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.

For many companies, the beginning of October is also the beginning of the fourth and final quarter of the fiscal year. In IT, it’s a time to prepare for the new year by defining our priorities and setting our budget. COVID-19 threw a wrench into all of our 2020 plans last year and a lot has changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for a network monitoring system in your software stack.

You’ve heard the term IT help desk. You’ve probably also heard of IT service desks. They’re pretty much the same thing, aren’t they? They sound similar enough, so when people start throwing around mentions of help desk vs service desk, you don’t raise an eyebrow. After all, you don’t want to seem like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Here’s the thing: an IT help desk differs from an IT service desk.

Data loss events frequently occur, but it seems that a good portion of companies are not fully prepared for these damaging events. An Avast report states that 60% of all backups performed are incomplete and restores fail 50% of the time. An increasing number of organizations depend on digital data, so data backup and recovery should be a top priority to potentially minimize both downtime and loss of data and ensure continuity of business operations.

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.

Agent-based and agentless monitoring are the two main approaches network monitoring tools use to capture and report data from network devices. As the names suggest, the difference between the two is pretty simple: someone has to install extra software(the agent) for agent-based monitoring to work. But, that doesn’t explain why an IT team or an MSP would choose agent-based or agentless monitoring.

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?

In today’s Geo Economics and a truly globalized world, it has become easier for products and services to reach consumers and industry alike. To reach the customers and consumers directly can be expensive and an operational challenge as it would require a large workforce to sell, deploy, and service the products/ services. For a growing organization, the initial focus is towards acquiring customers, expanding market reach, providing a good customer experience, and containing costs at the same time.

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.