This is Two Minute Tech Tips, I’m your host Lester Steward. In this series we are discussing Business cybersecurity and what you need to know to protect your business.
A Managed services provider or MSP, is a person or company that handles your business IT. They can be inside the company or be an outside organization. These people help your company keep current with technology. An IT MSP should come alongside your company and be a partner to help your business be more effective in day to day operations.
An MSPs main goal should be reliability by keeping your operations stable, backed up and secure.
Stable means they should have tools to monitor the critical infrastructure catching most issues before they become an issue for your business operations. An MSP cannot be omnipresent even if they’re in-house IT, monitoring tools are great at finding out problems and alerting the helpdesk most of the time before the employees know there is even a problem. There have been many times I’ve called a client because I was alerted to a critical issue by my tools and the client says they were literally dialing my number about that issue.
Backups, we’ve talked about how important those are in a previous episode and best practices for backups. This is a crucial component to discuss with your MSP or in-house IT. The MSP should be reviewing all backup types for your business on a weekly basis. Good backups will save your business.
Security should be of paramount concern for your MSP. If a bad actor or a disgruntled employee can gain access to your critical infrastructure then your going to have a bad time. MSPs should have anti-virus protection on each PC and server. They should also be keeping up with security updates on PCs and double checking often if each PC is up to date. A firewall system also needs to be in-place to protect the network from outside attacks and they should implement MFA where they can just to have that second layer of security.
MSPs should never be a burden to your business, they should never be hard to communicate with but please remember, MSPs are humans and we can’t be perfect all the time.
If you need any information on this subject, please let North Tech Group know by visiting our website ntgak.com.
On the next episode I’ll be discussing Anti-virus products and how to ensure what you have installed is doing enough to protect your PC and server.
Thanks for joining me, Lester Steward for your Two Minute Tech Tips, helping you keep safe in your cybersecurity world.