MSPs

MSPs: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Business

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Optimize your business and partner with ActiveImage.

It is already the third month of the year, and you are most likely still trying to implement the positive changes your business decided to embark upon in the beginning of the year.

Are you where you thought you would be by now? Are you struggling to define these ‘New Year business resolutions’ or have they fallen by the wayside completely?

No matter where your business is with its resolutions, to be a successful enterprise, you need to look at the start of the year, the beginning of a project, or even a change in management, as an opportunity to take the business to the next level. If you need to redefine the change you want to see in your business, here are a few tips to help grow your enterprise.

Tips to Optimize your Business

  1. IT represents one of the more complex areas of the corporate budget, therefore, it is a priority to optimise the IT budget and keep the spending under control. From here you can realistically discern what you can invest in and accomplish moving forward through the rest of the year.
  2. The documentation of every aspect of a project should be a practice that must be done consistently and on a regular basis. A dedicated effort to documentation can play an important role in handling client accounts and internal projects.
  3. You do not have to be a marketing guru, but if you want your business to grow and keep a real competitive edge, you need to develop some marketing skills. Whether you use email, social media, podcasting or a mixture of these platforms, make your mark somewhere and begin a marketing strategy that will bring new clients to the door. One of the easiest platforms to get started on is social media. Via social media you can become connected to hundreds of IT professionals and influencers. By simply retweeting a relevant tweet, introducing yourself to a different audience or starting a conversation on a prevalent platform, you can make new connections and strengthen old ones in no time.
  4. Corporate networks and business groups provide you with an opportunity to connect with professionals who are in the same industry and market as you. These connections could open your business up to building its brand and showing off its expertise. You may even be able to create a group and build a community around your own brand.

Another game changer would be to partner with ActiveImage. By adding our backup and disaster recovery solutions to your portfolio, you can ensure that your customers will be efficiently and sufficiently covered and more than satisfied with what you can offer.

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MSPs: 4 Tips on Engaging with Non-Technical Clients

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Engaging and empowering non-technical clients improves customer relations and satisfaction.

All MSPs at one point or another are likely to deal with clients who are not ‘tech-savvy’ or do not understand the different technical aspects of backup and disaster recovery management. In these cases, it is important to treat these clients a little differently to ensure their satisfaction and to maintain, if not better, the reputation of your MSP.

How to Engage and Empower Your Non-Technical Clients

  1. Take time out of your day to observe how the company/business and its employees use technology. This will give you insight into their business, how they operate, and what their pitfalls might be.
  2. Use clear, ‘layman’s’ language, but be sure not to make the person you are speaking to feel like they are inferior or even stupid. There are many buzzwords and acronyms that IT professionals use on a daily basis that the average person is not familiar with. Don’t assume a client understands a concept because it is simple and logical to you. Rather stick to speaking about what technology can and is doing for the client, instead of how the technology works, and you should be in the clear.
  3. However, there are times when there is no other way than to get technical, which can be a challenge with non-technical clients. In this situation, it is important to educate your client on the terms and concepts that are relevant to their systems. This can be done by creating a clear list of technical terms and their definitions for the customer.
  4. The above tips provide advice as if you already have a non-technical client, but what if you are trying to pitch your services to one? Firstly, look over your presentation to make sure it uses language that an average person could understand, then omit anything that is too technical. Rather punt how the services you are pitching will help the business, or even how the manager or the CEO would look good in implementing your MSPs solutions. Additionally, doing a little research into what this specific business needs and wants and pitching how your specific services will help achieve the business’s specific goals will give you a leg up on the competition that pitch the same services to every client.

Your non-technical clients will appreciate the effort you make in understanding their business and tailoring a solution to its needs, while communicating clearly and making it easy for management to trust in you. An MSP that can do this efficiently will be able to successful build its client base in any industry, no matter the clientele. By adding ActiveImage to your portfolio, you can ensure that you will have a solution for any business’s needs.

