Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You have made the decision to finally start taking the marketing and lead gen activities of your MSP a bit more seriously, but, as the business owner, you recognize that you don’t have the time or energy to take this initiative on yourself. So, what do you do? Do you decide to hire internally and build your MSP marketing department from the ground up? Or do you decide to outsource the marketing function to a third-party agency and have them manage it all for you?

As an IT solution provider, you must walk a fine line between generating revenue and maintaining your team while providing the best possible service for your clients. However, you must have a sufficient budget and develop long-term strategies to attain all of these. Furthermore, when you’re operating on a break-fix model, all these tasks can be challenging.

The managed services provider (MSP) industry is at a pivotal moment in its history. With data management, security, and privacy regulations getting strengthened and added to the books all over the world, and with awareness of the risks associated with those issues on the rise, MSPs must take their role in compliance seriously. Any failure to do so will put individual MSPs at a competitive disadvantage, and incidents involving MSPs will be a stain on the industry’s reputation.

“You can’t get this kind of stuff for free,” says Manuel “Manny” Lloyd, founder of Wilmington, NC based CyberSleuth. “I know technically MarketBuilder isn’t free, because you have to be an N-able partner to use it, but at the same marketing can be expensive and MarketBuilder gives you all the tools you need to create targeted, MSP-specific marketing campaigns.”

With the surge of remote workers and a need for increased flexibility, the traditional workplace is a thing of the past. According to Slack’s Future-Forum Pulse Report, the percentage of people working in hybrid and remote arrangements has increased to 58% in the United States. This means that organizations will need to adapt to a hybrid model to maximize employee productivity while supporting collaboration in and out of the office.

“Just one more tool…what’s the harm?” Because MSPs tend to be technophiles in some measure, we can sometimes be lured in by shiny objects known as “the newest and flashiest solution”. While this isn’t catastrophic in its own right, the “just one more tool” effect is compounding in nature, and so are its dangers.

Regex—short for regular expressions—is a way to describe a search pattern. They can be used to find a text pattern or string (character sequence) within a larger body of text, such as a sentence or paragraph, but even entire documents and databases. They can be used to quickly find specific text in a text document like a configuration file for a network device. Need to know what IP addresses a device has? What VLANs are on a switch? What devices are using a deprecated DNS server?