hasn’t always had a reputation for digital agility and modern hardware, but that’s beginning to change thanks to COVID-19. Forced to operate from home, public sector employees are employing a mix of devices and cloud strategies to keep city services running. However, these very same advances could be fueling shadow IT within public sector organizations and leaving them vulnerable to data leakage, theft, or attack.

There are a variety of ways to add accessible data storage to a home or business network, but not all equipment is created equal. Determining the best solution is challenging, especially for small businesses or home users who don’t necessarily need the features and capacities that large organizations require. Among the most common solutions to choose from are cloud, in-house servers, and network-attached storage (NAS).

Companies typically seek to create centralized systems to manage IT assets, including not only hardware, software, networks, and infrastructure, but also important data. Complete control over such a complex environment is often difficult -- if not impossible -- to achieve, but proper asset management protocols can help organizations edge closer to that goal. Asset management makes it easier to manage budgets, utilize analytics, protect data, and optimize the IT environment.

In the digital age, organizations depend more on IT than ever before. The foundation of many IT functions -- including data storage, website hosting, emails, and software -- is server management. Without reliable, functioning servers, most IT functionality would collapse. Many businesses have migrated internal IT to cloud services using servers located in remote data centers, but a significant number still have in-house servers or use a hybrid environment of in-house and cloud services.

Feel like you're working through the same tickets and tasks over and over and over again? Breakout of your IT Groundhog Day time loop with the help of scripts and automation. Helpdesks and IT teams are inundated with repetitive, time-consuming, often low-value tasks that distract from larger strategic projects. With most IT leaders saying their staff is already stretched thin, this leaves little room for important projects that will lead to greater organizational productivity and efficiency.

As the IT world continues to grow in size and complexity, an increasing amount of information is needed for both the operation and security of IT devices. It’s nearly impossible for MSPs and IT professionals to remember everything without writing it down somewhere, but “somewhere” needs to be both secure and readily available to reference. Fortunately, IT documentation software was created to be both.

Business continuity and security are top priorities for IT professionals. Along with data protection tools, data backup plays an important role in keeping an organization running. There is no shortage of tools and methods for backup and restore, but the glut of options can make choosing the most efficient and effective set of backup operations difficult.

Now more than ever, it's crucial for MSP owners to be mindful of burnout and to help their teams address it proactively. While it’s been a recognized term among mental health professionals and those in high-stress industries for years, “burnout” has taken on new prominence and meaning during the pandemic. Case in point, searches for "how to leave IT for goat farming" have skyrocketed the past two years.

Cloud technology has enjoyed exponential growth over the past several years. Increases in broadband and wireless speeds have spurred a rise in everything from cloud storage to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Before the cloud grew into its current form, it was primarily a tool for backing up data in a safe, remote location. Throughout the evolution of cloud, backup and restore remains one of this technology’s most widely-used and important functions.

NinjaOne released our custom field functionality in 2021, adding a new level of flexibility, customization, and automation power to our platform. Custom fields are an advanced feature that requires setup to use, but once you start, the power and flexibility of this feature is almost limitless. In this blog piece, we’ll walk you through a powerful use case for custom fields in NinjaOne. Refer to part one of this series for a quick overview of NinjaOne Custom Fields.