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MSPs: Going that Extra Mile for Your Clients

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ActiveImage can help you go the extra mile for your clients.

ActiveImage can help you provide the best backup and disaster recovery solutions to your clients. However, it is not only the products and solutions on offer that need to be outstanding, but the customer service and satisfaction needs to be high. Clients who have a bad experience are more likely to find another service provider. To avoid creating a reputation of bad service and stop using more and more money to find new clients, here are 5 ways to help retain your clients and ensure good customer relations.

5 Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction

  1. Many clients want a way in which they can easily look up their current IT problem and fix it themselves, without having to wait on a technician. By providing accurate and clear self-support resources, such as newsletters on relevant topics, or an educational client portal with ‘DIY’ guides, their relationship with your MSP will improve, as they see you as a helpful and efficient service provider.
  2. Keeping to your service agreements with regards to pricing, response and expectations is vital to ensuring the client has a good experience and is happy to stay within your client base, as they are getting what they pay for.
  3. Although your service agreement outlines what your client can expect of you, there is no reason why you can’t exceed expectations, especially when it comes to fast response. Look at how logging issues or your processes of escalation can be made more efficient.
  4. Most clients are also happy to pay extra if they know they are getting premium treatment. Think of how you can package solutions and create add-ons, such as after-hours support, office supply delivery and tiered backup and disaster recovery options.
  5. It is the little things that end up making the difference and ensuring you keep your client base. Consider calling clients to chat about your service, or inviting them to regular client appreciation events. Your clients will appreciate the gesture and be happy to have you as their service provider for the foreseeable future.

It costs less to keep your customers satisfied than it does to find brand new ones. Speak to us today about how our backup and disaster recovery solutions can help you keep your customers satisfied and enable you to keep on going the extra mile for them everyday.

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MSPs: 5 Ways to Maintain Your Reputation with Clients

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A MSP thrives when clients have trust in the service provider.

Nowadays, anyone and everyone is at risk of opening a phishing email because we are all more than likely to be sent an email by a hacker at some point in our lives. Therefore, the risk is real and prevalent for any and all MSPs employees and clients. Although a professional IT technician would easily spot the difference between a malicious and harmless email, are all the employees of your MSP, no matter their experience level, able to tell the difference?

An MSP relies on its good reputation and the trust of its clients to flourish. When there is a breach, and a client’s faith in your ability to protect their and your own data is broken, it can be difficult for an MSP to recover and rebuild after such an occurrence. That’s why it is vital for MSPs to take every precaution to protect a client’s data and offer them the best in backup and disaster recovery solutions.

How to Maintain Your Reputation and Client Trust with ActiveImage

  1. Ensure that you as the MSP are covered and have an efficient and reliable backup and recovery plan in place. ActiveImage can offer you regular incremental backups, replication to multiple off site locations, and smooth, fast and reliable restores. Our variety of solutions are perfect for you and for clients in any industry.
  2. The solutions you provide need to be tailorable to your client’s industry and security needs. ActiveImage can provide you with solutions to protect clients with Windows and Linux physical machines, and virtual environments. Our product, ActiveVisor, is also a vital tool to help you manage the state of ActiveImage Protector agents to maintain system continuity, and ensure all licenses and cyber-security rules of any industry are being followed and maintained.
  3. Always continuously assess a client’s security solution, especially if it has recently received new features. ActiveImage product features allow for the ability to test whether a business is disaster ready from anywhere in a matter of minutes.
  4. Keep your clients in the loop about what new types of cyber-attacks are out there. Clients who are more aware of cyber-crime are less likely to fall for bait left out by cyber-criminals.
  5. It is important to keep your software patches up-to-date to keep hackers from finding weaknesses in your clients’ protection plans. With the ActiveImage Protector IT Pro Edition and ActiveVisor, you will be equipped with all the IT tools to keep your clients protected and have peace of mind as an MSP that your reputation is covered.

