ThreatLocker: Zero Trust, Zero Excuses (EP 865)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. If you are seeing me live, this is the Wednesday live show. Tonight is an open house party edition.

I have Dawn Sizer coming up with me as a guest, and we're going to talk about a couple of things that we've been working on over the last week. Maybe it will help you in your journeys. But before we do anything, if you saw the video, then you saw the first major announcement.

I need to give a huge thank you to our newest partner, our exclusive live stream sponsor, ThreatLocker. For enterprise level security that truly locks down your end points, ThreatLocker is the gold standard, explicitly allowing only trusted applications and scripts to run, then denying everything else by default, including ransomware. With granular policy control, real-time visibility, and centralized logging, ThreatLocker helps you streamline security and protect your business from evolving threats.

Plus, their support is lightning fast with response times around 60 seconds, and if you're ready to take your cybersecurity to the next level, you need to visit ThreatLocker and request your free 30-day trial today. Even if you are watching now, if you open up a second screen on your window there, you will see that ThreatLocker is already on the website. There is already going to be a link to the 30-day trial, itbusinesspodcast.com slash ThreatLocker, and I need to say thank you to them.

So you, of course, will be seeing them more, and I already have some ThreatLocker swag sitting in the background there, their Getty water bottle. I know you can't see the logo, but you can see it here, as I already have my mug with ThreatLocker on there as the sponsor for the show for 2025. So if you're watching the video, there it is, the Iron Man symbol there, and ThreatLocker proudly displayed as I sip my sparkling water.

Thank you to ThreatLocker. I want to say thank you also to people. We've already gotten some comments in the chat.

Somebody said good evening, and I don't know if this is the same somebody, but he also got a thumbs up as well. So thank you for hanging out with us, and feel free to throw questions in the chat, responses, all your good stuff. But let me do this.

And I did not tell her this, but I just happened to see hanging in my video intro the video that I made for the Dawn Sizer, CEO of Third Element Consulting. She was the darling of the channel back in 2021. She is an MSP leader extraordinaire.

She is probably one of a few people that everyone just loves to see and hang out with. She claims that there is nothing south of Orlando, but yet she is busy drafting a business plan to help relocate iguanas in the South Florida area with air tags, air guns, and all of those things. But what's best about Dawn Sizer is she claims to be one of my bestest friends, or maybe I'm one of her bestest friends.

I don't know exactly how it works, but yet here we are. And when I need things to happen, I call on my friend Dawn, and she comes a running. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, the Dawn Sizer.

Hey, Mark, how are you? I'm good. How are you? There's way too much lead up for this. But people like it.

There's a child saying, hey, and the golf clubs. Awesome. Oh, my goodness gracious.

Well, thank you for joining me tonight. And what'd you think of the big announcement? It's exciting. It's super exciting.

I am super excited for you, quite frankly, and for the podcast, but also, I mean, I'm a partner, so I think it's awesome. Well, I figured whenever I made this announcement, I would have to get you on because you were the person that literally told me, step your game up, get ThreatLocker, and that was two years ago. Yeah.

It was a while back. I know we had that conversation, and you started down the road of, I'm too small, I can't do that. And I'm like, not sure that's the case, but I think we had a really good conversation around what that would look like, what the lift was, the reality of it, and then what you decided to do, and sat down and went through the demo and set it loose in your own environment.

And I think one client, I think that you had it running loose in and really liked it and went from there. It is funny because I have heard people all over the place always talk about, oh, ThreatLocker is too complicated. You've got to have a team in order to use it and stuff.

But listen, I have subcontractors, but in theory, it's just me. And I'm running it just fine. And it's funny because my largest client, I probably had it on their systems, I don't know, three, four months before they even realized that they couldn't do anything.

Which is good. I mean, you want to have that situation, right? Because the client user experience is really, really important. I think as MSPs, we forget that sometimes because it just works, right? Just put it on there.

It does its thing and it's security. We should do that. I think the biggest thing is most of my clients, and when I say most, I'm talking like 98% did not have admin rights to install stuff anyway.

So for most of them, no big deal. It was that 2% that were used to just installing whatever they wanted, or it was the juniors that I had on site or the AJs, the admin juniors who wanted to be admins and do stuff without calling and then all of a sudden they couldn't install. And I had to tell them, I can't install either unless it gets approved through ThreatLocker.

And it's not that I'm being a jerk about it. It's because we are being secure. There is too many things that are able to be installed, even without admin rights.

And there are things that pretend to be legit, but are not, that we need to protect ourselves from. So that was one of the main reasons that it stuck out to me. Now I'm going to say this and it'll upset my cyber thoughts, friends, but that's where I originally was going to look at was just the AutoElevate feature.

But when I got introduced to the Zero Trust model and all the other things, you know, with the ring fencing and the storage control and the network control, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go that route. You know, and I think to be fair, if you have other solutions, right, AutoElevate is phenomenal for exactly what it does. And if you have other solutions that, you know, tick a couple of those boxes, it's the perfect thing.

So I think CyberFOX is really good for exactly what it is and for the people that are using it as long as you have, you know, other things in your arsenal. Yeah. And I would say to CyberFOX, return my calls, write me back.

I mean, I still like CyberFOX. What it does is fantastic. And, you know, if it's, listen, everybody can't have everything in their stack, but there are a lot of people that will use CyberFOX and be just happy.

