News in the Channel - issue #17

MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDERS

more cloud services, thanks to the greater adoption and integration of the cloud across the board. Clients are also demanding more customised and bespoke solutions to their needs, and flexible service contracts that adapt to meet their ever-changing requirements. “With remote and home working in the mainstream, many MSPs also need to offer solutions that offer this approach of working away from the office.” Mark Watkinson, head of market insights at Adarma, adds customers often want to expand their security programmes and leverage new innovative tools to enhance their security, but often lack the expertise to deploy, integrate and manage these effectively to realise the promised benefits and ROI. “As a result, security teams are becoming increasingly frustrated by handovers or hand-offs from one partner to another, and the management that requires, which creates inefficiencies and additional overheads,” he says. “They are, after all, the security team, not the partner management team, so their focus should be on security rather than managing partnerships.” This means for MSPs, there will be more opportunities in ‘exposure management’, Mark says. “With the rapid evolution of cyberthreats, traditional approaches to cybersecurity such as periodic vulnerability assessments and reactive threat detection and response are no longer sufficient,” he says. “Organisations are increasingly realising the importance of continuous monitoring of their environment to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This helps to enhance their overall security posture and reduces the likelihood of successful cyberattacks. Consequently, organisations are investing in and purchasing tools to address this problem. “We predict that customers who have invested in, or started to invest in, tools for discovering exposures, mapping the attack surface, prioritising issues, or validating how potential attackers can exploit them, will require support in joining these disparate and conflicting tools together. “They will need services to help them better define and streamline processes and better operationalise the telemetry that is coming from all these different exposure assessment technologies. They will also need an end-to- end support for exposure management and help to mobilise the remediation efforts based on threat exposure assessment findings.” Mark adds that another important security consideration is whether customers have their

Markus Rex

synaxon-services.com

legal requirements,” he notes. “Investing in automation tools helps MSPs deliver services more efficiently and reduce operational costs. Automation can also improve service quality by reducing human error and freeing up skilled staff to focus on more complex tasks or customer interactions.” Ross Teague, CEO at Nebula Global Services, recently attended a MSP summit in the USA where AI and how this will influence the market was discussed. “Will the introduction of AI tools enable customers to better self-serve or add a layer of complexity?” he says. “My view is companies are always better when they focus on their core business, and I believe this is only magnified when looking at SMBs, so it will be how the MSP’s introduce better self-service tools using AI technologies that enhance the services they provide for their customers that will be the winner in my opinion,” he says. “If MSPs get this right, they can enhance their service to the customer in terms of speed of response without losing the white glove human to human check and balance. This is where I feel the best MSPs will succeed, bringing automation and white glove together and I truly believe this is what customers want.” Security Another key trend for MSPs is security and dealing with the increasing number and variety of cyberthreats to businesses. “With rising cyberthreats and almost every day a new data breach reported, MSPs are putting a heavier emphasis on the importance of security services,” says Dan. “We’re also seeing MSPs expand their offering to include

With rising cyberthreats and almost every day a new data breach reported, MSPs are putting a heavier emphasis on the importance of security services. “ ”

Dan Smale

fasthosts.co.uk

CONTINUED