One difficult part of taking on a new role, especially a technical one, is learning all the jargon. Listening in on a conversation among specialists in any field you’re not intimately familiar with can be highly confounding. It sounds like they’re speaking English. At least some of the words are English, but you’ve never heard them put together in that particular order before. I heard someone mention SMB and SME? Is that a Small to Medium Business or Small/Mid-sized Enterprise?

In my final blog as the Head Nerd for N-central and now your newest Product Manager for N-central, I thought it would be time to update my previous blog from July, 2021 and provide a few more details as to why hardening the N-central server—and for that matter any on-premises server that has an operating system—is critically important.

With the constant shifts in the IT landscape, your IT teams must remain agile and adaptable. While it can be incredibly beneficial for a large organization to have in-house IT talent who can manage your IT infrastructure, many are unaware of how difficult it is to maintain that expertise. Whenever you’re responsible for minimizing the downtime of your business-critical services, you need to consider whether your in-house IT resources are up to the job.

The last few years have thrown about everything they could at the status quo. Shifting climates, political instability, and a global pandemic have all contributed to a broad host of network device supply chain issues. Consumers all over the globe are still affected by computer chip shortages and many other items delayed by supply chain issues. And it’s not expected to end anytime soon.

In honor of World Password Day, we asked our Head Nerds for their top password-related tips and thoughts. One thing they could all pretty much agree on is that passwords shouldn’t be replaced, but that they should be supplemented with MFA. Here’s what else they had to say.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are charged with protecting their customers from all of the threat vectors that target devices, networks, and applications. The diligence required to provide this level of protection for customers is unending. However, if an MSP is going to properly secure their customers’ environments, they first must secure their own, which is why NinjaOne has collaborated with the cybersecurity company SaaS Alerts to better protect MSPs from RMM supply chain attacks.

Patching devices, whether you’re an internal IT team or an MSP, is something that takes time, costs money, and honestly isn’t a particularly pleasant job. Different products do different jobs at patching, but no matter what you use, you should always make sure you patch in a timely manner. If we go back ten years, it used to take upwards of 30 days for people to exploit security vulnerabilities, but in recent years, we’ve seen that decrease to 15 days.

Working at N-able for over 17 years, I’m not really considered a “spring chicken”. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the fact that I am getting older and I have learned to embrace this. It has been said that after the age of 40, a women’s metabolism decreases by 2% a year, and women lose muscle mass to the tune of 1% a year. What does this mean?

In the years that I’ve worked with large technology vendors and an MSP provider, there were a few common denominators between the ones that were successful. Partners that were consistently at the top of the food chain were the ones consistently providing value to their customers in some area other than just one specific product or service that was being offered.