MSPs, or Managed Service Providers, are seeing a convergence of business conditions that are both expanding market opportunity and making it more difficult not to be—or be partnered with—a major industry player. The growing need across all industries to be digitally connected, the arrival of cloud computing and the required expertise in cybersecurity are slamming [...]
IT departments today find themselves pinned between meeting expectations of business units based on managed service provider promises and a wealth of new technology options. Oh, and no pressure -- business revenue is increasingly dependent on IT getting it right. Enterprise IT has traditionally been regarded as quite different from the Managed Service Provider model. As more and more technology is moving to the [...]
A common stat thrown around the industry is that 75% of IT resources go to maintaining the status quo. It's a testament to the mission critical nature of IT in the enterprise—new technology is great, but you've got to keep things up and running, first and foremost. This makes prioritizing IT projects critical, and a [...]
Managed service providers (MSPs) struggle with the basic tenets of sales competition—price and differentiation—at a more pure level than most other IT enterprises. At the end of the day, they need to be cheaper than their competition or better in some way that keeps their customers happy. There are a number of tools available for MSPs [...]
Many managed service providers (MSPs) are looking to expand their network services into managed cloud services and some are finding that it's not always an easy transition. In addition the traditional management of on-premises equipment and onsite applications, cloud adds new requirements to monitor cloud service availability, quality of service and security. It's a different [...]
Local Management has some clear benefits for managed service providers who use Uplogix to deploy gear faster, manage it better, and control costs while hitting their SLAs. Uplogix is working with one of the top carriers in the world to deploy and manage services for a large federal customer. They are using Local Management throughout [...]
What's a greater risk? Asteroids or network downtime from Level 1 support issues? [UPDATED: 2/15/13 We survived!] While the threat of an asteroid's path bringing it inside the orbit of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites and taking one out is real, it's much less of a concern for most satellite-based managed service providers than meeting [...]
Which side of SLAs do you sit on? Are you gunning to meet required service levels for your customers, or are you watching your provider like a hawk to make sure you get what you pay for? Either way, service level agreements are only as good as: What they measure - are these really the [...]
Ensuring high availability and performance for customers with geographically distributed networks and multiple remote locations presents a number of unique management challenges for MSP staff. Since it’s not possible to be onsite everywhere, network device errors often require expensive support calls and drive missed SLAs.Monitor AND Control Remote NetworksLocal Management drastically reduces the cost and [...]
Here is a peek at the new white paper from Uplogix: Meeting the Network Requirements of Cloud and Virtual Computing with Local Management. Don't let the catchy title fool you -- this paper could be the plot of a movie. There is the introduction of characters, introduction of the conflict, rising action, heroes, villains... but [...]
