The managed services provider (MSP) industry has been rapidly consolidating for the past several years as private equity (PE) firms buy up small IT firms and cobble them together into larger platforms. But that process is evolving quickly for two main reasons: there aren’t enough sellers of quality assets and PE firms have shortened how long they hold their investments. That means they need to hunt for bigger game—and with a rifle, not a shotgun—before they cash out and exit.

When I’m speaking to any IT solution provider or managed service provider (MSP), one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “What’s the one mistake you’d recommend any IT businesses avoid?” My answer is always this: Not documenting your business. The reason is simple. If you don’t document your business, you’ll inevitably find your business is prone to an SPF—a single point of failure.

My mantra with regards to automation has always been, “If you do it more than twice, automate it.” And I stick by that, with a few exceptions. There are some things you should never trust to an automated script.

As the IT world continues to grow in size and complexity, an increasing amount of information is needed for both the operation and security of IT devices. It’s nearly impossible for MSPs and IT professionals to remember everything without writing it down somewhere, but “somewhere” needs to be both secure and readily available to reference. Fortunately, IT documentation software was created to be both.

I often have discussions with N-able partners who need help capturing data for either regular reporting or just to have when a customer asks for it. Often people will use a tool like BrightGauge to pull data from their RMM platform and generate dashboards and reports. However, these can be overly complex if you only need to capture the data so you have it and can act upon it. What I regularly recommend is that you create a monitoring script to capture just the data that is needed.

As today’s IT infrastructure becomes more complex, a continued reliance on legacy systems can become costly as IT operations get bogged down in inefficiencies and hampered by unreliability.

The MSP sales process has experienced some serious disruption over the past couple of years as a result of the pandemic, and as we make our way through this fifth wave, it is still unclear how much more we will all have to endure. But your MSP business still needs to grow—and to grow, you need sales, so what are the top sales skills your team needs to generate success in 2022?

Business continuity and security are top priorities for IT professionals. Along with data protection tools, data backup plays an important role in keeping an organization running. There is no shortage of tools and methods for backup and restore, but the glut of options can make choosing the most efficient and effective set of backup operations difficult.

Now more than ever, it's crucial for MSP owners to be mindful of burnout and to help their teams address it proactively. While it’s been a recognized term among mental health professionals and those in high-stress industries for years, “burnout” has taken on new prominence and meaning during the pandemic. Case in point, searches for "how to leave IT for goat farming" have skyrocketed the past two years.

Cloud technology has enjoyed exponential growth over the past several years. Increases in broadband and wireless speeds have spurred a rise in everything from cloud storage to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Before the cloud grew into its current form, it was primarily a tool for backing up data in a safe, remote location. Throughout the evolution of cloud, backup and restore remains one of this technology’s most widely-used and important functions.