License Management with the MSP360 Platform
In this guide, we will overview license management features in MSP360 Platform and walk you through the main steps of the license management process. Continue reading
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Introduction to Endpoint Monitoring and Management
Once upon a time, business IT environments were relatively simple. They consisted of a few on-prem servers connected to a fleet of PCs. The number of hosts on the network was comparatively small, and network configurations were not particularly complex. Neither were endpoint monitoring and management needs, which could be handled manually. Continue reading
How to Use Billing in MSP360 Managed Backup
The billing system in MSP360 Managed Backup allows users to set up custom prices and limits for backup and restore monitor clients’ statistics, and simplify the invoice generation process. This feature helps providers to either sell predefined storage packages at a fixed price or opt to charge clients per GB used.
In this guide we will walk you through these billing features in MSP360 Managed Backup, and describe how to configure limits, customize prices, control storage used, and monitor statistics. Continue reading
Synthetic Full Backup with MSP360 Managed Backup Service
When you back up your data regularly, performing full backups all the time might be way too resource-demanding. The alternative is a synthetic full backup, which saves your time and bandwidth. Continue reading
What is RMM? Remote Monitoring and Management Basics
Remote monitoring and management, or RMM, tools make MSPs’ jobs more efficient by helping them take a more proactive approach to monitoring and administering the various systems that they manage. RMM solutions also enable automation, which allows MSPs to work faster and operate more effectively at scale.
This article provides an overview of RMM, including what it is, what benefits it offers, and how to use RMM as part of your MSP strategy.
What is RMM?
Remote monitoring and management is an approach to IT management that relies on pre-installed tools for monitoring and managing IT systems resources from any location.
An RMM tool could be an application that lets you log in remotely to a server, or it could be a tool that collects data about the server and streams it to a central dashboard where you can monitor all of your servers.
With RMM software, managed service providers can remotely monitor and manage client endpoints, networks, and computers from a distance.
In many cases, MSPs deploy RMM platforms that combine multiple types of RMM functionality – remote logins, remote monitoring, remote administration, and more – into a single product suite.
Key Features of RMM Tools
Remote monitoring and management software unlocks a wide variety of features that make it simple for your IT staff to effortlessly monitor and manage complex IT assets.
Real-time monitoring
Real-time client system monitoring ensures that a system remains protected against vulnerabilities and is operating efficiently. Every device connected to the client's system must have an RMM app installed. This way, all devices connected to the client's network will appear in a single management dashboard under the managed devices section. MSPs can monitor their performance in real time and install software updates as and when needed. In simple words, software deployment and checking network health status becomes easy. This real-time monitoring of the client base helps your team leader know what's happening all across the organization's system.
System alerts
Imagine that a device in your client’s network system encounters an S.M.A.R.T or antivirus issue. In such a scenario, RMM swiftly sends alerts to system administrators and MSPs, enabling them to promptly address potential issues, ranging from incorrect system time to high disk space usage. This software provides immediate solutions, ensuring that your organization experiences minimal downtime. MSPs can even receive real-time push notifications on their mobile devices, enhancing their sense of security and preparedness.
IT automation and scripting
If you want to save time, you can head to the script library on the RMM software dashboard. Run scripts to automate tasks such as cache cleanup, restarting the system, enabling/disabling WakeOnLAN, etc. This automation boosts your work efficiency and helps you manage multiple devices simultaneously.
Patch management
Another feature that makes the RMM tool quite valuable for MSPs is that this software will manage and install security patches, driver updates, and software updates. It will keep complete track of patch runs on your system.
Further reading Patch Management With MSP360 RMM
Reporting and analytics
The RMM tool unlocks customized reports about software inventory, patch history, and system health. Stakeholders can use these reports to make informed decisions based on data, and IT staff can use them as a document for billing purposes.
AI-Powered RMM
If you install AI-powered RMM software, it will help you with proactive maintenance. This tool can quickly analyze historical data and patterns and easily predict potential issues that need a quick fix. Once you know which areas have problems, you can easily find their solution to prevent downtime. Since this tool is driven by artificial intelligence, it can quickly remediate routine issues. There won't be any need for manual intervention for handling routine maintenance tasks. As a result, you will experience a boost in the work efficiency of your IT staff.
Benefits of RMM
RMM offers a range of benefits across different areas of a managed services workflow.
Monitoring and centralized management
RMM software allows your team to monitor systems 24/7 through a centralized dashboard. You don’t have to check each system individually to track its status.
What’s more, because RMM tools work in the background, they collect monitoring data automatically, without disturbing your customers.
Further reading RMM: What Do MSPs Need to Monitor?