For more information on ActiveImage or any of the above mentioned products, contact us for a demo or a 30 Day free trial.

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Why Choose ActiveImage?

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If you are looking for a long term business partner, that is fully committed to you and delivers on all expectations, then ActiveImage is the partner for you.

Our years of experience in providing solutions in backup and disaster recovery proves we understand the need to provide a stable solution, unparalleled support and a profitable model.

If our promise of excellence and commitment doesn’t convince you, here are even more reasons why you should partner with us and use our products.

9 Reasons to Choose ActiveImage

  1. In the event of a disaster, your systems and company can be operational again in 5 minutes.
  2. Incremental backups are made every 5 minutes to ensure minimal impact during an outage or attack. This is a background process that occurs without interfering with the work of employees.
  3. We can protect all your systems, whether it be Windows or Linux, on physical machines and virtual environments.
  4. Our products and services allow replication of data to any off site or Cloud location, another office, local target or a network location via (secure) FTP and WebDAV. These services also allow you to easily manage your backup retention policy and consolidate your backup chains to ensure smooth, reliable and fast restores.
  5. We are able to apply your business continuity strategy to ensure your backups and recovery plans are working by booting a recovered machine in 2 minutes from any full or incremental backup file.
  6. We provide flexible restore, migration and failback across many platforms (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P)
  7. Our deduplication is inline and has minimal impact on backup and restore performance.
  8. Instant availability solutions allow you to access your data and systems in a few minutes at a fraction of the cost of high availability solutions.
  9. We offer our instant disaster recovery solutions as an addition to existing backup solutions.

It’s easy to become a ActiveImage partner, all you have to do is visit our partners page and fill in your details to receive more information, or you can find out more about our products and services that you are interested in by requesting a 30 day trial or a demo.

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MSPs: Are You Protected Against Ransomware in 2019?

Backup Solutions, Cybersecurity & IT Threats, Disaster Recovery, Managed Services Insights / / / , , , ,
Do not be held for ransom. Invest in ActiveImage Ransomware Protector today!

Ransomware is a tool that cyber-criminals use to infiltrate computer servers, desktops, laptops and other mobile devices. This malicious software then encrypts a company’s critical files and web properties and holds them for ransom until the company or organisation pays the requested amount (usually through cryptocurrency), on which the cyber-criminal will release the company’s digital assets.

Recent examples of ransomware include: CryptoLocker, CryptoWall, Locky, Cerber, KeyRanger, SamSam, TeslaCrypt, TorrentLocker, and Reveton. Although we have yet to see any new ransomware emerging in 2019, and no major ransomware attacks have happened in these first two months of the year, it still pays to be prepared.

Ransomware Predictions

In a collection of predictions made at the end of last year, which were published by Forbes in an article titled ‘60 Cybersecurity Predictions For 2019’, the forecast alluded to the following trends in ransomware attacks and cybersecurity.

Corey Nachreiner, CTO of WatchGuard Technologies contributed to the article by saying that malicious or hijacked AI-driven chatbots will be used to socially engineer individuals to give up personal and sensitive information, or misdirect victims to illegitimate links that allow cyber criminals to access a victim’s data. Nachreiner suggested that the malicious bots would start out text based, but could eventually evolve to use human speech bots to socially engineer victims over the phone. For now, website application flaws could be exploited to insert malicious bots, where there was no chatbot before.

Additionally, certain weak points and likely targets were discussed in the predictions. Tal Zamir, CEO of Hysolate predicts cloud and user devices will be the main targets of attack, since the great functionality of operating systems on user devices are vulnerable to attack. Similarly, Erez Yalon, the Head of Security Research at Checkmarx, states that the IoT (the Internet of Things) is not secure and therefore vulnerable to attack. Since there are no big changes in IoT security on the horizon, it is important to ensure your devices are secure, regardless of the security on the computing devices it is interrelated with.

