The Path to Profit for MSSPs Stepping into 2021

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 | 2:00 PM ET / 11:00am PT

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Every organization is forced to contend with the work-from-home (WFH) realities. Thankfully, your managed security service provider (MSSP) business was quick to adapt, adjust and overcome the many obstacles that arose, ensuring your customers could continue to sell, process orders, collect cash and drive revenue during trying times. But with WFH models poised to remain in place for the foreseeable future, it’s time for MSPs to take the next step: further improving customers’ network infrastructure in order to accelerate and transform the way they work, especially as organizations embrace new software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, expanded access to corporate IT resources and additional voice and video collaboration platforms delivered via the cloud.

What Is an Exascale Data Center? And How Can You Leverage It to Earn Channel Revenue?

Wednesday, November 18, 2020 | 2:00 PM ET / 11:00am PT

Think all data centers are built the same? Think again. With the largest exascale data center ecosystems in the world, Switch takes an entirely different approach to cloud, connectivity and the channel. In fact, some channel partners with Switch earn hundreds of thousands of dollars on numerous digital services and advanced solutions. This includes colocation, cloud solutions, advanced (sub-millisecond) connectivity and more.

But here’s the channel partner industry challenge: How do you get to those kinds of opportunities? How do you shift away from your traditional colo sale? Everything changed in 2020. Your approach to channel and revenue modeling needs to be different too. Switch can help.

Networking Trends in Ethernet and RDMA — and What They Mean for MSPs and Their Customers

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 | 2:00 PM ET / 11:00am PT

Today’s agile, always-on business relies heavily on the dexterity and resiliency of its networking elements, particularly server-side networking. Dell Technologies and IT Consultants can help customers future-proof their networks and drive the performance and efficiency gains essential for success by implementing technologies like remote direct memory access (RDMA) — a host-offload, host-bypass solution enabling low-latency, high-throughput direct memory-to-memory data communication between applications over a network — and non-volatile memory express (NVMe, a protocol for accessing high-speed storage media).

Pandemic Pulse Check: Effectively Navigating the Distributed Workforce

Tuesday, December 8, 2020 | 2:00 PM ET / 11:00am PT

The hybrid workforce will continue to be a pervasive SMB environment even after the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course, with 74 percent of the partner community indicating they expect to support distributed teams for the long term. Now is the time for managed service providers to ensure their core technology stack is armed with solutions that confidently address the heightened vulnerabilities associated with the hybrid environment — solutions that empower MSPs to boost their value to customers, and differentiate their business from the competition.

What Is an Exascale Data Center? And How Can You Leverage It to Earn Channel Revenue?

Thursday, December 10, 2020 | 2:00 PM ET / 11:00am PT

The threat landscape changed dramatically in 2020. As organizations across the globe embraced work-from-anywhere policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals rapidly evolved their tactics to target this new normal, unleashing a barrage of phishing attacks and related scams exploiting a wide range of remote work vulnerabilities. Heading into 2021, small businesses (SMBs) express anxiety about what comes next: 68 percent say they are concerned about cybersecurity vulnerabilities at their business locations, and 18 percent report an increased need for data security solutions as the pandemic wears on.

Essential Cybersecurity Sales Strategies to Boost MSP Revenues

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The world of managed service providers (MSPs) is rapidly evolving in response to the unprecedented business changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Gartner projects that overall enterprise IT spending will plummet by 8 percent in 2020 to $3.4 trillion in response to economic changes. However, with legions of workers now doing their jobs from home — a trend fueling a dramatic increase in both the volume and scope of digital attacks — enterprise spending on cybersecurity is expected to rise 2.4 percent. For MSPs to maintain healthy business growth, they must seize this opportunity to protect their clients from cyber threats, which means offering best-in-class security solutions and support at competitive prices that maximize MSP margins.

Six Principles for MSPs to Accelerate Invoicing and Accounts Receivables Processes in Times of Economic Crisis

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Close to 60 percent of business owners identify slow-paying clients as their biggest challenge in managing cash flow. Some of your customers might be struggling to pay their bills, but other payments may be delayed due to your organization’s complex billing processes. Creating and sending invoices doesn’t have to be a time-consuming and expensive activity, however; there are clear, decisive measures managed service providers [MSPs] can take to streamline systems and processes to slash the cost of invoicing, minimize payment delays and ensure their company’s financial health — even in times of economic uncertainty.

Selling the Next Generation of Cybersecurity Solutions: What Every MSP Needs to Know

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The threat of cyberattack looms large across the worldwide business landscape, and no organization is safe. The stakes have never been higher: cybercrime frequency, sophistication and severity are all escalating at alarming rates, and according to Accenture, the average financial impact of a digital attack now totals $13 million. At the same time, businesses are grappling with a widening cybersecurity skills gap — a talent shortfall expected to reach 3.5 million experts globally by 2021.

