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MSP

The latest News and Information on Managed Service Providers and related technologies.

10 steps to securing the cloud

When it comes to cloud adoption, the analogy I always use is that our networks used to be built like castles. We put all our servers and users inside, and we had big walls to protect everything. Today, we’ve shifted large parts of our businesses outside of these walls, and moved them to various cloud and SaaS providers. As a result, we no longer always have the knowledge or expertise to secure and protect them.

Data Center's Need MSPs

A recent Honeywell survey reinforced something many in the MSP world already knew: data centers need managed service providers. 96% of facility managers indicated remote management is important, but only 34% had remote management capabilities in place. That’s surprising in a digital world where data centers enable critical business functions and an epic business opportunity for MSPs looking to enter the data center world.

MSP's Guide to Customer Data Protection

Customer data protection is important to every business that wants to protect its financial security and its reputation -- but it’s even more important for managed service providers (MSPs). When talking to your clients, you’ll probably tell them that a huge reason why protecting customer data is mission critical is because their entire business depends on it.

6 Best Network Inventory Documentation Tools

Although network inventory documentation isn’t the most glamorous task, it is essential for the success of any IT department. According to Steady Networks, “Workers spend about 22 minutes each day dealing with some type of IT issue.” An accurate network inventory can greatly reduce the time it takes for internal IT to identify and solve issues.

N-central: Getting customers' Active Issues under control

For some N-central users, clicking on the Active Issues view and seeing the total number of issues in the bottom right hand corner can be daunting and lead you to think ‘How am I ever going to get this under control?’ In this blog, we are going to look at a few steps you can take to address some of these issues and bring that number down, so that your Active Issues view returns to a useful dynamic dashboard, with key issues that you need to address.

4 Energy Vampires Draining Your Helpdesk's Efficiency

The way that many organizations are operating has fundamentally changed over the past few years, and IT has been forced to evolve to keep pace. The good news is many teams are seeing their budgets for new tools and services increase. The bad news is the additional tooling doesn’t appear to be making a dent in IT support workloads (at least not yet). According to Zendesk, tickets filed by corporate employees jumped 31% last year.

Virtual CISO Services: A New Revenue Stream for MSPs?

As you look to optimize your MSP’s growing business, it’s going to become more and more important to maintain an acceptable return on your investment. To do this, you’ll need to find services that increase your gross margin on every client engagement. Virtual CISO services can greatly help in this function. While solutions like Auvik already help MSPs have visibility inside of client networks, we want to take this a step further with the addition of vCISO services.

The 2022 Guide to Managed Services Agreements for MSPs

Wouldn’t it be great if all business transactions could be conducted over lunch and executed with a handshake? It would sure cut down on the paperwork. Unfortunately, business is far too complicated for the kind of vagueness and misunderstanding that would arise from such a deal. Everything needs to be in writing. Love them or hate them, those piles of paperwork are your allies. This is especially true when evolving your business from a break/fix model to managed services.