2021-01 January Roundup Newsletter

Happy January everyone!

This month, MSPGeek kicked off the year with a bang! We went LIVE with our latest website which  you can see here, in addition to a new program called the Vendor Spotlight, which we'll get into later on. There were also several other actions we've taken to help improve the community for you guys.  

Here's a bulletin of changes - listed in order of when they occurred 🙂

  • Document your documents please! We've moved our processes and documentation to a great documentation platform (Hudu, check them out) to help keep us streamlined and organized.
  • MSPGeek Moved! Check out our brand new website, www.mspgeek.org! We've also updated www.mspgeek.com to point to the same page and moved our forums to forums.mspgeek.org. The Slack inviter, at join.mspgeek.com, has not moved.
  • MSPGeek Inc is now live! We are a fully formed registered Corporation in the USA, and our application for NPO has been filed with the IRS. This will significantly benefit us as we gain access to discounted rates for many services that allow us to better serve content to our members.
  • Spotlight on stage please! Vendor Spotlight is a program created by us so that we can continue bringing high-quality educational content to the community in the form of Geekcasts. Read below for more details on how this works; rest assured only certified educational tech content will be on display!
  • To Slack, or not to Slack... We're all aware of the ongoing shortcomings of our beloved Slack. We have been agonizing for quite a while about what we can do about it, including calculating what our costs would be to purchase Slack with the NPO discount. We released a mini-survey to the community to identify our options, if you haven't seen it please take 30 seconds and fill it out here. This is for us to help improve the community for you
  • Channels, channels galore. MSPGeek would like to welcome several new vendors to the community! Vendors who come to engage do so with the understanding that they come primarily to help not sell! We appreciate their willingness to be a true partner to Service Providers and are looking forward to their community contributions. Please be sure to check them out.
  • Monthly Roundups! We have in the past (primarily Gavin!) sent out infrequent monthly newsletters when we were able to. Moving forward, these will be replaced with newsletters like this that will round-up the month - and will hopefully be regular. Emails and posts will go out on the last day of the month. Stay on the lookout for them for the latest MSPGeek News!

New Vendors Welcome

We'd like to specifically call out the new vendors that are representing in MSPGeek.

SyncroMSP is an up-and-coming combined RMM/PSA platform for MSPs. They joined us in Slack (#v-syncro) at the beginning of January and maintain a strong and active presence in the community!

Connectwise as a company needs no introduction, of course. Anyone familiar with our roots as LabTechGeek will know that we have always had a strong Connectwise community presence. Connectwise will officially represent in our community in #v-connectwise slack channel. Keep in mind that existing channels should still be used for individual product discussions! The Vendor channel was requested by them to handle specific requests about Connectwise directly.

HostiFi  is for those who like Unifi but are turned off by the required controller or lack of support. This company will provide affordable Unifi Cloud Controller hosting for you along with a second line of support for when you need help - an "MSP" special for Ubiquiti products! You can find them in the #v-hostifi channel and others that focus on Networking and Ubiquiti.

Vendor Spotlight

Alright, finally! We keep mentioning this "Vendor Spotlight" so, let's get into the roots of what exactly that is! 

One of the most popular requests we get from our members is for Geekcasts to occur more often, ideally with varied topics each time. Additionally, as more vendors join MSPGeek we get continued requests from them to be allowed to promote their various benefits more often. At MSPGeek we've been vividly aware of the fact that "vendor fatigue" is a problem most MSPs or any IT Department really can face, and we wanted to ensure we kept the community as productive as possible so as not to chase away our good, hard-working members.

Given the above challenges, we were able to formulate a "compromise" that is actually just a really big win for everyone! 

Vendors are offered a chance to enrol in the Spotlight program, where they will have one month being front and center on our website. To qualify for this they must submit the details for a Geekcast session that will be held by MSPGeek on the third week of their selected month. 