Yep. So we have an active chat tonight. Let me make sure.

So the GOAT, Dawn Sizer, the IT badass. And look, another world famous person on our show. Look at that.

And then either one or our other of our LinkedIn users, Zero Trust is paramount. And that's key. That is probably 10 years ago, I'd have been like, I'm not doing that.

But in today's age, I'm like, oh, yeah, we're definitely doing that. We're doing that. Yeah, for sure.

So let me ask you a question. And this goes back to something that happened last week. I'll let the listeners know that David from your office, your husband.

We have two Davids now, so you have to specify. Reached out to me a while back because you have a client down here, south of Orlando. Yep.

That you needed some assistance with, some boots on the ground. We actually have a couple of clients south of Orlando. Apparently that does exist.

Yeah, see that Bermuda Triangle thing. And so it was just a simple, you know, job and they just needed me to move some stuff from one office to another and literally across the street. Yep.

And I said, sure, I can do that. So last Friday, I went down there to do that, but ran into a little bit of a snag because they did not have Internet at their new location. So before we go any further, I want to ask, did they get their Internet? They did.

They did get Internet. And what was really funny, and I do want to do a big shout out to Rhythms because I called, well, actually I texted Leonard over there and said, hey, if we can't get Internet, what's it going to take me to get a box out to this site? He's like, where's it at? What's going on? Let me know. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he was like, this was Friday that you had done the job. And I was texting him on Friday afternoon. He's like, we can get it, you know, Monday, Tuesday over to you.

So like they would have had Internet one way or the other, but yeah, the folks that were dragging the line in, they didn't drag it so far. No, they didn't. I walked into the space and where they thought a cable was going to be, no cable.

No cable, yeah. And so it was interesting. So I mean, we set everything up as best we could, took pictures, sent them to your office, and then I waited and heard nothing.

So I figured, let me ask. They did, yeah. I think it was Monday afternoon, line was delivered, everything was up and running and was hooked up and they were back to work.

All right, very nice. Huzzah. Did Dave tell you anything about my adventures? No, the only thing that I heard was that I was going to owe you at least a podcast out of all of this.

And I was like, it's a small price to pay. And he didn't even know half of it. So, okay, let me give the short version.

So I drive down. So let me first say, when he originally emailed, he said it was in Miami. And I was like, oh, please no.

So it turns out it was actually north of Miami, Hallandale Beach. So it was, there's a thing called the Glades Interchange, which is basically where all the main 95. I do know you do not go south of the interchange.

I've heard this before. So apparently that is where your triangle of craziness of Florida is. Okay, got it.

So it was north of that, basically two or three exits before that. And then I hang a left, go to the beach. So I go there and I get the address.

I go to the building. I go upstairs to the second floor and I can, I think I can say this. The address was a 201B, or the suite was a 201B.

Is this the deal where like the elevator wasn't working? I did hear this. Well, that was before. So I go looking for a 201B, but there is no 201B.

There's just 201, 202, 203. So I'm like, okay, is it inside of 201? So I go to open the door and literally desks are like right there. It's like there's no open reception area.

There's like, it's like a nail salon. When you walk in and all the, hi, they're all looking at me. And I'm like, I'm looking for 201B.

And they're like, nope, it's the tall building behind us. So then I'm like, okay, then I go back there. That's where I go and there's a big old security hand pad on the outside.

And I'm looking to try to find the name of your client. They're not on there. But I see the suite, but it was a different name.

And it doesn't give me a way to like bring it. Now, there's also glass doors and windows. So I can see inside the building.

There's a security guard sitting in front of the elevator, looked at me, put his head back down. It was more like, brother, I am not helping you. I'm like, are you kidding me? We set this whole thing up as a test for you, just to make sure that you could actually, you know, do the job.

I got you. So I had to call and I'm like, is there a number I can call? And so I call, the person's like down the street. I'll be there in a minute.

So we go in. There's one elevator. It's to the second floor.

So all of that's good. I'll speed up and go to the fact that we go to the new space. That's where we drive up into the building.

It's a brand new building. The elevator doesn't work. The guy's putting his card in.

He's doing his thing. He's like, it worked earlier. I know it.

So we had to go up. We had to drive to the seventh floor. Take the steers, two more flights to the ninth floor.

Oh my gosh. So I had to carry all your stuff. I had to carry all your stuff.

Two floors. All right. So I owe you probably at least dinner.

My back hurts. And a spa day. But wait, there's more.

Oh boy. So I'll skip that. I'll skip that.

So I go to leave. First of all, the reason the elevator didn't work, we didn't find out exactly. But there was an emergency vehicle downstairs, a fire engine.

So they assume that either they were doing some testing or whatever. Okay. So I go to the restroom, walk out, and I'm like, let me see if the elevator's working.

Because no alarms or anything. I hit the elevator. Door opens.

So I go in. I hit the, you know, downstairs. It lights up.

I'm like, good. So I step back. I'm doing something with my bag.

I look up. The light's out. The door closes.

Nothing happens. Did you get stuck in the elevator? I was stuck in the elevator. I'm hitting.

I'm just going to point out. I'm watching the chat, and Dave is laughing at you from the chat. I'm sure he is.

I'm sure he is. You know, especially. So he does, ha, ha, ha.

And it was a simple job. So I'm in the elevator. I'm hitting the alarm button.

