When prospects do a Google search on your MSP, where do they find you? Is your MSP landing on Page 1, or is it being relegated to Page 2 or even worse? According to quicksprout.com, the top result on Google has a 33% chance of getting clicked, and they have found that 75% of people won’t scroll beyond the first page. (I know I never do—if what I’m looking for can’t be found on Page 1, why bother even seeing what is on Page 2?)

Any mature industry, at some point, will be regulated by local, state, or federal laws. Restaurants did not always have to have food safety inspections. Gas stations did not always have to have pumps calibrated and certified. Vehicles have not always required seat belts. As a society, we are well served by these regulations that help keep us safe and protect consumer interests.

As the saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. So, in this blog, I’m going to look at five things in N-central that you might not know exactly how they work—or you might not know about them at all.

Now that we have entered the back half of the year, this is a good time to do a self-check on yourself, your team, your customers and your overall MSP business.

With the continued focus in our space on the movement from MSP to MSSP, it’s crucial to remember that products alone don’t necessarily make you an MSSP. For smaller customers, although you might be able to provide a range of security solutions (like EDR and backup) and compliment these with an RMM to provide insight and control over end user devices, this is not enough to call yourself an MSSP.

According to the 2021 Cost of Data Breach report, the average attack “dwell time”—the period between an attacker’s breach of an organization’s network and the point at which the organization finds out about it—is 287 days. During this time, the attacker can stealthily look to gather valuable information to steal or compromise data, incurring huge costs for affected companies.

I’ve written extensively about the technical aspects to consider when expanding your horizons and embracing the Mac platform. What I haven’t covered much up to now is why. Why bother learning an entirely new skillset, targeted at supporting a minority platform, when you’ve got your hands full just keeping up with Windows?

A while back, we wrote about the differences between backup and data protection. While the points made there are still valid, the industry’s definitions of these terms have continued to evolve, as has our thinking on the topic. At N-able, we’ve settled on a definition shared by analyst firm William Blair in a recent report: data protection solutions should include backup, disaster recovery, and archiving/retention of backups.

You’ve been waiting and planning all year. The sunscreen is packed, the neighbors have a spare key to water the plants while you are away, you made sure to set your out-of-office notifications, and emergency contact information has been updated. It is time for vacation season!