It's Time to Think About Digital Health & Cloud Transformation

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2020 has been a year like none other. And what is the primary motivation for customers to make changes in today’s climate? Concerns about security! Concerns about migrating away from premises-based networking (servers, fax machines and phone systems). Concerns about being compliant in industries such as health care, finance, legal and insurance.

The Cure for the Common Cloud: How the Right Technology Makes All the Difference for MSPs

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Cloud services increasingly are a “must have” for any comprehensive managed service provider (MSP) offering. While the cloud application software as a service (SaaS) market continues to grow, increasing to nearly $105 billion in 2020 from $102 billion the previous year, Gartner forecasters also note the expanding influence of the cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) segment, which climbed 13.4 percent year-over-year to eclipse $50 billion. But despite these lucrative market opportunities, many MSPs remain locked in a holding pattern, struggling to identify the cloud partner that can truly complement the services they’re already offering.

MSPs: How to Make Sure Customers Don’t Take the Phishing Bait

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Phishing is one of the most common and effective forms of cybercrime. Phishing scams typically involve a bad actor attempting to harm a company or individual by obtaining sensitive information like passwords, logins or credit card information, most often by employing fake email addresses and web domains to lure users into giving away important credentials or money. Not only are these schemes increasing; they’re also growing harder to spot. Yet despite mounting warnings about the phishing threat, 49% of employees still admit to clicking on a suspicious email link at work.

Why do so many continue to fall for phishing scams? That question is the focus of University of Washington Assistant Professor Prashanth Rajivan, whose research examines how human behavior affects information security and privacy to develop models of effective interventions that reduce the risk from attacks and promote safe behaviors online.

Why SD-WAN Is Essential to Navigating the New Normal in Business

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Customers are scrambling as remote working becomes the new normal for businesses of all sizes. A recent Gartner survey found that 82 percent of companies plan to permit employees to work remotely at least part of the time after the coronavirus runs its course, and 47 percent intend to offer full-time remote work options moving forward. While smaller companies may have readily transitioned their communications to accommodate remote work, others — especially enterprise businesses — are still struggling to implement permanent, more robust UCaaS and CCaaS solutions and migrate to a multi-cloud environment to support these applications.

With UCaaS and CCaaS on the rise, cloud solutions are increasingly in demand, as organizations plan to invest an average of $73.8 million over the next 12 months. Though customers may be willing to make the investment, there are still concerns around security, bandwidth, and reliability — especially if the right tools aren’t deployed. Enter Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC), Session Delivery and SD-WAN to neutralize those concerns.

Why Cloud-Based DRaaS and BaaS Are Becoming the Disaster Recovery Solution for the Masses

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Now more than ever, companies are moving their backup and disaster recovery to the cloud, and adoption of Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is growing in tandem. A recent survey found that as of 2019, 53 percent of IT professionals were using DRaaS, up from 39 percent in 2016. Beyond reduced costs and improved services, the onslaught of employees migrating to a remote work environment is another key factor driving BaaS and DRaaS momentum; moreover, global lockdowns and business continuity challenges are forcing many businesses to move to a cloud environment to further employee collaboration, data access and sharing for their geographically dispersed teams. But not all cloud-based backup and DR services are created alike: managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) must choose wisely to deliver the efficiency, flexibility and reliability their customers require.

Cybersecurity Predictions 2021: What’s Next for MSPs and SMBs After a Year That Changed Everything

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The threat landscape transformed dramatically over the course of 2020. The COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted day-to-day operations across all phases of industry, requiring millions of workers to perform their jobs from their homes and other nontraditional sites using a range of digital communications and collaboration tools — a work-from-anywhere shift that wreaked havoc on organizations’ secure perimeters and created a host of new vulnerabilities for cybercriminals to identify and exploit. With more cyberattacks reported in the first six months of 2020 than in all of 2019, it’s no wonder that 86 percent of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) cite cybersecurity among their top five organizational priorities — and given how quickly and how radically work paradigms are changing, it’s also no surprise that 79 percent of SMBs are concerned about their remote devices or remote employees being breached.

Driving Profitable Growth with SD-WAN Managed Services

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The global software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market is on pace to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 33.8 percent from 2020 to 2026, climbing to $9.8 billion by mid-decade. With cloud application delivery, security-driven networking and cost optimization accelerating adoption of managed SD-WAN services, managed service providers (MSPs) need to seize the moment and provide customers with scalable, resilient and secure network infrastructures that enable the realities of a fast-changing business landscape increasingly dominated by remote employee access. But many MSPs are still struggling to create and monetize managed SD-WAN services, squandering the opportunity to provide customers with the services and support to ensure increased productivity within a secure work-from-anywhere environment.

5 Contact Center Success Strategies for Channels in 2021

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In these pandemic times, contact centers have never faced more difficult challenges, especially around supporting home-based agents with premises-based systems. While many contact center leaders feel they have limited options, they actually have many, but may not be sure where to turn. As customer expectations keep rising, contact centers need a plan, and channels are ideally-positioned to be their trusted partners for adopting to new and better technologies.