Faster Support
With RMM tools, you can provide support from anywhere, regardless of where you or your customers are located. You can also easily support multiple customers at once from a central office.
Further reading The Benefits of Remote Support
Automation
RMM tools make it easy to build automated workflows by, for example, setting up automated alerts for monitoring tools, automatically creating tickets to handle support requests, and using scripts to automate incident resolution. Thanks to its professional services automation feature, your IT staff needs to spend less time on the support desk.
PowerShell Remote Alerts
In this document, you'll find a PowerShell script that checks the status of the services listed below and sends an email alert if any of them is turned off:
- Windows Firewall
- Windows Defender
- Windows Update Service
- Any installed third-party antivirus
Reporting
Benefits of RMM also include transparent reporting. Using the data collected by RMM tools, you can create various types of reports about your clients’ systems. For example, you can automatically generate data about how many times you logged in via this remote management software to provide support or how many alerts a client’s system experienced in a given time period.
Simplicity and Transparency
By consolidating monitoring and management operations into a single platform, RMM tools simplify MSP tasks. They also make information more accessible to anyone on your team who needs it.
Scalability
RMM tools are critical for scaling MSP operations. By automating workflows and making it easier to support clients spread across a large area, RMM helps your business grow.
Increased Productivity
RMM tools help your technicians investigate issues faster without having to travel to remote sites. In turn, they increase productivity.
Further reading Core RMM Software Features
Why MSPs Need RMM
RMM tools offer so many benefits that it’s difficult to imagine a successful MSP business operating today without the help of RMM.
RMM plays a vital role in helping MSPs make the jump from a break/fix model to offering proactive managed services. With RMM, it becomes much easier to monitor and manage your clients’ systems on an ongoing, continuous basis. You can identify and fix problems before your customers even know about them.
In addition, RMM helps you deliver more secure managed services. RMM monitoring and security tools can detect threats automatically. You may even be able to use scripts to automate security incident resolution by, for example, blacklisting an IP address that is generating malicious traffic.
RMM reduces downtime, too. By enabling you to find and fix issues proactively, RMM means fewer disruptions for your customers.
Finally, as your customers’ needs change or you seek to offer new types of managed services, RMM provides the flexibility to help you do so. When you spend less time traveling to remote sites or fixing problems manually, you are in a stronger position to offer more services to more customers.
Further reading RMM Security for MSPs: Vulnerabilities and Best Practices
RMM and MSP Profitability
There are hard financial reasons to adopt RMM, too.
Traveling wastes not only time but also money. RMM can improve your operating margins by reducing how much you spend on travel.
RMM platforms that integrate a variety of tools into one suite can also reduce your tool costs. They eliminate the need to pay for separate monitoring tools, remote login solutions, and so on.
By making your technicians more productive, RMM will reduce your labor costs, which may be the single most important factor in boosting your MSP business’s profitability.
Further reading Guide to MSP Profitability
Selling RMM-based Solutions to Customers
The benefits of RMM may be clear to you as an MSP but less obvious to your customers. They often want the cheapest service model rather than one that includes proactive services via RMM tools.
To help customers understand the value of the types of services that RMM enables, emphasize:
- Faster results: Automation and remote support mean your customers get what they need from you sooner.
- Proactive service: Ongoing, continuous management via RMM eliminates the need for customers to monitor systems or make changes on their own.
- Minimal disruptions: RMM helps you deliver managed services with minimal disruptions to your customers. You don’t need to send staff on-site or sit at their desks.
- Self-service: In some cases, you may choose to use RMM tools to let customers check the status of their systems on their own. For example, you could give them access to monitoring data from RMM tools.
Conclusion
Before any final words, visit some of our most popular articles, like Exchange Online vs. Exchange On-Premises, what is backup software, immutable backups, cost-effective backup solutions, why Amazon's EC2 and S3 are fundamentally different types of service, how to resize partitions in Linux, how to retrieve Amazon Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key and an overview of SQL server backup types.
From faster support to more efficient troubleshooting to less downtime, RMM offers MSPs and their customers a range of benefits. Whether you’re building a new MSP business from scratch or looking for ways to optimize your existing business, RMM should be a part of your strategy.
