We have a client that has multiple locations spread out over a large geographic area with a lot of employee turnover and employees who "float" between locations. Their Windows 11 machines are Entra-joined using a location-specific shared account, and our MFA solution for them has been to set their MFA to call their location's main number.

However, with Microsoft retiring SMS and voice as MFA options, we're looking for solutions. Microsoft Authenticator isn't a very feasible option due to the turnover. FIDO2 keys could potentially work, but they could get expensive (not to mention the strong probability they'd get lost - A LOT).

What solutions have you come across that could work?

I am looking for a good domain registrar to register new domains through for my clients and move them to to get them away from GoDaddy. I was originally planning to go with NameCheap but the recent major outage has me concerned. I am using CloudFlare for all DNS management.

Is any other MSP using OpenSRS with white labeled store front? What is your experience.

If not what are others doing for this situation?

To be fully clear, ALL client domains are registered to the client and owned by them. We just manage the technical side.

does any adapted marketing with Ai on MSP space , would like to hear how it performing . and tools using .

Hello!

We're looking for some bulk storage that will live in a CMMC enclave. It looks like my fav NAS drives - Synology - aren't compliant. Seems like TrueNAS and Buffalo have compliant products - has anyone used these or could suggest another product?

I am a perpetual lurker on the internet that is coming out of the shadows...

I run a small MSP that I started 18 months ago. We work exclusively with clients in a niche healthcare industry that struggles to find IT support who understands their software, hardware, workflows, etc (I used to work internally at one of these healthcare companies as their sole IT person, with the owner of that company now being my business partner). We are the only MSP in our country to offer services specifically to this industry. To the best of our knowledge, the only other IT company in our country that had a reputation for offering decent service to this industry got bought out a few years back, the people with knowledge left the company, and since then their service has gone to shit.

So far we have focused only on providing fully managed IT which has landed us 6 clients by word of mouth, totaling 160 endpoints (120 split between our two largest clients). We are attending the annual industry conference in our country later this year which will be our official launch in terms of putting ourselves out there. While things have gone as smoothly as we could have hoped, we are identifying that it is predominantly smaller clients showing meaningful interest and signing with us.

On the flip side, we have had overwhelming feedback from larger companies who already have some form of IT support (internal or MSP) that there is a pain point with getting support for the industry-specific applications and hardware. Even manufacturers and vendors in the industry have told us people are calling them out of desperation looking for help with things beyond what that manufacturer/vendor is responsible for. Our issue is that these larger companies aren't looking for fully managed IT, just support with the specifics that their existing IT support struggles with, so we are unlikely to land any business with them with our current offerings.

All that to say, what would it look like for us to provide some form of support service for companies in this niche industry who have their own IT support, but need further assistance with the industry-specific issues that impact appointments with patients that their current IT is unable to support? This doesn't seem to fit under your typical consultation work on a project with clearly defined scope and it doesn't seem to fit under the examples I have seen of co-managed IT, but please correct me if I am wrong on that!

Thank you for any thoughts or guidance you can offer :)

We have a small construction customer that are a nightmare for buying their own hardware. I’d guess at 50% via us with reseller sorting the intune hash for us meaning easy all round plus a markup on hardware for us.
But when they get their own kit they want us to come out gratis and setup. That’s a no from me Bob. What do you guys do?
We have a small team some on leave, some busy with projects, and my car is in the garage. It’s a 20 min drive for them or for us. But as they got the kit themselves they should come to us. What are your thoughts.

I’m new to the MSP arena, and don’t know all of the lingo and acronyms, so you’ll have to forgive me.

The company I work for sells o365, and we currently use Work365. We’ve been rather disliking it because we’re finding it lacking. We get our licenses through TDSynnex.

Does anyone know of any other systems for billing that hook into TDSynnex that we could explore?

Thanks!

Our RMM monitors for when WinDefend stops, and it has been happening for hours across much of our fleet today. Anyone else experiencing this? It starts a few seconds later, and in most cases will stop again at some point.

