Trends in Managed Services provisioning
Barracuda Networks has an interesting report about the current trends and future prospects of the Managed Service Provider segment of the IT services market. The report taps the intelligence of over 700 MSPs around the world and the results are interesting.
For one, it confirms what most of us in this business were thinking. There is a clear and ongoing shift away from interventions or project-based engagements to ongoing relationships designed to deliver a portfolio of recurring services. The shift is being driven by a perceptible (and now visible) move to scale back in-house IT teams in favour of MSPs – 92% of responding businesses reported this happening.
The other interesting projection was about the areas where enterprises are seeking help.
Security is a clear focus among the solutions being offered by MSPs. Security Operations Centres were the clear leader with 42% of enterprises demanding this service offering. Nearly 40% needed security awareness training and network security solutions too. AI is an obvious item of focus and MSPs that don’t scale up their knowledge in this space are likely to suffer.
It seems like the industry is at a turning point. The rising complexity of the enterprise tech ecosystem, coupled with the reduction in the availability of in-house talent could make the MSP offering very compelling. For the right kind of MSPs, that is!