MSP360 Managed Backup Web Console Overview
This guide will overview MSP360 Managed Backup Web console, each of its tabs, most popular features, and tips and tricks. Continue reading
Introducing Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Backup 3.5
We’re excited to introduce MSP360 Managed Backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace 3.5! You now have the ability to restore Drive files to a different user, back up OneNote files, and easily restore all subfolders within an email account by selecting the parent (root) folder alone. Continue reading
ITIL for MSPs Explained
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework that defines core areas, KPIs, and processes for the effective provision of IT services. It is designed upon the IT service management (ITSM) approach and allows managed IT service providers to streamline and standardize their operations to maximize customer experience. Continue reading
Introducing MSP360 Managed Backup 6.6
We are excited to introduce several new features and enhancements in MSP360 Managed Backup 6.6 that streamline your experience and make managing your backup and recovery processes even more efficient. Continue reading
How to Protect Against Ransomware
Ransomware has been around for decades. So you might be tempted to feel complacent about it; after all, if ransomware has existed for so many years, the tools and strategies required to address it must be well developed by now, right?
Well, not exactly. Although the first ransomware attacks occurred many years ago, the threat posed by modern ransomware is much more intense. Ransomware has become more pervasive than ever, with ransomware attacks causing many millions of dollars’ worth of damage each year to organizations across a range of industries. At the same time, the number of ways in which ransomware attacks are executed is greater than ever, making it harder to prevent attacks.
For all of these reasons, it’s critical for MSPs to protect all of the data and devices they work with -- both their own and their customers’ -- from ransomware. Having a ransomware defense plan in place is the only way to keep data and devices safe, while also protecting your business’s reputation.
This article offers an overview of ransomware protection strategies, and tips on using backups to keep your own business, as well as your clients’ businesses, safe from ransomware.
Ransomware Attack Scenarios
A first basic step in ransomware protection is to understand all of the attack strategies that can be used to install ransomware. Here are four of the most common attack vectors:
- Phishing: In a phishing attack, attackers convince users to click a malicious link or install a malicious package that contains ransomware by sending them an email, SMS, or other messages.
- RDP: The RDP protocol (and similar remote-access protocols, like SSH and VNC) can be used by attackers to gain access to systems and install ransomware on them.
- Application exploits: Flaws within applications make it possible for attackers to gain unauthorized access and install malware.
- Physical intrusion: It’s easy to overlook the risk of unsecured physical access, but it’s a serious one. Without strong physical security, an attacker can simply walk into an office or data center and install ransomware.
There are various steps you can take to respond to these threats, such as monitoring messages for signs of phishing, keeping applications up-to-date and -- most importantly -- making sure you keep multiple backup copies of data so that you can use it to restore systems in the event of a ransomware attack.
Further reading Ransomware Attack Scenarios
FREE ASSETS
MSP’s Assets to Stay Safe from Phishing
Check out our assets that will help you to minimize the risk of a phishing attack, reduce the possible damage, and increase security awareness.
How to Protect Your Customers’ Data
Complicating the threat posed by ransomware for MSPs is the fact that many of your clients may not take ransomware seriously. They mistakenly believe that their business is not important enough to attract a ransomware attack, that they don’t have any sensitive data, or that the basic security measures they already have in place are enough to keep them safe.
Defending your clients from ransomware requires, in part, dispelling these notions, so that your customers understand just how important it is to take extra steps against ransomware. There are several ways to go about this:
- Consultations: Devote time to consulting with your clients specifically on the topic of ransomware. This is not usually a discussion that you’d otherwise have in the context of providing managed services, so providing a consultation is an opportunity for you to explain to them the risks that ransomware poses to their particular business, and how you can help protect against them.
- Create educational content: Consider creating materials about ransomware that you can distribute by email or publish on a relevant blog to help educate your clients.
MSP's Ransomware Awareness Poster Pack
4 white-label posters to help you educate your end-users on how not to get hit by ransomware.
- Emphasize constant updates: You want your clients to understand that they can never be up-to-date enough. All systems, whether you or they maintain them, should be updated continuously.
- Offer clear ransomware solutions: Getting your clients to take ransomware seriously isn’t just about scaring them. You must also offer clear solutions to help them address the threat, whether they are managed services offered by you, or software tools the clients can install on their own.
Further reading Ransomware End User Training
Conclusion
Ransomware may be decades old, but it’s a more serious cybersecurity threat than ever. Keeping your own and your customers’ businesses safe from ransomware requires understanding all the ways in which ransomware attacks can occur, as well as educating your customers about ransomware dangers and ways they can respond.
Mastering Customer Service for MSPs
For an MSP, having the technical expertise necessary to deliver managed services is only half the battle in running a successful business. Equally critical is your ability to provide positive customer service -- and doing that takes more than just technical know-how.
How to Scale Seamlessly with MSP360’s Backup Templates Feature
Configuring backup plans on many endpoints can be hard due to the complexity, scale, maintenance, and security challenges that need to be addressed. However, with a centralized backup management solution it’s easy to configure and manage backup plans across all endpoints. Continue reading