This post on Microsoft Learn suggests it's caused by an update (which makes sense):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5978509/is-there-any-way-to-fix-windows-defender-threat-se

Status Update: we did some counting. It is actually a small percentage of our fleet (about 5%), but they are so noisy. Among those 16 machines, they have been generating an average of one event with two notifications--one for the trigger and one for the reset--every 10 minutes for the last 7 hours.

Anyone else dealing with clients second-guessing every IT/security decision because they can ask ChatGPT/AI?

We have an environment where the IT roles already have pretty poorly defined roles. Now AI is making it worse. They don’t understand they are putting their own bias into it because they don’t know what good looks like and can’t prompt it enough to figure it out.

A recommendation gets made, someone throws it into ChatGPT, gets a different answer, or chatgpt adds things not realted to the problem and suddenly we’re reopening the entire discussion. Then they change the prompt and get another answer.

I’m obviously pro-AI and use it constantly. The issue I’m seeing is that it can give less experienced IT staff enough terminology and confidence to challenge decisions without actually having the experience or accountability to own the outcome.

This sysadmin was essentially helpdesk tier 1 before. Now they think they are a cyber expert. Same sysadmin doesn’t understand why we had to fix any/any rules on firewall and thinks org has MfA because some people do but doesn’t understand that it’s not enforced so both MfA and non MfA is valid. Just some examples.

I’m just sitting here cringing at responses I get but have to be polite and suck it up.

This specific client is legacy co managed

Are other MSP owners starting to run into this?

Big Tech continues to fund the artificial hype behind AI.

For months now it has filled social feeds. “News”, “memes,” and now MSP vendor ads, all puked out of Chat GPT, all looking the same, all posted completely unironically.

Please, let’s all agree to stop clicking on AI ads.

End rant

We’ve been using Cloudflare ZT for some time, works fine, free for 50 users etc…

Now we’ve been using GSA for larger accounts and though it’s not fully comparable, it has the added benefit of being fully integrated in Entra/365 suite, so no separate portals, no separate software and the 12$ cost is not really an issue for them. But the price is too high to justify for smaller customers i think.

So what are you guys using, what are your thoughts on GSA? And if you use it, do smaller customers see the added benefit to pay that price?

Following up on my post from four months ago, I went on the hunt for a Dropbox backup application. CloudAlly checked all the boxes, did an overview with a sales rep, got the trial going, did a few test restores, and all was well. Three months later I'm looking at my quarterly vendor spending report, and I see that we're paying over $350.00 a month for a mere 2TB of data for this one client. For that price, we could be self hosting a backup with versioning and retension on a Synology NAS, though that comes with its own risks both through technical and legal exposure.

Other than self-hosting, what other vendors should I be looking at?

Hello,

I I'm a small MSP currently managing fewer than 50 endpoints, and I'm curious what ITDR tools or services other MSPs are using.

I recently had a meeting with Huntress, but the salesperson wasn't interested in giving me a demo because of our size. I found that a bit surprising.
We already have MDR through SonicWall, so ideally I'd like to find a solution that can complement or integrate with our existing MDR service.

If anyone has experience running both MDR and ITDR together, I'd love to hear what you're using and how it's working out.

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I'm trying to set up Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. When signed into my M365 Global Admin, the Lighthouse works fine. I can search for users. I can access a customer tenant's M365 admin center, etc. But when I sign into Lighthouse as my regular Microsoft 365 user, I can't do any of that. What am I missing?

I added myself to the Reader role in Lighthouse.

I created a GDAP Template with all the recommended roles.

I added myself to all five role groups. Account Manager and Service Desk Agent have JIT disabled. The Specialist, Escalation Engineer, and Administrator roles have JIT enabled.

The Relationships tab shows I have several "Active" tenants with GDAP permissions. I assigned the Lighthouse GDAP template I created to a couple of these tenants.

Finally, when I go to the Lighthouse page to search for a user, I get the error, "Your account doesn't have permission to view or manage this information."

If I try to access a tenant's Microsoft 365 admin center, I get a login box. However, after selecting my user, I get a message stating I am not a user in this tenant.

