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.

As many workers have shifted to working in offsite locations, the need for secure remote access for remote support and device management has never been greater. IT teams need It can be difficult to securely access and control all your organization’s endpoints, but secure remote access solutions simplify and streamline that process.

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.

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.

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?