Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework—NIST Cybersecurity Framework for short—is a set of best practices to help companies better identify, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. While the framework was intended to be used by internal IT teams, its five major themes—identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover—can be used to create a handy network security assessment tool for MSPs.

Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, SOPs that outline technical procedures are a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your MSP business. Whether you’ve got existing SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

For MSP business owners, figuring out how to improve your bottom line is like an ongoing game of tug of war. Do you raise your rates or do you make your service staff more productive? Raising rates may seem like the easier option, but at the risk of upsetting existing clients and losing prospects to competitors with better rates, it may not be your best bet. Instead, you should focus on improving service efficiency and productivity within your MSP.

It’s the beginning of a new year! You’ve had a great 12 months, are rested after the holiday break, and are now raring to make this year your MSP’s best one yet. You’re enthusiastic and you’re energetic. But how can you turn this positive energy into business success? Start by using these seven suggestions to kickstart your MSP for (almost) immediate improvements.

In 2019, the Auvik team and a helpful host of awesome guest authors published 51 blog posts—including this one! Some were about breaking down technical topics, some were focused on boosting your bottom line, and some were just plain fun. But which posts were the biggest crowd pleasers? Based on web traffic data, here’s our top 10.

I recently had a conversation with an IT business owner who told me he felt burned out. While his business experienced steady growth over the past 12 months—and he was pleased with the positive impact on his bottom line—he felt like he’d achieved this success at the expense of his health. I knew how he felt. I’d been there too. Chances are, like a lot of people in our industry, you’ve been there too.

2011 was a big year for pop culture: Prince William and Kate Middleton tied the knot, Ashton Kutcher replaced Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men, and the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marked the end of an era. While our eyes were turned to the screen, something else was happening—two former co-workers were deciding it was time to start a new adventure together. Know what that means?

Wi-Fi 6, or 802.11ax if you want to get technical, is the latest version of the 802.11 standard for wireless network transmissions that we all know as Wi-Fi. And if you’ve been on any tech news websites lately, you’ll know the topic is taking the tech world by storm. To get to the bottom of all the Wi-Fi 6 buzz, we talked with Lee Badman, a wireless network architect and expert, about what it means for MSPs and whether they should buy into the hype.

A core tenet of managed services is the ability of an MSP to support multiple clients, in various locations, all without ever leaving your desk. While this approach is more efficient and profitable than dispatching engineers out to client sites to deal with every support ticket that comes in, there’s a catch. The challenge is when you become good at doing managed services in this way, you don’t have much of an excuse to visit your client sites at all.

What is cloud computing? If you’ve been asked this question by a client, you know there isn’t an easy answer—it really depends on who you ask, and every article seems to say it’s something different. But as cloud adoption continues to rise, you’ll likely be asked this question over and over again, and you’ll want a simple answer you can rely on. So we’ve broken it down for you.