It doesn't work. I'm hitting the help button. It doesn't work.

I'm hitting the door open. I'm hitting the floors. I'm looking for the emergency phone.

There is none. How long were you in the elevator? So then I'm deciding, do I call 9-1-1 to get out of here? And do the firemen down below laugh at me, thinking, dude, why do you? So I wait a couple minutes. The lights go out.

And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Now I'm stuck in a dark elevator. So then I start to call 9-1-1.

Oh my gosh. Then the door opens. Or the lights come on and the door opens.

And there's somebody from that floor who had the button. They go to walk in. And I'm like, I wouldn't trust it.

And I just left. I don't know if they got in. I don't know.

I just left. So I'm like. Oh my gosh.

I'm like, they're not going to believe this. They're just not going to believe this. That's crazy.

Yeah. So you get an extra, you know, 10-minute charge for standing in the elevator. That's fair.

So. Joy. Yeah.

But it was a simple job. You know, logistically, having just gone through a move and all of the fun stuff that goes along with that. And then having two kids move in all of that same scenario.

Like, if the internet line was the worst thing. I mean, the elevator was bad. I'm not going to lie.

That would have been terrifying. Like, new fear unlocked right there. Yeah.

I mean, if it had been more than five minutes, it would have been something. But luckily, not so bad. Yeah.

So. Sorry, Dave. When you visit, we'll see how you can make it up to us.

Yes. So, all right. So, that story took longer than I thought.

I do have another announcement that I want to do here. And this also has a video component to it. So, let me take a sip of water because I got to read it.

And let us start the video here. I'm excited to announce that today. July 2nd, 2025.

The Covello jersey has officially been lifted and hung in the rafters. As best swag from this year's PAX 8 Beyond Conference. This honor celebrates Covello's standout style and creativity.

Earning them a permanent spot in Uncle Marv's Swag Hall of Fame. The jersey now hangs high as a symbol of conference excellence and unforgettable flair. Congratulations to Larry Madar and Covello for setting the bar and inspiring us all to step up our swag game.

The legacy of the Covello jersey will live on as long as we lease this space. So, I have to know at this point. Are you going to lace up the skates, put on the jersey, and go ice skating? No, it's up in the rafters.

I wore it for like two minutes the other day. You're killing me, Marv. It's all right.

Dave, visit where, Orlando? I mean, there's nothing south of there. That's where the airplane stops. It is.

Oh, my goodness gracious. All right. So, all right.

So, I've told a bunch of stories. Anything new with you guys in Third Element? I mean, our biggest issue this week was we had some VoIP go out on us. Like, we could make calls.

We could get calls. But if our clients called in, went into the call queue, if we didn't pick up right away, we'd just hang up on them. That was awesome.

We like that. That was pretty much my favorite thing that happened this week. All right, and it was specifically a VoIP issue? Yes.

Yes, it was. That's all you're going to give me? You know, I'm still mad. So, I'm going to hold on to that for a little while until I'm not mad anymore.

And I have a meeting scheduled with the vendor next week. Gotcha. I'm going to have a chat about how that went.

Because they offered me, now you have to understand, we had many calls that were hung up on, that were client calls, calling into my service team. And they were not happy people that got hung up on. So, when I went back to this vendor, and they're like, oh, it's fine.

We're going to give you, you know, $15 and change, you know, to offset your trouble. I lost my mind a little bit. Okay.

I lost my mind. Now, you guys are pretty self-sufficient, but I assume that you don't host your own VoIP service, do you? We do not. We actually get that from a vendor.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we decided long ago, strangely, it was one of those things, like, we actually had an Asterisk system, jeez, eight, nine years ago, probably, maybe a little bit longer than that, that we did host for ourselves.

And decided that that wasn't really something we wanted to get into. And just phased it out and went to partners after that. Okay.

Yeah, I didn't want to do VoIP for the longest time. Then I got into bed with Freedom Voice before they got sold to GoDaddy, and that was a colossal cluster buff. Yes.

So many things are. Yeah, but I'm still doing it. I have two vendors I'm working with now.

I won't say their names, because one of them is technically still in the trial period. And if I give them a shout-out, they'll probably, you know, think I'm all in, and I'm not yet. Oh, my goodness gracious.

So Keith had put up the comment, hanging up on customers prevents one from making rude comments. Does it, though? They can make them, you just don't hear them. That's exactly right.

Yep. All right. So I have a question for you.

You probably don't know this story. No, I think you do. So I had a client that, what can I say, let’s say 70 users.

And I was supporting them after they had a full-time person go away, and they didn't like the previous MSP. Yes. And I know that this client had been looking to go with another MSP for years and never did.

And two years ago, they decided that, you know, I wasn't able to support them, and so they went with this MSP. And I kind of told them what to expect. And some of the things were that the MSP wasn't going to give them the same on-site service that I did.

They would, you know, do it, but it would be an extra cost. There were some other things with the way that tickets would be handled and yada, yada, yada. Bottom line is I had really no issues with it.

I knew that they wanted to go with this MSP. This MSP was one that tried to bully me during the off-boarding, on-boarding period where they wanted me to give them stuff. And I said, if I give you that, I'm done.

And then they tried to say how unprofessional I was. I remember all of this, yes. By pushback.

I was like, I was pretty sure. Like, I don't even know which client this is. I'm pretty sure.

No, I definitely remember this, yeah. So guess what? They coming back? I got a call. Weird how that is.

