In the managed service provider (MSP) channel, Forrester tells us that about 25% of service providers are running at break-even, even during great economic times. That means that now, more than ever, it’s critical to be managing cash well. But crisis cash management is different than day-to-day management when profits are high and cash flow is steady.

The fundamentals of managing your business don’t change during a crisis regardless of what causes that crisis. Whether the cause is a natural disaster, ransomware attack, keyman illness, or a pandemic-induced recession like COVID-19, there are real, practical, and effective ways to respond to ensure the survival of your business in the short and long term.

I recently had a great conversation with Jay McBain, Principal Analyst for Channels and Partnerships at Forrester, about how the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 will affect the channel – specifically the MSP Channel.

There was a lot of territory to cover: from looking at the current state of the channel to how many in the channel may (or may not) survive the economic hardship to examining the real opportunities the pandemic has created for MSPs.

I’ll recap our conversation below and you can watch the full interview as well, but long story short: while many in the channel will struggle to survive, there are also tremendous opportunities ahead.

While cyber protection is most frequently discussed in relation to managing and securing operating software, it can also involve managing the hardware that stores your valuable data – namely your disk drives. Because if your drive fails, any data stored on it can be lost forever.

All hard drives will fail at some point. While this is particularly true of traditional, magnetic disk hard drives (a.k.a. hard disk drives or HDD), newer solid state drives (SSD) that use flash memory also face issues once their memory cells start to fail. Several factors can lead to errors in these data storage devices.

For complete cyber protection, ensuring the stability and reliability of your drive is critical to safeguarding your data.

As an MSP, I was always looking for better tools, tools that would ultimately help me deliver a higher level of service to my clients. As expensive as it is to change tools, if the benefits outweighed the pain of switching, I was all over it.

Today, protecting your clients from cyberthreats has become a full-time job. Exploits are created every minute of every day, making it practically impossible for most IT service providers to keep pace to counter them all.

Now more than ever, MSPs need modern tools to manage modern threats.