On a fairly regular basis, users will post to Reddit or Spiceworks or another IT forum to ask about the best support staff ratio of techs to users, and what other companies are finding sustainable. The question usually comes from an overworked tech who’s drowning in tickets and trying to understand what’s considered. The answers can get interesting. On Spiceworks, many people responded with details about the environments they support—and the range was notable.

Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, an MSP SOP that outlines technical procedures is a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your business. Whether you’ve got existing MSP SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand-new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

I speak to a lot of MSPs every day, and I’m always asked for advice on meeting new prospects. Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges they all face. “Have you tried asking your existing clients for referrals?” is my stock answer. And for good reason—prospects referred to you by an existing client are four times more likely to buy than any other opportunities. Here are a few of my tips on how to generate client referrals from existing clients.

Break out your buzzword bingo cards, it’s time to talk about SASE or Secure Access Service Edge. Pronounced “sassy,” SASE has become one of the hottest topics in networking and security over the last three years. The basic idea is great: all your security and network services are on one platform. The problem comes when you get into the specifics. When does a set of services go from “not SASE” to “SASE”?

In the first portion of the underutilized RMM features series, we discussed the use of Site Concentrators and Data Overdue Cross-Checks. This time we’re going to discuss Monitoring Templates. MSPs have shied away from Monitoring Templates in the past because of the effort needed to set them up. I think this is the wrong way to look at them; we need to be thinking long-term here.

Pew research reports that the percentage of adults who own smartphones is up to 85%. These mobile devices are also being used frequently for work. The addition of an increasing number of mobile devices within companies causes IT environments to be more complex, making it necessary to have a centralized management tool for these types of devices. Mobile device management (MDM) is software tool designed to allow IT to manage smartphones and tablets that are used within a business.

We’ve entered a time when hard drives are becoming less important than data speeds, syncing, and remote storage. More and more end-users are saving their files in the cloud for convenience, safety, and cost savings. That said, some people still have concerns about cloud computing -- namely around security. How safe are files that are stored hundreds or thousands of miles away, on some other organization’s hardware?

Computers double in power every couple of years, according to Moore’s Law. That’s good news for companies and their people—continually faster and smarter gear can power higher productivity. But there’s also a downside to Moore’s Law: devices go obsolete quickly. The average server lifespan is only two to four years. And network switches often last just three to five years before breakdowns become a common concern.

While it is fair to say that in recent years we’ve seen a shift to servers being deployed in the cloud through Microsoft Azure or AWS, I’m sure if you’re reading this today you still have a large percentage of physical servers under your management, including Hyper-V and ESXi hosts. N-central’s ESXi monitoring should automatically detect and monitor the hardware in these boxes, but what about the rest?