Alternatively, Avishai Sharlin, General Manager of Amdocs Technology, pointed out that there is a lack of individuals in the workforce to combat the growing threat of cyber-attacks and malicious attempts. Therefore, 2019 is the year to re-skill employees and take steps to improve an organisation’s position against cyber attacks.

What to Do to Stay Ahead of Ransomware Attacks?

Any organisation should feel confident in their backups, testing and recovery so that when a ransom is made for their data, they can deny any ransom demands. As an MSP you should be able to provide your clients with this confidence, as well as have this confidence in your own systems.

ActiveImage will help setup a secure efficient backup process to protect all your data, as well as regularly test these backups and their restoration, protecting your systems from ransomware. For more information, a demo or a 30 day trial contact ActiveImage today!

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MSPs: Can Your Clients Afford Downtime?

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Downtime can cost a business more than revenue.

The true cost of downtime for any organisation is difficult to calculate. However, there are many elements that can be considered when estimating the damage downtime can do for a business.

Lost Revenue

Downtime caused by a cyberattack or network service malfunction, means that most of the lines of communication that most businesses depend upon, such as email and online platforms, are down. This means new money is prevented from coming in, due to the lack of tools. Many businesses also use cloud-based services, which means downtime prevents employees of these businesses from continuing their work.

Lost Productivity

Besides downtime stopping a business’s operations in its tracks, money that could have otherwise been used to further the company is being spent on performing non-revenue generating activities, such as fixing things, to return the business to normal operations. Additionally, during downtime, although no work is being done, the business still needs to pay operating costs and salaries.

Lost Opportunities

Businesses that do the majority of their business online especially feel the effects of downtime as they can miss several opportunities to make a sale or gain new customers. Any loss of network service means that customers won’t be able to find them online and purchase products or services. It also makes it impossible for the business to connect with existing customers.

Brand Damage

Downtime can cause harmful long-term damage to a company’s brand when customers frequently encounter service outages that make it difficult to use a company’s products or services. This experience will stop customers from consuming the business’s products and services, as well as cause them to share their negative experiences with others, resulting in the besmirching of a business’s name.

Data Loss

While most service providers backup data, downtime can have unpredictable consequences, such as damaging and corrupting files. Despite the loss of precious data, the sudden inability to access data can also cause panic in a business’s customers and cause them to lose confidence in a company and seek more reliable services elsewhere.

Downtime can have a serious effect on business operations and efficiency, and can end up crippling a business if it is unable to cope.

If your clients or potential customers are worried about the prospect of downtime or are wanting to prevent further damage to their business by placing their business in the hands of someone who is able to handle downtime in the future, you should be offering vStandby AIP, an add-on module to ActiveImage Protector.

vStandby is a cost-effective solution that ensures continued data protection for your mission-critical servers. It revives physical machines in no time and is automatically updated for complete peace of mind.

For more information on vStandby and other ActiveImage products, contact us today.

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MSPs: What You Need to Know about ActiveVisor

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What is ActiveVisor?

ActiveVisor is the enterprise management solution for ActiveImage Protector.

Why Should You Want a Management Solution?

A centralized structure gives IT staff better oversight and can make routine tasks easier.
Industry-specific IT regulations can easily be adhered to when there is a central point of management or simple management solution.
A management solution for IT leads to better knowledge-sharing and cooperation between clients.

What can ActiveVisor Can Do for You?

ActiveVisor monitors task status, execution, and agent status. It can display task execution logs for managed clients and provides pre-emptive information. For example, if there is insufficient space for efficient storage management, a notification will be received. In the event of a system failure, ActiveVisor provides table views illustrating where the failure occurred, so the affected system can be recovered quickly.

Besides keeping you up to date and aware of any changes in the system, ActiveVisor also keeps you on top of your responsibilities. The centralized management of ActiveImage Protected clients, displays product key information, lists licensed client machines and re-assigns licenses as needed, so you will never have to worry about product licences again.