Yes, although I do have to figure something out because they actually told me some of the real reasons. And the big thing is they see me as a one-man show. And if something happened to me, what happens to them? And I explained to them that I do have somebody here that is my emergency backup.

If something were to happen, that person can come in and take over and do stuff. And they understood that. But to them, that's like, but they're not your company and they're not you.

So even though I have subcontractors that could step in and do some of this stuff, their whole idea is we want everything self-contained in one team. So even if I had a second tech, that would be enough for them. They really want a company with three to five techs.

What they did tell me is that they're not going back to a big MSP every year. And I think, I don't know exactly some things, but I just think that they just didn't feel treated properly. They liked the personalization that I gave them.

They liked the fact that he did make a comment. I think I can say this without getting in trouble. He said, if there was an emergency, we know that you would not leave us to drown.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's realistic. Honestly, Marv, I think that's 90% of the customers out there.

They want to have that relationship, somebody they can trust. If they pick up the phone and make a call, someone's either going to answer or they're going to get a call right back. And they have to have that trust that when they make that call, that things are going to be set in motion at that point that will save whatever the situation is.

And obviously, they just didn't have that scenario going on with the previous vendor. There's some stuff I've got to look at. There's time.

They're in the middle of a big move. This other company started them on the move. This is going to be several months.

They don't think they'll be finished until October. The bottom line is we're both going to investigate coming back together, and we just need to have a decision probably around October or so. to transition back.

So we'll see how it goes. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's plenty of other options.

I mean, I'm even swirling a couple around in my head that you can probably take a look at too. Well, we have thought of things. I thought about if I were to hire a help desk, so that way they could feel like if they called and somebody always answered, and it was just, again, more than me being available to help them.

Because it's weird. I told them, I said, look, 80% of the time I'm sitting in my office. I don't get a ton of calls.

My clients are locked down. I can do almost everything either remotely or through an app. I told them about ThreatLocker, about being able to approve software installations from my phone, and he goes, really? I said, yeah.

So I think I have them intrigued, and I think if I could supply them with enough surrounding support, that it may not be as big of an issue. Well, I mean, you run a good documentation system, so you have that. I mean, it's like everything else, right? You're to the point where if you needed to, or if you even needed to hire somebody, you have the documentation, you have the processes, you have the things in place to make it as easy as you're going to make it for right now.

Yeah. All right. We'll talk more about that offline.

I just thought I'd throw it up here. Oh, we have someone waiting in the green room. So before we do that, let me take this opportunity and thank our sponsors, especially since we have a new one here.

So with that, of course, the livestream is presented by ThreatLocker, and our exclusive sponsor, lock down your endpoints and say goodbye to ransomware. Check out itbusinesspodcast.com slash ThreatLocker today. All of our other sponsors, we want to thank NetAlly, Rhythms, LionGuard, DesignerReady, TruGrid, and OneStream.

Thank you all for what you do. And, of course, my patrons, Tom, Jared, Jason, and Jason, help provide monthly support to pay for all of the hosting services and stuff like that. Let's bring to the stage a gentleman who heard the ThreatLocker call and had to come on board, the stoic Brian J. Weiss in the house.

Brian, how are you? Doing very well. Yeah, my ears were ringing. I bet they were.

And I even came up with a cool slogan in your LinkedIn chat. Yeah? I didn't put it up. I was hoping you might throw that up.

Oh, I'll go back and look. Zero trust is worth the lift to avoid the grift or prevent the grift. See, I didn't even get my own slogan right.

There we go. There it is. Yes.

Zero trust is worth the lift to prevent the grift. There you go. You said it much better than I did.

I'm sorry. Here's why I didn't see it earlier. Frank had put up this comment that I saw that I wasn't going to read.

It got sent on a dummy mission. Your mission, should you choose to accept it. Thanks for letting me pop in.

Hi, John. How's it going? Good. How are you, Brian? Doing well.

Yeah. So at one point in time, we were calling you Mr. Threat Locker. Do you remember that? Yeah.

We're all in with Threat Locker. And one of our larger co-manager clients who actually gets targeted by threat actor groups. Saw a huge drop in SOC alerts that they are dealing with.

And even asked their latest pen test with flying colors. They were told they were in the top 5% of companies that had been pen tested by this third party company. So the proof is in the pudding.

Yeah. As they say. I can tell you that I wish I had gone back and documented before and after.

But I can almost guarantee that the reason my phone doesn't ring so much now is because of Threat Locker. I mean, we literally would have to take, you know, several calls a day. You know, install this and do that.

Who put this on my computer and all that stuff? And now I don't have to worry about it. The emails that I get are, hey, we got a new video player for these medical records.

Click, click, click. Boom. Done.

Yeah, there is a shift with clients, you know, to help them understand the zero trust approach. I worry that if you don't educate them on kind of the shift in security that you're taking, they might feel like it's taking too much convenience away. But once, you know, we've had a couple, you know, personal experience here, if you can't tell, where we reset expectations with them and help them understand the why behind the zero trust approach.

So there is, you know, there's some initial work, obviously, building out the policies, learning mode. You know, you can do that in learning mode. And then I think, you know, definitely letting your clients understand what the process looks like moving forward, where, hey, they can't just install a random app, you know, like they used to be able to.

