2011 was a big year for pop culture: Prince William and Kate Middleton tied the knot, Ashton Kutcher replaced Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men, and the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marked the end of an era. While our eyes were turned to the screen, something else was happening—two former co-workers were deciding it was time to start a new adventure together. Know what that means?

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.

What is cloud computing? If you’ve been asked this question by a client, you know there isn’t an easy answer—it really depends on who you ask, and every article seems to say it’s something different. But as cloud adoption continues to rise, you’ll likely be asked this question over and over again, and you’ll want a simple answer you can rely on. So we’ve broken it down for you.

At the beginning of October, conveniently dubbed National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Auvik team descended on the city of Pittsburgh to attend Continuum Navigate East 2019. With recent MSP-targeted ransomware attacks fresh in the minds of all attendees, cybersecurity took the event by storm—from keynotes to casual conversations, there was no escaping it. What was everyone saying? We put together a list of four key takeaways from the event to fill you in.

In 2018, we released the inaugural Managing Network Vendor Diversity Report, where we discovered that MSPs face a serious challenge: There’s high vendor diversity in the network hardware they operate. In the short year since then, the managed services industry has experienced a lot of change: tech trends are evolving, new products are being released, and client expectations are growing. So what was true in 2018 might not be any longer.

In a 2019 Top Trends Transforming Network Operations survey, 34% of networking pros identified improving network agility as their top business goal for the year. The stat isn’t surprising. “Network agility” is considered the future of networking, but the term itself has become a bit of a buzzword. Everyone’s talking about it, but no one can agree on its definition. So what does network agility actually mean? We surfed the web and analyzed what (almost) everyone has to say.

It’s a story we often hear from our partners: A client calls and their network’s down, so our partner logs into Auvik, pinpoints the problem, and gets them back up in no time. Everyone’s happy. But your client shouldn’t have to make that first call. And if you’re using Auvik to its full potential, they likely won’t have to. Turning Auvik on when a client reports a major problem doesn’t make full use of Auvik’s power. For that, it needs to be on all the time.

As the managed services market becomes increasingly competitive, you’re likely looking for ways to boost your MSP’s productivity and efficiency. You’ve already got a stellar PSA, RMM, and network management tool, but you need something more. You need something like a TED Talk… or six… to inspire fresh ideas and make your MSP the best it can be. That’s why we surfed the web and found six seriously awesome speakers to bring you a new perspective on your business.

It’s a question the Auvik support team receives often: “What’s the difference between packet errors, packet discards, and packet loss?” And if you’ve ever typed that sentence—or any other variation—into Google, you’ll know it’s a tricky answer to find. Until now. Before we break down the three packet terms, let’s first look at packets themselves.