Another feature of the ActiveVisor is the Push Installer. This feature finds unprotected machines in the domain or workgroup and remotely pushes ActiveImage Protector to the client machine.

ActiveVisor is Free!

ActiveImage is a free add-on included in the installer of both the ActiveImage Protector trial and full software package.

Added MSP Benefits

Clients can be grouped for management purposes and predefined scheduled templates can be used to deploy a pattern-based backup schedule to batches of clients. If a client has specific needs, they can be re-grouped and their schedule can be configured to their individual requirements.

For more information on ActiveVisor, get in contact with ActiveImage today!

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MSPs: How are You Protecting Your Linux Clients?

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As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) you want to offer your clients the best possible solutions for their IT needs. Whilst most solutions revolve around the Windows operating system, ActiveImage can offer MSPs live backups and fast restoration of Linux machines with ActiveImage Protector Linux.

What is the ActiveImage Protector Linux?

The ActiveImage Protector Linux can offer your MSP the following options for your portfolio:

  • Our Linux snapshot driver that backs up live / hot Linux machines.
  • Recover, restore, migrate and virtualize using our Linux based Recovery Environment.
  • Ensure data integrity and security without having to shutdown MySQL.
  • Efficiently reduce backup file storage with our Inline Data Deduplication Compression feature, which places minimal impact on backup windows and restore time.
  • Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS physical and virtual machines.
  • Unlimited replication to onsite, offsite and Cloud locations for greater protection against ransomware attacks.
  • Program backup windows are down to every 5 minutes and include multiple disks into one disk image.
  • Automatic deleting of old backup image sets
  • Mount an image file as a virtual drive for quick and convenient granular recovery of files and folders contained in the image file.

The ActiveImage Protector Linux also allows you to enhance recovery times with the VStandby AIP Instant Disaster Recovery Solution.

The vStandby AIP add-on module offers reliable Instant Disaster Recovery options for all Windows and Linux machines. Clients will be able to recover their ActiveImage Protector backup files in as little as 2 minutes in Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX(i), and be able to continue using it with no performance impact or time limitations.

If you are not able to offer your clients this kind of solution, get in contact with ActiveImage today!

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Hyper-V Backup Tactics Every MSP Should Know

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If you are an MSP offering Hyper-V backup to your customers, any oversight on your part can prove to be quite costly. Therefore, you need to make sure you can offer your clients the best backup strategy.

What Your Hyper-V Backup Strategy Should Include

  • A special backup software should be used instead of using scripts for backing up on virtual machines. Scripts lack essential capabilities, such as error detection, and file verification, which make it an outdated practice.
  • Although virtual platforms are free from physical limitations, they should be regularly backed up so that the client has a recent record of their data if there is a crash or software malfunction.
  • Virtual disks should not be expanded often as this can slow down the backup process.
  • It is very important that the host and Hyper-V machine communicate effectively, therefore they should be updated regularly.
  • You should choose a compression mode that suits the amount of data you want to backup and the hardware you have.
  • Staying on top of Windows updates are important to protect servers and weed out any reported bugs that are fixed in the improved update.

If your current strategy does not include the above tactics, you will want to consider adding the ActiveImage Protector Hyper-V Enterprise to your portfolio.

What You Can Expect from the ActiveImage Protector Hyper-V Enterprise

  • Backup for all VMs without having to install an agent on each guest machine.
  • Save storage space with a deduplication across all VMs
  • Manage all ActiveImage Protector licences from a single network console
  • Replication to single or multiple locations onsite, offsite or into the Cloud.
  • Scheduled recovery point objectives every 5 minutes using agentless backup.
  • Restore individual or multiple VMs
  • Restore and migrate one or more VMs directly to the same host or to a different Hyper-V host with new or dissimilar hardware.
  • Backups to all VMs and the host.

For more information on the ActiveImage Protector Hyper-V Enterprise, contact us today!

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