I’m in the middle of planning a family celebration for my daughter’s upcoming Confirmation ceremony. The invitations have gone out, I’ve booked the restaurant where we will have lunch afterwards, and I’m currently sourcing a local bakery for the cake and sweets table. While scrolling through Facebook the other day, one of my friends “Liked” and tagged a new local bakery.

On the recent Q3 earnings call, N-able CEO John Pagliuca perfectly captured the mood in the MPS market. “Some in the industry refer to the MSP era we are in right now as the golden era for the MSPs,” he said.

Over the past few years, we’ve been seeing large-scale consolidation taking place in our marketplace, with private equity firms and margin-based companies, such as telcos and traditional IT consulting businesses, investing heavily in MSPs.

In part one of this blog post series, we discussed several key reasons why your clients need backup and why either of you might be considering a change. In this second part, I will discuss how you might go about expanding or replacing your existing backup offerings.

“I can’t get this website to load.” As common help requests go, this sort of ticket can cause any tech to roll their eyes in anticipation of wasting time on a wild goose chase. If example.com isn’t working for one of your users, it could be caused by any of a dozen or more points of failure—everything from the user making a simple typo to a major Internet outage.

Although it’s good to stay optimistic for 2022, it’s difficult to deny that the main challenges the world has been facing since the beginning of the pandemic are still among us. Cybersecurity continues to be one of the key global targets for criminals in a world where an ever-increasing percentage of the workforce is shifting to working from home (WFH), leaving organizations more vulnerable than ever to a wide array of threats.

One of the questions I regularly get asked is what common automation tools do I use or what do I advise people to use for various use cases? I thought I’d put this information into a blog for easy reference for our partners and others. Note: None of the recommendations below are commercial endorsements, but they are suggestions based on what I’ve used personally in the past. You are welcome to use whatever you want since most of the things below have other options, free or paid.

So, you’re thinking about replacing your current backup solution. Well, before you start requesting price quotes and comparing feature matrixes you should understand that a change can have both short-term and long-term impacts. The extent of the impact depends on several factors, including why your clients need backup, how those backups are being performed, whether they have ever experienced data loss, and how long they need to retain backup data.