Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This month, I have been delivering a three-part Boot camp series focused on the MSP Sales process. MSPs that I have been speaking with lately, have been telling me that they are starting to gain success with their marketing, and are increasing the volume of leads they are generating. However, they are also telling me they’re struggling with how to move those leads through the sales process and converting them into new, signed, Managed Services contracts at the end.

It’s the holiday season again, which means family gatherings, good food, and plenty of toasts. It also means a lot of online activity—buying gifts, getting promotional offers, booking deliveries—all of which mean a continuous flow of emails sent to your personal and business accounts. With so much going on, even experienced users can accidentally fall prey to one of the many “hooks” that cybercriminals are putting out there.

I’m sure for most of you reading this, you are well aware of just how powerful PowerShell can be. Speaking with partners and prospects over the years who were either using or evaluating our software, I’d often get asked: “Can your products do X?”.

Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 21h1 will go in End of Servicing (EOS) on December 13, 2022, and a month later, on January 10, 2023, they will put Windows 8 in End of Life (EOL)—Windows 8.1 End of Life will also occur on the same date. What does this mean for you as an MSP or internal IT team… should you care? The short answer is “probably”.

As 2022 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to look back at the past 12 months and highlight some of the great new features we’ve seen added in N-central. I got the idea for this blog recently when I was helping a partner and was shocked to find discover how old the version they were running was. Of course, I get that not everyone wants to jump onto the latest release straight away.

With 2022 winding down, many MSPs will be using this time to reflect on their performance during the past year, and strategizing on how they can improve in 2023. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that MSPs should be continuously tracking as part of their normal business activity to help measure the health of their organization. In this blog I’m going outline what I believe the five most important ones are.

It’s always been important for managed services providers (MSPs) to exercise backup best practices but this has become even more important with the pandemic having reset employees’ expectations around remote work. Up to 74% of professionals believe that remote work is here to stay according to Growmotely, while 16% of companies globally are already completely remote and 40% offer hybrid working.

Let’s start with a simple but harsh fact: If you say you’re protecting your customers’ networks and you’re not managing their Apple devices, then you’re lying to them and yourself! Over the years hackers have targeted everything from HVAC machines (Target) to fish tank thermometers (an unnamed Las Vegas casino) and a whole host of devices in between in order to prise their way into company networks. Let’s stop for a minute to consider that fact.

Having returned from our N-able Empower event in Las Vegas about a month ago from writing this, I was surprised at just how many attendees felt like they were not doing enough to automate their IT processes. I spoke to several IT leaders, business owners, presidents, and other executives and all of them were looking to do more with automation—many were even still trying to get to grips with the concept from a business perspective and start out on their automation journey.