You know, there are apps that you can install, even if you don't have local admin. And ThreatLocker helps protect against those as well. One added benefit that I found is that it will also block all those browser add-ins.

So no more, no more honey add-ins on the browser. Yeah, I will say that I didn't realize how many browser add-ins that I randomly use from time to time. But ThreatLocker reminds me about that.

Yeah. So I've been doing some marketing lately and playing around with some browser apps that, you know, that was a change for me to learn. I actually follow the proper process, though.

I don't just go in and whitelist myself. I submit the request because I want to see what it feels like to have my team process that for me and be an end user myself. How long is your typical wait time? So we, well, we use Cyber Hero as well.

So they typically handle it within a few minutes, you know, and they only, only when they have to escalate it to our team might it take longer. So let me ask you that. So I'm not using the Cyber Hero program.

I'm doing it myself, and I don't think that I've needed help except maybe once when I first got started. But in terms of what would they have to escalate to your team? Typically, you know, you give them a playbook to follow. And so it's something new outside of the playbook or that's not explained or, you know, elevation requests.

Typically, they want to make sure that we handle, you know, that they're not going to just elevate someone with admin credentials. I guess if we put it in our playbook, but we don't necessarily have that in our playbook to approve admin elevations. And that's a common threat actor playbook anyway when they're living off the land is how can I elevate to an admin level? So, you know, part of that, I would say that the big benefit for us is just not needing to fill those tickets from a tier one support level.

You know, as far as having those come in and clutter up things that we have to get to right away for clients. And then more importantly, things that are after hours. You know, we're only eight to five. 

We do 24 seven support if there's like a P1 emergency and it can't wait till the next business day. We have some clients that do operate on the weekends. We have hospitality clients as well.

But if that ever happens, the first thing we're usually looking to try to do is understand why did it happen in the first place? And how can we prevent it moving forward? And we charge extra for after-hours support, so it helps prevent the client from abusing it. Of course, because that's a concern where, oh, you do after hours on call, you're available for me. Well, yeah, there is an extra cost for that, you know, so.

I recently told one of my law firm clients when they asked, you know, about getting 24 seven support, and I said, well, first, you got to pay 24 seven prices. Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, we're only at a 10 employee. 

We're hiring. We'll be at 11 soon. But, you know, we're not a huge MSP where we have a knock that runs 24 seven.

So it's literally someone on call that might even have to get out of bed. And, you know, so we're paying overtime. We have to in California, it's a minimum of two hours.

They have to get paid for after hours, even if it only takes them 15 minutes to fix. So there's a fair amount of expense on our end to just be promising that, you know. So unless it's critical to the operations of the business, we're usually not doing after hours.

And then, of course, looking at some sort of business continuity where it's why, why did it even happen after hours and how can we prevent it moving forward? Because the client doesn't like having to pay for the after-hours support either. Dawn, you, you guys support some pretty important clients. And I imagine most of those are 24 seven operations. 

What do you guys do? So we do an on call rotation, which is same type of thing. And we offer our guys, you know, a stipend for doing that. But it's usually I mean, honestly, it's the standard stuff that you get. 

I mean, occasionally you have like a legitimate, hey, something's not working. But a lot of times it's I forgot my password and I came in off of the shift and I need that reset. Summer storms will occasionally knock equipment down. 

We usually get one or two of those a year, that kind of thing. But it's usually nothing major. And it's rarely clients that are eight to five.

I think I have lawyers, so they think they're 24 seven. We also have lawyers and most of them that you get the occasional, hey, something isn't working. If you can do it, great. 

If not, tomorrow is great. So here's a question. Do you guys have maintenance windows with your clients so that every week or every month they know that at this particular time, the systems are going to be updated servers will be restarted that sort of thing.

We did traditionally we have so few servers left that the traditional ones are still left in place. So, yes, but no, because we're down to a few of them left at this point. I think it's the, hey, we're doing maintenance X, Y, Z, and we try to do it in the middle of the night. 

So it kicks off via the arm and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and there's different types of maintenance. When I think about that question, Dawn brought up a good one about the servers. 

You know, what does that look like? We definitely have a window that we use for servers. In the past, we've even had servers where it's like, hey, we can't auto reboot them because they need help coming back up. They're that old.

And so usually we'll get an alert. Hey, updates have happened. The server needs to get rebooted. 

And then we even have to pick a time when we're going to do it. So we know we can have some handholding with it. We've been working, or I should say, looking at and working with clients to get them moved to the Intune auto patch for Windows.

And what's really cool about that is it's got kind of a machine learning that it does, where it can understand the behavior of when the user is using the computer or not and kind of determine its own maintenance windows based on that. And I was actually talking to Darren from Immybot. He mentioned they just opened up the API for that too. 

So he sent me an email to try to help him, you know, help promote the fact that, hey, we should let third party companies use this. Because we do a lot of our patching through Immybot, you know, and of course we have established maintenance windows. But if we could follow the same window that Microsoft has machine learned per user, we'll have much more success.

I'd say, you know, Windows updates are typically the ones that need the reboots. Those are the trickiest. And, you know, luckily most third party updates don't always need a reboot. 

They just maybe need the application closed and reopened. But the issue we run into where, you know, never 100% patched, you know, you're looking at the dashboard item and wishing you could be there. It's typically users that have laptops and that are roaming and they don't leave them on, you know, and it's the tricky part there is when they turn them on.

