Many entrepreneurs hang their shingle without putting much thought into sales. They find out further down the road that sales is the heart of enterprise, and that it demands just as much preparation and planning as any other aspect of business. More often than not, an MSP who doesn’t plan ahead finds a great deal of difficulty growing once their referral business has inevitably run dry.

The MSP industry is facing and ongoing movement across customers’ transition to the cloud, the evolving threat landscape, and a skills shortage that seems to be more pronounced than ever. Consider these facts from Gartner: The threat landscape is also evolving as highlighted by some of the following statistics: Data protection is a service that managed service providers (MSPs) need to consider as critical.

When I initially wrote my guide to blocking Microsoft’s auto-update to Windows 11—Windows 11: how to configure an auto-patch decline in N-central—I only had N-central partners and our N-central Patch Management in mind. However, after reading various other forums and discussions, I thought I’d take a more regimented approach to stopping or blocking Windows 11 from your machine.

Prior to the pandemic, the notion of hybrid work was foreign and in most cases was for the “exceptional situation”. There used to be a small group of remote workers who weren’t near the office, and the road-warriors who were rarely in the office. On average though, working in the office was the norm. Beginning in 2020, there were headlines, articles, research, and statistics on how hybrid work is here to stay.

“All happy successful MSPs are alike—each MSP fail is a fail in its own way.” That IT spin on the Anna Karenina principle pretty much sums up what we’ll cover here (but keep reading, it’s good stuff!). To be a successful MSP, you have to nail the financial, marketing, customer service, and tech sides of the business. All successful MSPs are “alike” in that way. On paper, that sounds simple enough.

Today, almost every IT department or MSP uses some form of mobile technology. Even though smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other mobile endpoints are incredibly useful for an organization, they can be difficult to manage. TechFunnel’s article on mobile devices in the workplace announces that one laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, while 7 million smartphones are lost every year.

As someone who has worked in an office environment for more than 20 years, I never considered the idea of working remotely. But as a result of what’s happened in the world over the past few years, like so many others out there, I find myself working from home full-time now. Don’t get me wrong, there are many benefits to working remotely—none more so for me than not sitting in traffic for an hour in what should have been a 10-minute commute.

Welcome to part 2 of our Patch Management Basics series. In part 1—Learn patch management—we covered what patch management is, how it’s different to vulnerability management, and what the components are that make a good patch management program. In this article, we’re going to go a step deeper and explore the features that make up the best patch management solutions.

Hard drive crash. Ransomware. Equipment failure. Accidental deletion. Theft. There are plenty of reasons why end users want to have a secure and up-to-date backup of their most important files. And there are just as many approaches to backup and recovery as there are reasons to want it in place. In this article, we’ll discuss practical strategies and best practices for backing up important data, including consumer-level options and how to get the most from an enterprise-grade backup solution.