Empowering Your MSP Business to Grow and Prosper—One Post at a Time

Continuum will be making a BIG announcement on June 14, 2018 at 12:00pm EST. Mark your calendars, you’re going to want to hear this.

To increase your chances of closing a deal, you need to understand the customer and their specific needs. Why might they be seeking help from a managed services provider? What problems are they trying to solve? What challenges are they facing? How can your IT services help overcome these challenges?

While no prospect wants to be ambushed with non-stop questions, well-crafted inquiries can make all the difference when it comes to winning new business. If you have prospects or clients willing to engage in a dialogue with you, use these key questions to gain a better understanding of their needs and accurately prescribe your services.

Today’s IT service providers understand the value that blogging brings—whether it be through search engine optimization (SEO), driving traffic to your website, demonstrating thought-leadership or generating new leads. However, many are left wondering, “how do I get more involved with blogging?” and “what kind of content should I be publishing?”

To help you maximize the effectiveness of your blog, I’ll walk you through the five types of blog posts you should be writing, and how and when to best leverage them.

You tell your clients all the time about good password policies. You tell your friends and family. You may be able to rattle off in your sleep “unique, long strings of varied characters with multiple numbers, capitals, and special characters.” But just how many people are heeding the call for better security? Has the public started taking cyber security seriously?

Today's businesses are hyper-focused on ensuring their IT environments are secure and protected from cyber threats. However, with all the attention being given to the front lines of defense, what happens if you leave the back door open to hackers and intruders?

Configuration errors, lack of IT controls, un-secure internal processes—these are all examples of vulnerabilities that could lead to security breach and major data loss. To decrease the chances of a successful breach, organizations can take simple countermeasures, such as working with an MSP to tighten IT security. But first, look out for these seven basic avenues that might be open to cyber criminals. 

As the saying goes, April showers bring May flowers. But what does May bring? In our case, it brought another month filled with valuable, business-driving content on the blog! This month’s roundup covers a range of topics including sales and marketing best practices, the benefits of live product demos, the FBI's recent cyber attack warning and more. 

Read on to discover the top five blog articles our readers couldn’t get enough of this month, with special bonus content at the end!

On this Memorial Day, we wanted to take a moment to thank all those who have served in our military, and those who have given their lives for our freedom. We feel that there is no greater sacrifice to be made than to serve your country and we salute all the veterans out there on this Memorial Day.

As veterans return home from service, many of them choose to leverage their acquired skills and get jobs in the IT industry. We understand the close ties that IT professionals have with the military, and many of our own employees and partners have served our country.

Ever since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tied the knot last Saturday, my news feed has been flooded with Royal Wedding coverage, updates, opinion articles and quizzes. In fact, one of the quizzes I came across the other day was titled, “What’s Your Royal Guest Name?”

Seemingly innocent, this quiz provides you with “your new royal identity,” and has since swept the Internet. But, what makes this quiz so cleverly dangerous is that unbeknownst to those who are participating, their answers could help scammers get their hands on some sensitive data.

While it’s likely that you and your clients may not be taking quizzes like these (or maybe you are, I don’t judge), it’s yet another example of the power of social engineering and how easily people can be duped into divulging personal information. In this post, I’ll cover how this scam works and what you and your clients should look out for.

Today we are proud to announce that the MSPblog is a Gold Winner of the 2018 Hermes Creative Awards in the Blog Overall category! The Hermes Awards recognizes professional excellence in media conceptualization, writing, and design. With more than 6,000 entries from around the world in this year’s competition, the MSPblog is honored to have won a Gold Award. This achievement simply couldn’t have been possible without you, our valued readers and subscribers.

As a thank you, I’ve compiled some of my favorite blogging tips in hopes that it inspires you to create your own successful and award-winning blog.

To survive in today's MSP market, you need to be equipped with the best tools, technology and—most importantly—knowledge. As they say, knowledge is power, and today's most powerful MSPs are finding the following three eBooks to be real page-turners. 

In these must-read eBooks, discover how to overcome modern MSP pain points, capitalize on the IT security opportunity and set your business up for long-term profitability.