You know, what does that look like? In the past we've made the mistake of just, you know, forcing the updates where all of a sudden they will turn on their laptop right before a meeting and it's just trying to do all these Windows updates and then they scream at us because they can't use their computer. So we've kind of backed off on that idea. But, you know, if their computer is never on during the maintenance window, that's a struggle as well.

So that's what I love about what Microsoft's trying to do. If you do move to using their system and kind of trust that, hey, Microsoft knows how to patch probably better than anyone when it comes to Windows updates at least. Don't say that. 

Don't say that. Well, let me clarify that. They should know. 

Okay. Right. They're the ones coming out with the updates. 

That's fair that, you know, it's not a blanket statement. I agree. But they're getting better at it. 

They want to improve. They're trying. We have to give them that.

We don't have to. So I do have a good Microsoft story. Yeah, we have a server that's not getting its licenses applied appropriately, and it hasn't been getting its licenses applied appropriately for, I don't know, like six months, nine months. 

It's been a while. It's ridiculous. So call the distributor. 

Distributor gets in touch with Microsoft. They're like, yep, they'll give you a call. They're supposed to call around this time. 

So I think they've called two or three times at this point, at like 630 in the morning. I don't see what the problem is. Can’t imagine what the problem is. 

They're very surprised that the person that they're looking for isn't available to just answer the phone at 630am. Did you change my name? Uncle Marv.

Did I know? Yeah, it's Microsoft fanboy. No, my hands have been up here the whole time.

I do want to. Yeah, I do want to point out I am a Microsoft fanboy. So, you know, it's an interesting story, Dawn.

The support. So I imagine there's different support experiences, which I've had them to the best support experience I've had is through my partner center right where we're registered partner. And I'll tell you a little about what that looks like. 

I get off the phone with them and the guy connects me with me on teams. And I've literally got a direct connect with them now where I can chat with them on teams, which I thought was pretty amazing. They're allowing that now. 

And so as I'm meeting updates, I'm like pinging him on teams instead of like replying via email or having to call back or. Or like you said, getting that random call that you hope you could pick up, but they're just not calling at the right time. So.

I would say they are trying there to maybe at least for partners. Based on my experience. I mean, we're a registered partner.

They just don't care. Got to be silver. That they're, they are enterprise focused. 

Right. So. You've got to, you can't. 

So they got rid of the action pack. You know, so you got to be. We're a qualified modern work.

Yeah, but. Everything starts at silver. I hear.

We paid our cash. Okay. Well, silver is going away. 

This is my last year on it. Yeah, you have to, like Dawn said, there's, there's different solutions designations that you have to obtain now, which are a little. A little harder than getting the, the old silver that we depended on back in the day.

Well, they have what they have. They have the essentials starter package, something, and then they've got, it's still three tiers, right? Well, so what you're talking about is like a partner package you can buy that comes with licensing. So you can get that without a solutions designation, except for maybe the biggest package. 

I can't remember, but they have like the entry level that they replaced action pack with. And then they have the partner core. I think they call it the one we bought, which is supposed to replace license similar to silver that you get.

But silver gave you other things like kickbacks. Right. And, and.

So you, you don't get those by just buying the software package. You actually have to reach certain solutions designations. Well, they have those is the one I recommend.

Yeah. They have the certifications and the, the things you have to go and qualify and pass the, not the exam, but whatever the competency, right. That's what they were doing.

Yeah. All right. Stop talking about Microsoft. 

It's bringing me down. Jerks. I'm sorry. 

Oh, here's what I was going to ask you guys. With patching and threat locker. So I know that for most of the third party apps, I still have to plan updating.

In the same frame that I. Tell threat locker to go into maintenance mode. And as far as I can tell, you cannot schedule a maintenance mode ahead of time. So if I want to do my updates, you know, between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. I can't tell threat locker ahead of time. 

Hey, make that a maintenance window. So that I can, you know, install updates, restart servers and stuff like that. It's something that has to be done manually. 

Am I am I correct with that? I think you are correct. And that is a really great point. And one I hadn't thought of. 

And we've got a meeting coming up in August that we can talk about that. We as in you and threat locker. Yeah, the advisory board.

I just wanted to double check because you made me double guess myself because we talked about this before, Marv, and I never really quite looked it up. You bring up a good point. Are you asking Grok, by the way? Well, you can schedule maintenance mode, right? You can pick a date and time, you know, start date and end date. 

But I think the better question is like that's on a per device. Right. And when you think about a client needing to update all systems, are you really going to go in? Like, I think, Dawn, you know, what we should talk about on the partner advisory board. 

Is there some sort of global maintenance mode? If you will. I feel like that was a conversation that we had at some point because it was the we don't know how long things will take. And like, I vaguely remember from a conversation along the way.

But I mean, it's hard to schedule things, especially if you're like, well, I know I've got, you know, a multitude of things. I don't know how long it's going to take. And we don't want to leave it open for any longer than it needs to be open.

So I think it's a great talking point. And it's one of those things that, I mean, it affects everybody as far as that goes in some way, shape or form. So I think it's just, you know, food for thought. 

Can you schedule it? Can you schedule it appropriately? And can you give it an appropriate window without it cutting off? Right. So here's why I also thought of it. So I also am using Action 1 replacing the Microsoft updates, Brian. 

So I've been using Action 1 for all my updating. And there, when you set up an automation, you can actually set the time for it to start. You can set it as a regular schedule.

