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Trust your MSP
Adam Currey
You've found and hired an MSP now comes the hard part.
Having been in the managed service provider (MSP) game for several years, I cannot begin to count the number of times that someone has hired a company that I was working for to give them advice and then proceeded to ignore every word. I am unsure as to the motivations of the persons who would hire a consultant and then not listen to their advice. However, I am not unsure of what often results from ignoring the advice given which is many times catastrophic.
If you make the decision that you need assistance from someone in regards to your technological needs, please heed their advice. You hired them to give it and are paying them handsomely for it. As MSP’s, it is our job to be informed about the different attacks that are coming for your business, and how best to avoid them. We give advice based upon the knowledge that we have gained from our peers as well as firsthand experience. Clients who fail to heed that advice don’t tend to stay clients. While we are opposed to leaving clients in a lurch, I have seen a client hit with ransomware after not listening to the advice of the company they hired for two years and the company walked away and refused to help. This is not common practice to my knowledge, but is most likely more common than I give it credit for being.
Managed Service Providers are normally hired to both manage your network and give advice on the technological needs of your company. As such we are often seen as both the IT department and the IT consultants. As the IT department it is our job to fix the issues that arise and do preventative maintenance to stop as many of those issues as possible from occurring. As consultants it is our job to recommend upgrades to your hardware and software to make your data and your company more secure. We are in a unique position of being both an inside and outside resource. We see your company from the inside looking at all of your infrastructure and your employees. We also see your company from the outside looking at what hackers see when they are trying to break in. With being able to see both sides of your business, we are able to make better recommendations. We can see where your issues lie and make timely suggestions to fix them. But we can only do so much, it is on you to take action.
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How many times have you called an IT person only to have them ask you if you have tried rebooting your PC? There is good reason for this. Most electronics need to be restarted from time to time to allow them to continue to operate the way we expect them to. Rebooting your computer from time to time is absolutely necessary. Your IT person, be they your daughter, neighbor, or someone else knows that timely reboots are useful to the normal operation of your PC. There are protocols that those of us in the IT industry typically use for rebooting. Many of us have learned that from time to time extended shut-downs are also a necessary evil. With many of us working from home, the reboots and shutdowns may seem impossible. Especially if you deal with overzealous security which removes the option for shut-downs and reboots from your menus. When working remotely, you can us the ‘Run’ command (Win+ R) and input one of the following commands, for reboot: shutdown -r -t 0 for shutdown: shutdown -s -t 0. Without the period. The portion of the command labeled ‘shutdown’ calls the shutdown command, the switches ‘-r and -s’ tell the command to either reboot or shutdown; and the ‘-t 0’ portion of the command overrides the normal 30 second wait time for the command to be processed. You may enter any time from 0-120 seconds. We all understand that reboots and shut-downs are not an enjoyable experience especially in the middle of your busy day. None of us wants to have extended downtime when we are busy with important items on our to do lists. Which is why maintaining a schedule of reboots and shut-downs should be a priority. At 3C we recommend a weekly reboot on Fridays as you leave the office, and on the last Friday of the month a shutdown for the weekend. Listening to the advice of your IT provider is always recommended, but listening with regards to setting up a reboot and shutdown schedule could save you valuable time during the week.