Disaster recovery (DR) plans are not one-size-fits-all. There’s no silver bullet, and without a clear understanding and some level of customization, a DR plan done wrong will have detrimental effects on an organization’s operations and business. And let’s not forget the wrecking ball a bad DR plan delivers to the VAR or MSP who designed and executed it. Loss of business aside, there’s guilt, reputation damage, and potential lawsuits. It’s not a good day.

Whether you work for an MSP or you are an IT Professional, patch management is a critical aspect of modern IT infrastructure, particularly in today’s complex, interconnected world. With the ever-increasing number of cyber threats and vulnerabilities, it is essential to keep your software up-to-date to help minimize the risk of security breaches.

If you’ve been shying away from exploring co-managed IT services opportunities, it might be time to think again. Co-managed is here to stay, and is likely going to be a big play for MSPs looking to move up market, especially considering the increasing pricing pressures we’re seeing in the market.

It’s World Backup Day! And that means that once again, backup vendors, influencers, and pundits are talking about the importance of backing up your data. Of course, that’s important, as is testing your backups on a regular basis, and making sure you’re adhering to regulatory and security standards in the process. But in the 12 years since World Backup Day began, surely we’ve learned some lessons about how to do backup better?

The security industry may not have been making a lot of noise about Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) for long, but it’s not actually a new technology. Despite having been around now for roughly 10 years, it’s only recently that EDR has really come to the fore. This has been driven by the fact that traditional antivirus struggles to cope with the increasing sophistication of modern malware, and is certainly unfit to handle new types of cyber threats.

As you likely be all too aware, there is a Microsoft Outlook zero-day vulnerability listed under CVE-2023-23397. With the increased attacks on Outlook this month, Microsoft has pushed out fixes for about 80 Windows flaws. More information on some of those patches can be found in my colleague Lewis Pope’s March 2023 Patch Tuesday blog. Lewis was also kind enough to send over the remediation script for both N-able N-central and N-able N-sight.

The best part about patching in N-able N-central is the ability to fully automate the process, but even if that is accomplished correctly there is still a need to have the right amount of sensitivity of patch monitoring in place. I have always monitored patches in terms of age, I did so with WSUS v3 (15 years ago) and have always done so in N-central.

Network device monitoring is a crucial aspect of IT management and it helps organizations to ensure that their network infrastructure is running smoothly. Many people that use RMM solutions will often use an additional application to monitor their network devices. However, one of the huge benefits of using N-able N-central as your RMM solution is the way it allows you to monitor network devices through Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

MSPs own and process large amounts of sensitive data and act as gateways to the sensitive data and infrastructure of their clients, which is why cybercriminals view them as good potential targets. To adequately protect this sensitive data from today’s sophisticated attacks, it is crucial that MSPs leverage cybersecurity best practices to ensure the safety and security of their own systems and their customers’ systems.