And you can adjust the window so that you allow the task to be able to run in. So for instance, I will be doing Windows 10 to Windows 11 updates using Action 1. And I did a couple of tests already. And I found that on some systems, if I give it a two-hour window, that's enough. 

But on some, it's not. So that's where I'm playing around with that. By the way, folks, Action 1, 200 free endpoints. 

If you need to update computers from Windows 10 to 11 and they're capable, and you can't figure out how to get your PowerShell script to work in your RMM or whatever, Action 1 has a feature update, Windows 10 to Windows 11. You click it, tell it where to go. Done. 

I've had, I have not had one fail yet. Nice. So buy me a coffee over at ITBusinessPodcast.com. Hit support and buy me a coffee and pay for that tip I just gave you.

All right. So we've been changing the way we do Florida Man stories. I have two in my hand. 

And Dawn, right hand or left hand, which Florida story do you want to hear? Oh, I feel good about the right hand. Right hand it is. And speaking of hand, Florida Man proves he'd give an arm and a leg for his ex-girlfriend.

Was it to an alligator? A Florida man named Ivan Figueroa made headlines for a dramatic and dangerous attempt to win back his ex-girlfriend after a breakup. Following the end of their relationship, reportedly due to his infidelity, Figueroa initially tried to reconcile by showing up at his ex's workplace in tears and begging her to take him back but was unsuccessful. He then escalated his efforts in a shocking way. 

He called his ex-girlfriend and told her that he would prove his love by shooting himself in the leg. During the call, his ex heard the gunshot. Figueroa had indeed shot himself, as he described, resulting in a critical injury.

He was subsequently rushed to the hospital and later charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. I mean, that's a good story. Who does that? I don't know, but I'm interested to know what the girlfriend's name is.

Oh, I didn't, I didn't dig deep on that. I don't know if she wants to be named. I heard they're building a new prison over there in the middle of the swamp.

Yeah, and? Oh, I don't know. So I need to, oh, I should have found the story. You guys all know, you know, Sheriff Grady Jug out of Polk County. 

He's the one that, you know. So apparently the Brevard County Sheriff, where I grew up, is also trying to make a name for himself. I don't have the story. 

I'm going to give it to you just. So apparently when the political thing was supposed to happen with the big old party. The sheriff got on the press conference on television and started talking about things not to do.

And literally said, if you do this, you will go to jail. If you do this, you might get shot. Oh, it's just literally just saying it said, don't do it.

If you touch our cars, we will shoot you. And if you do, I think he said, if you, if you pull a gun, what you need to do is before you pull that trigger, tell us how to get in touch with your loved ones so we can let them know where you'll be buried or something. Florida sheriffs are going off down here.

Too many Florida men. Yeah. And women.

Doing too many Florida things. Yeah. That's a good question or a good call out. 

I don't know if I've ever heard a Florida woman's story. I'm sure you've told them. Oh, we have.

Oh, we have. One of these days, I probably should hire somebody to go back and document all the Florida stories and, you know, just list them. Oh, my gosh.

Just dump your transcripts into AI and have it do it for you. No, the best ones I've heard, they're taking the Florida people's stories and turning them into like fairy tales. So you can, you can literally like swap things around and it's, it's hilarious. 

It's absolutely hilarious. Fairy tales? Yeah. Wait, you hear that? Think about it.

I mean. Florida woman locked in tall building, let's hair down, boyfriend crawls up. Shoots her.

I mean, that's the story of Rapunzel and legitimately it works. I see what you're saying. Florida woman lives with seven small men.

You can just keep going. So the sheriff of Brevard County is his name is Wayne Ivy. So he made headlines for his strong warnings against violent protests, stating that while peaceful demonstrations are protected, any violence against law enforcement or the public will be met with decisive and potentially deadly force.

He made it clear that actions such as resisting lawful orders, blocking roadways or attacking officers will result in arrest or in extreme cases, fatal consequences for the offenders. He even mentioned that if you block the roadway, drivers have permission to run you over. I remember seeing that.

Oh my goodness gracious. Well guys, thank you very much. Let me see.

Keith Nelson has done his usual long dysentery things. We all do seven twenty four and charge that in quarterly in advance billing. OK, you know what, Keith? I know that you do great stuff.

None of us can charge one hundred and fifty thousand for four hour response. With a four hour minimum cheese crackers. That's nice.

What is. Nordstrom service. Did we miss something earlier? Sorry, folks, for the quietness, if you're listening to audio, I'm scrolling.

We have a lot of chat people tonight. Oh, well, here's a comment. I think three to five text is the perfect number.

You can keep customers happy, give service and do six point five million or more and not have grief. There we go. I wonder.

That much revenue with only three to five text. How many clients and what size clients? Is my first question. Well, if we wait 20 seconds, Keith will answer.

So different business model, a lot of development. Yeah, it's like when I try to think of the average MSP, you know, that's out there servicing small businesses. Because there's a lot of different models you could have.

I don't know that I'd call it the average MSP model. We, you know, we do about 60 percent of our business with co-managed that, you know, make up ten clients out of our 50 total. And then we have 40 clients that make up the other 40 percent.

And we're not I wouldn't consider us average at all as far as the model goes. Yeah, I think we also have to make a distinction between number of clients, number of endpoints. Because that can make a big difference as well.