Here's the important bit! The Geekcast is not here to promote their product, rather the vendor will be going in-depth on their selected topic and having an educational discussion about best practices and various challenges and how to overcome them. The vendor can provide a demo at the end of the cast showcasing how a platform or product can solve the challenge, but the primary focus should be on bringing awareness to the topic so as to help Service Providers improve, regardless of them using a specific vendor (or no vendor at all). The Geekcasts will generally be hosted by an MSPGeek representative acting in the role of the audience and a Vendor representative who will be there to give the session.

Huntress Labs, who has shown themselves to be a company more interested in educating the masses and being a true partner, was selected for the Month of January. This is proven again and again in every session CEO Kyle Hanslovan is on as he likes to say... 

Use your built-in existing toolset to secure what you can first, before filling in the gaps with spendy outside products - Kyle Hanslovan

You can catch their Geekcast from January here and see their listing on MSPGeek here.

This Month in Security

Hopefully, you're not relying solely on just MSPGeek newsletters to get your security news. There are interesting events that happened this month that we feel we should draw your attention to, in case you missed it from your other sources.

Starting first with the ongoing crisis, the Solarwinds Orion compromise (Sunburst) quickly spread in a way eerily similar to COVID, as more and more vendors are finding themselves having been hit; we cannot stress this enough just because you don't use Orion doesn't mean you're not affected, be sure to check the list of vendors directly affect and identify where those breaches can impact your business (like ripples in a pond)

Likely this is an event that will have long-lasting repercussions for many months to come.

Google believes North Korea is behind the new wave of Social Engineering that has started, targeting top Cyber Security researchers. A fake profile is created and the person approaches the Security Expert under the guise of reviewing an exploit that they found. The exploit contains a backdoor that allows the bad actor behind the fake profile to steal existing research from the security expert. It seems someone may be after another Sunburst type exploit!

On to some good news; almost as if this was the good guys striking back hard - a collaborative effort of several government Law Enforcement Agencies worldwide including the Canadian RCMP and the American FBI have announced the takedown of the Emotet botnet and the Netwalker ransomware sites

Some other highlights; 

NinjaRMM put together a very successful Security Summit once again for the year of 2021, bringing together powerful names in the world of Cyber Security, to continue education for service providers and Small Businesses on protecting themselves and more importantly what to do if your protections fail. This is an important piece that is most often overlooked, you do NOT want to be caught with your pants down! Have an Incident Response plan in place and make sure you have the training and ability to implement it quickly and calmly. Fire drill over and over, again and again.

Huntress learns EDR!  Huntress Labs, a beloved vendor of MSPGeek (and in this month's "spotlight"), made a huge move doing an M&A of another like-minded company to enhance their security services and provide additional options to their partners. 

Community Shoutout!

We'd like to thank everyone, vendors and MSPs alike, for actively engaging the community and helping make us who we are today! 

We are always focusing on bettering the Information Technology field by improving the quality of information in all three pillars; Technology, Business, and Customer Service. 

Other miscellaneous announcements...

For those of you who weren't around for the announcement, we do maintain a community calendar for Vendors to earmark webinars and events on so that you can view them (for all participating vendors) in one easy place and select which ones you'd like to register for. Additionally, these events get announced in the Slack channel #vendor-events-announcements be sure to join that channel and enable Alerts for all messages so you can stay in the loop if you like.

Please be mindful of unsolicited messages, vendors are under strict agreement for no solicitation (check our Code of Conduct) however just like any other social media platform there could be other nefarious purposes for someone messaging you (see the above mention regarding North Korea). As a reminder do not give out personally identifiable information or information that can lead back to your systems.  

This is a free public community and we want to make sure to remind you occasionally that security should always be your first thought, even when trying to get help. Also, if you get any suspicious DM's or requests for information please do a /adminrequest command and an admin member will reach out to help you. All Admins are identifiable by name and are listed on our website About Us page.

and last, but by no means least...

From all of us in the MSPGeek Admin Team... Happy New Year everyone!! We hope that 2021 bring you and your loved ones (and your businesses!) all the very best in health, wealth and prosperity! Onwards and upwards!!

 


MSPGeek Admin Team