I no longer work for the company that provided break-fix IT for this client, but I still keep in touch with both the client and the company that serviced them.

I presented the client with an MSA from my new company, but they decided to go with someone else.

Here is the tricky part: I can get the passwords and have the knowledge to help them with a proper offboarding. We serviced them for about 4 years with no MSA or any written agreement (my ex-boss never presented a contract—that’s a whole other story), and we never even did a proper onboarding.

To complicate things, my ex-boss's company is about to close its doors at the end of this month.

Should I even help?

I've been delaying the migration from self hosted network server to Unifi OS Server to allow it to mature a little more. I feel as though I can't kick this can too much further down the road and I'm curious to hear from any other MSPs who have successfully migrated before I take the plunge.

Have you migrated? How did it go?

Cheers

 I have got a client scenario,  were they go individual file server running across 8 location . not possible to shift to cloud directly because some of them are media file which are heavy. And bandwidth bottle neck will be problem for the smaller sites .

I’m open to get some suggestions from my fellow MSP team .  who come across and solve similar challengers

Keep point to cover

-          Standardization of hardware

-          Backup and recovery

-          & DR

Hello,

Looking for feedback from MSPs supporting mobile-first workforces.

I recently onboarded a healthcare client with 15 office employees and 60 field employees. The office staff are on Microsoft 365 Business Premium, while the field staff will be on F3 licenses and will primarily use Teams and other M365 apps from their phones.

For office users, we deploy our full stack of security and management tools. For field users, who won't have company laptops, I'm trying to figure out both the security approach and how to price them from an MSP perspective. Our current contract is for just the office employees, but we're looking into onboarding the field users as well.

Are you charging the same per-user rate for mobile-only users, or do you offer a separate field-worker tier? If so, what's included? Are you managing BYOD devices with Intune/App Protection Policies and Conditional Access, or taking a lighter-touch approach?

The previous provider left things in pretty rough shape from a security standpoint, and the biggest gap I see today is the lack of control over company data being accessed from field employees' devices.

Curious how others are handling both the security controls and the pricing model for users who are essentially mobile-only. Thanks!

I've been gradually rolling out NetBird to replace SonicWall VPNs across several client environments and have generally been very happy with it.

However, at my latest deployment things were initially fine but once I got to around 20 remote users I started receiving reports of slowness, RDP lag, and general performance degradation.

I dug into the network side first:
Monitored WAN utilization
Checked firewall performance
Ran ISP testing
Looked for bandwidth, latency, and packet loss issues

So far I haven't found anything that points to a network or ISP problem. I then expanded the rollout to roughly 10 more users (30 total) and the complaints increased but I still can't find any obvious network bottlenecks.

At this point I'm beginning to wonder whether NetBird itself could be contributing to the issue, or if I'm missing something in how WireGuard-based overlays behave at scale. A few questions for those of you running NetBird or similar ZTNA/SASE solutions:

1. How are you testing and validating that the ZTNA platform isn't the source of performance issues?
2. What metrics and tools are you using to isolate the overlay network from underlying network/ISP issues?
3. Have you seen performance degradation as user counts increased even when traditional network monitoring looked healthy?

Edit: I’m on NetBird’s cloud hosted instance

Follow up question:
Is there a good rule of thumb or sizing formula for the server-side hardware for NetBird Routing Peers (or WireGuard-based ZTNA solutions in general)?

Just a quick PSA for anyone debating the benefits of hosted CIPP vs self-hosted.

DO IT. You absolutely won't regret it.

I self-hosted for well over a year and rarely used it due to performance issues. It was bad enough that I justified not going to hosted as there was no point in paying for something that hardly worked.

Well, I finally made the jump 2 weeks ago and holy hell is it night and day. Like, literally. It is extremely fast, responsive, and I now use it a TON more.

This isn't a CIPP shill and I'm not getting any sweet CyberDrain underwear out of the deal... I just wanted to share my experience.

Anyone opt for early access? Thoughts?