Yeah, size of clients and then even breadth of service. You know, what are you doing for him? Are you doing standard help desk and cycle management? Yeah. Holding their hand.

Or is like Dawn said, are you starting to do development type work? You know, which is a whole nother line of business that has its own benefits but also requires its own type of skill set. All right. Well, I don't see a response from Keith.

And probably because it's not something he can look up on Brock and copy and paste that answer fast enough. So, Keith, we'll look for that on our way out the door. I do want to say thank you to Dawn Sizer and Brian, the stoic Weiss for coming on.

And of course, thank you to ThreatLocker, our new live stream sponsor for our live shows. Let's see. We will be doing.

So either next week or the week after, Paco LeBron will be here. I'm going to quiz him on this MSP owners group. Yeah.

I think I'm going to ask 10 questions and we're going to run an over under pool as to how many actual answers. That'd be great to hear more about that. I didn't have time to talk to him at PAX 8 Beyond when kind of the announcement came out.

Yeah. Well, I quizzed Juan and, you know, his most of his answers were, oh, you're going to have to talk to Paco about that. He's the man in charge.

So, of course, I got questions and I'm like, Paco. So he will be, I forget, one of the next two weeks. And let's see, I've got a new MSP.

He's old to the space, but he's starting his own MSP. So that'll be coming up soon. We're going to be doing a lot of MSP only shows here on Wednesday Lives.

And I still have. See, we just started. Publishing the.

Pitch it shows. So I'll have those throughout the month of July. I'm only releasing one of those per day.

I'm finishing up the PAX 8 interviews. Oh, by the way. Dawn.

I'm going to say this. I'm going to say it in front of you so that you don't think I'm talking behind your back that I'm playing favorites or anything like that. But the podcast that I'm releasing tomorrow.

It is my last podcast that was recorded live at PAX 8 Beyond. Brian, don't you get upset either? Because you know that, you know, I loved our show that we did there. But the show that I'm releasing tomorrow, I am already going to vote now that it will be the best show of 2025.

My guest was Mackenzie Brown, of Blackpoint Cyber. And if you want to talk about a show going off the rails.

That went off the rails. One of us might get in trouble for some stuff that was said. I mean, that's legit.

You what? I said that seems legit. Let's just say. From Vuori Leggings to people watching.

I'm sure it was interesting. It's going to be one of those shows that. First of all, I'm actually quite shocked at how much she allowed me.

To. It's the best way to say this. I asked some questions that I didn't think she'd answer and she did.

She's fun. She's a lot of fun. She's very smart.

Because he's great, quite frankly. So I know when we had talked the last time, the sound wasn't fantastic and you were sweating that. Yeah, it wasn't great, but it came out OK.

And the original reason we scheduled to do this at PAX 8 was to just redo what we did at IT Nation. But that came out great. So we really had nothing to talk about.

Even better. But it turned into 50 minutes. Oh, wow.

Of content at a conference that is huge. And all I want to say is. You guys should listen until you hear Idaho.

Teasers in there. Yes. Because I know people are like, why should we listen? You just you want to get to Idaho.

And it won't be that long. It's not like you have to listen to 48 minutes and then get to Idaho. It's actually early.

And then you definitely want to stay after that because it is a podcast. It just goes sideways from there. Yes.

OK, got it. Yes, it does. Yes.

I'm so proud of you. You went totally sideways. I love it.

What happens if it goes viral? Then what? It won't go viral. You really get in trouble? It won't go viral. So let's just say this.

I might have to make at least one edit. Because what you should do is you should release it like initially with no edits. And that'll be like the uncut viewing that everyone needs to come see before you turn around and edit it.

It'll be short lived. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that.

I've got to decide if I'm going to do the edit or not first. But it's there's probably four or five that should be done. But there's one specific that I'm like, I think I have to do that one.

And she's OK with you releasing this. Right. You got my show.

I told her my show, my call. If you don't want if you don't want to hear it out in the public, don't say it. That's fair, though.

All right, guys, let me let you go. Dawn, I see it's gotten dark at your place. So I can't see your backyard and pool anymore.

Is that was that the view of the pool? Oh, OK. No, the pool's actually on the other side of the house. All right.

And Brian, enjoying your new studio there. Yeah, I am with no windows on purpose because I didn't want to fight the natural light. So.

Fight the natural light. Yeah, that's not the way it should work. Well, in the past, I've always had a window like off to the side or something, and then like one side of my face is all lit up.

And now I just have these lights making my face look droopy, which I've got this other light I could turn on. I just didn't want to get blinded. OK, I thought you were talking about you didn't want to get sunburned on one side of the face or you didn't want to be distracted from what's going on outside.

But I hear you. No worries. That's going to do it, folks.

Thank you again, Dawn and Brian. Thank you for all of you with us in the chat. Keith and Frank and.

LinkedIn user, Giles, LinkedIn user. Thank you very much. Troy was in probably just to say hello to the goat.

We will be back next week with another live show. Of course, we will have all the audio shows out. So head over to IT business podcast dot com.

Sign up for a pod catcher while you're there. Click on the sponsor page. Support the people that support the show.

If you shop on Amazon, click on that link. If you want to support the show, that's the easiest way to do it. You don't pay anything more, but we get a little kickback from Amazon and we look forward to doing many, many, many more of these or at least to the end of the year.

That's going to do it, folks. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you soon.

Allah.