After years of navigating frightening economic uncertainty, organizations are now focused on reinvention and post-pandemic growth. At the top of their transformation agendas is incorporating new technologies into their operations. However, a PwC Pulse Survey found that 88% of executives struggle to capture the value of their technology investments.
Companies will continue to miss the mark with their tech investments if they rely on managed service providers to support their business transformation journeys. That’s because traditional MSPs are dead. They’ve been buried next to the likes of Napster and Excel spreadsheets.
In this article, we discuss why MSPs are a ghost of the past, why they no longer serve the modern enterprise, and how MSPs need to evolve if they want to return from the dead.
MSPs Are Haunted By Their Inability to Scale With The Modern Enterprise
The traditional managed services business model that focuses on labor and cost efficiency makes sense. Having a third-party vendor to fill in the gaps with IT support and monitor infrastructure so that teams can focus on more important tasks is an ideal scenario. This is also ideal for the managed services provider because they can provide standardized services to businesses with similar needs.
This model is great in theory, but it has skeletons in the closet. The old ways of working don't live up to the demands of the modern enterprise, much less top-performing organizations. Customer expectations are constantly changing, which means that business priorities and technology need to evolve with this ever-moving target so that teams can adapt quickly while still delivering value at scale.
Managed service providers that offer a one-size-fits-all approach and break-fix solutions won’t work in today’s business landscape. Every business has a unique set of needs and what works for one business might not work for another–no matter how similar those companies are.
More than just tech troubleshooting and infrastructure monitoring, organizations that want to keep pace with the speed of business need a partner that proactively provides strategic guidance and ensures technology is aligned with business transformation initiatives.
The Terrifying Truth: MSPs Lack Skills and Expertise
Another issue haunting MSPs is their teams’ lack the specialized skills to support the needs of enterprise organizations and their customers’ growing demands. In fact, Kaseya’s 2022 MSP Benchmark Survey found that hiring people with the right skill set continues to be one of the biggest challenges for MSPs.
As digital infrastructure expands, it’s increasingly difficult to find an MSP with comprehensive technical know-how to cover all aspects of your business. To support integrated, expansive digital ecosystems, businesses need a partner that has expertise across a broad spectrum of platforms and environments.
Take this leading railway company, for example. They hired an MSP to host their Atlassian applications, but that’s the only gap the vendor could fill for the transportation company. The MSP wasn’t equipped to manage the hosting infrastructure nor the application stack, which put these responsibilities on the railway company’s IT teams.
Hiring an MSP to close capability gaps–but they can’t fully deliver–is terrifying. Not only did the client need a fully-managed, scalable hosting solution to securely and reliably run their applications, but they also needed a partner that had experience with the Atlassian platform so their teams could focus on their core business functions.
IT Jump Scare: MSPs’ Deadly Reactive Nature
Security continues to remain a top priority for organizations. In fact, cyber-attacks currently present the biggest risk for organizations, with 74% of executives saying this is either a moderate or serious risk. This sounds like a nightmare for MSPs, which have become a primary target for cybercriminals.
A 2022 study found that 90% of MSPs have been hit with a cyberattack during an 18-month period. What’s even more horrifying is the same study showed that 82% of MSPs also reported an increase in attacks targeting their customers.
MSPs are susceptible to cyberattacks because they make it easier for hackers to creep into customer networks. This is especially scary because they put their customers’ environments at risk, which creates a domino effect of damage since those businesses’ customers and their confidential data become vulnerable as well.
Hackers don’t work from 9 to 5 nor do they take holidays off. They work around the clock haunting your IT systems. This means that businesses need 24x7x365 support, something most managed service providers don’t offer. Traditional MSPs often have to rely on third-party vendors to ensure that they can meet the security and compliance requirements of their customers.
As companies look to transform their businesses, they need a partner that can provide the right level of security and proactively mitigate these types of deadly threats within a secure, reliable, and compliant IT environment.
Lost in The Fog: MSPs Are Dreadfully Slow to Embrace Cloud-Centric Ecosystems
The IT ecosystem continues to grow as new technologies emerge. One factor that has contributed to making IT infrastructure more complex is the rise of the distributed workforce.
This has driven companies to move their workloads to the cloud and adopt applications that facilitate remote work.
For organizations that use cloud services across multiple locations, a multi-cloud strategy helps address the challenges of disparate IT environments. In fact, research from Gartner shows that 81% of organizations work with multiple cloud vendors to meet their business needs.
MSPs are late to the Halloween party since they have been slow to support cloud-first ecosystems and multi-cloud environments. They have stayed stagnant operating legacy IT environments that are known for their reliability issues, slow performance, and contribution to technical debt.
Modern organizations should beware of spending their IT budget on a vendor that is late to adapting new technologies. They need a partner that provides proactive support for any ecosystem and predictive analytics that anticipate any issue before it becomes a problem.
How to Bring MSPs Back to Life
If your website is slow or a customer’s information is compromised while using your mobile app, your business is dead to that customer. Businesses today need speed, security, compliance, and responsiveness, and you can’t rely on ghoulish MSPs to deliver this.
If MSPs want to come back from the dead, they must evolve with the current business environment. That’s where Modern Service Management comes in. Modern Service Management is a new approach to managing and modernizing IT infrastructure.
Offering technical expertise and comprehensive services that align technology with strategic outcomes, Modern Service Management enables organizations to evolve their technology with the constant shift of customer expectations and business priorities.
To achieve true business transformation, you need a partner that can run your technology infrastructure in a way that improves performance and minimizes risk. Praecipio has the expertise to help you meet all these needs without a scare in the world.
Through our Modern Service Management offering, we provide strategic advisory services around all digital touchpoints that impact business initiatives. From enterprise resource planning to 24x7x365 monitoring, and cloud optimization services, our not-so-spooky solutions focus on long-term strategic outcomes, not just day-to-day IT operations.
If you are ready to build an agile and secure ecosystem that evolves with your business strategy, contact us.
