2020 brought several new challenges for businesses, and 2021 will require MSPs to continue to adapt. These 10 tools can help you overcome these challenges in the new year.
With every year that passes, managed services providers (MSPs) face a new host of challenges as they attempt to keep up with rapidly changing business practices, advancing technology, and increasingly sophisticated security risks. These challenges are to be expected, but 2020 brought new and unique difficulties that no one could have anticipated—primarily caused by the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic.
2020 was a challenging year for individuals and businesses alike, affecting the needs of companies across industries and forcing them to adapt to new working conditions. For many MSPs, productivity, quality of service, and revenue were impacted as they tried to grapple with changes to their customers’ needs and the way they work. It’s important for IT companies to ensure their systems are streamlined, efficient, cost-effective, and robust—or in other words, capable of supporting their business through unprecedented circumstances. As we enter a new year, this article will provide with a list of the best MSP software solutions currently on the market to help your business thrive in 2021.
The tools MSPs should explore this year
As we enter 2021, remote work is still largely the norm, and cyberthreats continue to rise. To help MSPs face these challenges head on in 2021, we’ve selected several tools that are especially well-suited to helping businesses tackle both familiar and emerging obstacles.
1. N-able RMM
Having access to an all-in-one remote monitoring and management solution can help you consolidate and centralize your operations, eliminating the need to jump between applications and maintain multiple tools. Trading out multiple MSP tools for a powerful all-in-one MSP software solution can also be more cost-effective and easier for onboarding.
N-able® RMM provides a versatile suite of tools accessible via a single dashboard. By centralizing all the capabilities you’ll need to deliver a high quality of service to your customers, RMM can streamline your company’s activities significantly. N-able RMM features endpoint detection and response, managed antivirus, risk intelligence, patch management, and much more, incorporating multiple utilities into one consolidated console. As a cloud solution specifically designed for MSPs, capabilities like enterprise-grade remote access can help you meet the customer demand for increasingly remote working environments. To learn more, you can download a 30-day free trial.
Editor’s note: Also be sure to read our article explaining what RMM is.
2. N-able Mail Assure
N-able Mail Assure is a cloud-based solution for IT service providers that helps improve and safeguard email security. With more people working from home in 2021, email security will continue to be more important than ever. Email-based attacks are becoming more popular and more sophisticated by the day, and there is an increased likelihood of email-borne attacks being successful when employees are away from the office.
This reliable email security tool that provides enterprise-grade email protection for both outbound and inbound email correspondence. N-able utilizes collective threat intelligence from over 23 million mailboxes to filter out both known and emerging threats with 99.999% filtering accuracy. Plus, email continuity helps ensure your customers can access email even if their provider is facing an outage, and encrypted long-term email archiving with an unlimited retention period can prevent data loss. A 30-day free trial is available.
3. Rapid Fire Cyber Hawk
Cyber Hawk, by Rapid Fire, is an internal threat detection solution that can help your MSP enhance its cybersecurity measures. Cyber Hawk combines intelligent tagging and machine learning technology to detect anomalous activity, threats, or suspicious modifications. Cyber Hawk enables MSPs to deliver enterprise-grade security to all their customers, which provides significant added value—especially in a year like 2021.
Additional features include automated scans, pre-built plans and catalogs, service plan creator, scanning engine, daily alerts, weekly notices, recommended tags, and much more.
4. N-able N-central
N-able N-central® is an all-in-one monitoring solution that provides many of the same capabilities as N-able RMM but is especially well-suited to MSPs with a diverse client portfolio. This powerful software allows you to deliver customized support at scale and allows you to monitor and manage potentially thousands of devices to aid the growth of networks cost-effectively and efficiently.
N-central features robust automation functionalities that minimize technician labor and improve overall efficiency. With the Network Topology Mapping utility and the unique NetPath feature, N-central can enhance visibility into your networks, informing actions taken to boost performance. N-central’s consolidated dashboard is intuitive and gives you access to a range of capabilities, including backup management, patch management, remote monitoring, endpoint detection and response, and much more. To learn more, you can access a 30-day free trial.
5. N-able Take Control
N-able Take Control is remote access software that can help your business face the challenge of increasingly popular and necessary remote working practices. As tickets and support requests increase as your customers continue to adjust to their remote work realities, Take Control can help you remote into their devices and troubleshoot with ease. This tool helps you deliver fast, efficient, and secure remote support to your client base. With deep diagnostics and the ability to connect to machines in just a few seconds, Take Control is a powerful remote access tool. Take Control also delivers remote access without compromising security, with features like AES-256 encryption, multi-factor authentication, and automated clipboard deletion. A 14-day free trial of Take Control is available for MSPs who want to test it out for themselves.
6. N-able MSP Manager
If you’re looking for tools that can help you improve customer support, N-able MSP Manager comes highly recommended. This MSP software reduces the number of hours technicians spend solving customer problems by delivering lightweight ticketing, customer and knowledge management features, and batch billing exports.
With a fully brandable customer portal and an intuitive user interface, N-able MSP Manager is the ideal solution for MSPs—and their customers. By making it easier for technicians to juggle support requests in a streamlined workflow, your customers will receive more efficient support that keeps them satisfied with your services. A 14-day free trial is available.
7. Quest Database Management
Quest offers a range of database management tools for all major platforms, including Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra. Quest’s database management solutions help you simplify and streamline your database, allowing you to manage, move, and monitor your company data across an array of cloud-based and on-premises systems.
Quest’s database management tools cover database development, database performance monitoring, database DevOps, database administration, cloud migration, and even GDPR compliance.
8. N-able Backup
Given that cybercrime grows more sophisticated over the years, it is crucial that MSPs are using effective backup software to help protect their customers. N-able Backup is a web-based, all-in-one backup solution that is versatile and user-friendly, with support for backing up Microsoft 365, servers, workstations, and documentation. This tool also features bare metal recovery to facilitate fast restoration, as well as virtual disaster recovery. With this backup software, you can check the status of backups, rapidly recover important data, and schedule backups ahead of time to improve efficiency. A free 30-day trial is available for MSPs to test it out.
9. N-able Passportal
With more people working from home in 2021, team members should be able to access the systems and accounts they need without compromising security. A password management tool like Passportal™ can help you generate and maintain strong, unique passwords—and securely store them with granular access controls.
Passportal makes it easy to handle auditing, password change automation, and privileged client IT documentation management features. This comprehensive range of features makes complying with password best practices easy so you can rest assured that sensitive data and accounts are protected. Passportal stores credentials in an encrypted vault controlled by role-based permissions and two-factor authentication to ensure that only authorized users are able to establish access.
10. Teamwork Project Management
Teamwork is a project management solution that can help you manage your team’s priorities and tasks, track progress on projects, and meet deadlines and SLAs. This popular tool allows you to assign tasks and add deadlines, empowering your team to execute tasks in a way that is best suited to them. Optional views like Task Lists, Gantt Charts, and Board Views help you organize timelines and projects in the way that best keeps your team on track.
Teamwork helps your team collaborate more effectively by allowing team members and clients to comment on tasks and discuss project details within the tool. The software also includes resource management and capacity planning features to make sure your team members’ time is always allocated efficiently.
Bringing the best tools with you in 2021
The working world is changing, threats are multiplying, and business practices are evolving. To keep pace with these changes, businesses must be able to rely on sophisticated and scalable software solutions that empower them to offer high quality services to their customers. No matter the challenges your MSP faces in 2021 and beyond, there is a quality software solution that can help.
If you’d like to further explore the topic of MSP tools, be sure to also read: All in one software for MSP and