I speak with many MSPs online, in demos, at events, over email, and chat. They must cover multiple areas of knowledge. Maintaining specialist knowledge in each area is a constant battle. But when MSPs search for answers, they're often met with a sea of information from others trying to make sense of things too. True expertise can get lost amongst the speculations and partial confusions. Microsoft 365, being ubiquitous, adds to their challenges.

Our tests show that, even when an MFA policy is in place, 20% of applicable accounts have no MFA enrolment. Why? We'll get to that. This article is designed to help MSPs deliver MFA by helping them understand the choices, pointing out the pitfalls in the mechanisms and rollout.

Grand View Research predict that USA demand for MSP services will double by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 13%. It’s a similar story in most developed markets as businesses seek to outsource their non-core IT activities to experts. Such a strong sellers' market would normally mean easy growth. But MSPs cannot hope to recruit and train sufficient cyber security engineers. America has a 500,000 strong cybersecurity job gap.

We’re delighted to announce that Octiga, the multi-tenant Microsoft 365 security platform for MSPs, is now available to MSPs and MSSPs operating in France and French speaking African territories. Bordeaux based Watsoft, a French value-added IT distributor, is now Octiga distributor for these regions.

Before reading this, please flick up your client list on-screen. As far back as 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that 84% of B2B sales start with a recommendation or referral. We like to be sure that we’ll get the outcomes we want from our B2B purchase decisions. Failures cost money and can reflect badly on decision makers’ careers. Now let’s go back to your client list. What was the initial source for each client? How did they find out about your MSP business?

1. Limited Scope of Security Metrics Microsoft Secure Score assesses security configurations and behaviors within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem but does not account for external threats. MSPs need a holistic security approach that includes network security, endpoint protection, and third-party integrations, which Secure Score does not cover (S:1).

It seems like every other day there is a public announcement of a compromise involving unauthorised access to Microsoft 365. Privately, my security consultancy team are called in more often than we would like to deconstruct a compromise and determine if a notifiable data breach has occurred.

Octiga Software, Microsoft 365 Security Management & Monitoring for MSPs, is delighted to announce it has embarked on a benefit partnership with The ASCII Group for 2024. The ASCII Group is a membership-based community of independent North American MSPs, MSSPs and Solution Providers. By partnering with The ASCII Group, Octiga is enhancing its channel program and creating lasting relationships with IT service providers.

Microsoft's security team has recently made a significant discovery regarding an increase in cyber-attacks orchestrated by the Russian state-backed group known as the Midnight Blizzard crew. This group, which also operates under the aliases Nobelium, APT29, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes, has been actively targeting personal credentials, according to Microsoft's findings. The Midnight Blizzard hackers employ residential proxy services to conceal the source IP addresses of their attacks.

Microsoft 365 Secure Score is a comprehensive security analytics tool for a single tenant. It uses a score-based approach to provide actionable recommendations to enhance security. However, MSPs should be aware that the scoring process fails to fit the needs of scaling MSPs in terms of business exceptions, managing multiple clients, remediation and alerting, not to mention making an assessment which is independent of MS upselling.