For MSP business owners, figuring out how to improve your bottom line is like an ongoing game of tug of war. Do you raise your rates or do you make your service staff more productive? Raising rates may seem like the easier option, but at the risk of upsetting existing clients and losing prospects to competitors with better rates, it may not be your best bet. Instead, you should focus on improving service efficiency and productivity within your MSP.

Last month, the Elastic Security Protections Team prevented an attempted ransomware attack targeting an organization monitored by one of our customers, an IT Managed Service Provider (MSP). We analyzed the alerts that were generated after an adversary’s process injection attempts were prevented by Elastic Endpoint Security on several endpoints. Adversaries often attempt to inject their malicious code into a running process before encrypting and holding the victim’s data to ransom.

As 2019 comes to an end, OnPage would like to re-inform MSP teams about the value and importance of offering a 24×7 support service. Twenty-four seven support ensures that client issues are quickly resolved by an after-hours support team. Though 24×7 support is a must-have offering, MSPs must first re-work their internal workflows and policies, ensuring that after-hours servicing is a pain-free venture.

I recently had a conversation with an IT business owner who told me he felt burned out. While his business experienced steady growth over the past 12 months—and he was pleased with the positive impact on his bottom line—he felt like he’d achieved this success at the expense of his health. I knew how he felt. I’d been there too. Chances are, like a lot of people in our industry, you’ve been there too.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are on the hook to deliver reliable, performant, and secure services to their customers. Production issues or security incidents can threaten SLAs, customer contracts, and ultimately business reputations. To state the obvious, MSPs need to understand what is going on in their environment so they can effectively identify and diagnose production issues before they impact customers. This is the idea behind “observability.”

Wi-Fi 6, or 802.11ax if you want to get technical, is the latest version of the 802.11 standard for wireless network transmissions that we all know as Wi-Fi. And if you’ve been on any tech news websites lately, you’ll know the topic is taking the tech world by storm. To get to the bottom of all the Wi-Fi 6 buzz, we talked with Lee Badman, a wireless network architect and expert, about what it means for MSPs and whether they should buy into the hype.

A core tenet of managed services is the ability of an MSP to support multiple clients, in various locations, all without ever leaving your desk. While this approach is more efficient and profitable than dispatching engineers out to client sites to deal with every support ticket that comes in, there’s a catch. The challenge is when you become good at doing managed services in this way, you don’t have much of an excuse to visit your client sites at all.