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LogicMonitor released a new global research report titled The Next-Gen Managed Service Provider, which covers findings ranging from the time it takes to fill engineering roles to the top IT and security priorities of MSPs and enterprises.
The study surveyed 600 MSP leaders in nine global markets across North America, EMEA and APAC to understand the state of MSPs in 2022 and beyond.
Faced with a growing number of challenges as the pandemic continues to disrupt the normal course of business, while also accelerating digital transformation, MSPs are under pressure from global enterprise customers to deliver despite outages, cyber attacks, employee attrition and lack of resources.
Many Australian and New Zealand enterprises (53 per cent) are spending more money with their MSPs, particularly on future-oriented tasks, compared to previous years as they migrate to the cloud (45 per cent) and focus on providing additional employee training around cyber security (44 per cent).
As the pandemic continues to present considerable challenges to business operations, MSPs have been at the forefront in managing IT and industry disruptions,” according to Richard Gerdis, LogicMonitor vice-president and general manager, Asia-Pacific and Japan.
“Our new research has revealed that MSPs, global enterprises and other technology organisations, are struggling to operate efficiently and ensure uptime as they remain short-staffed.
"However, with the adoption of full-stack observability platforms that feature widespread automation and AIOps capabilities, companies are able to fuel productivity and foster the valuable technical and business insights needed to help teams evade disruptive business outages and collaborate and innovate faster," Gerdis said.
Overcoming Workforce challenges and IT outages
With forces like “The Great Resignation” causing labour shortages across every industry, and rising ransomware attacks, MSPs are challenged to provide support to enterprise customers while also maintaining their own stacks.
MSPs continue to experience high numbers of outages themselves while simultaneously trying to help customers modernise, move to the cloud, support remote workforces and decrease IT downtime.
Making the case for automation
Growing MSPs that want to lead the market are investing in solutions that will empower engineers and free them from rote tasks that impede scalability.
Many are turning to cloud initiatives, AIOps, and automation to address both immediate and long-term concerns:
The findings also indicated that an overwhelming 75 per cent of ANZ MSPs admit they are not completely confident in their organisation's ability to manage the threat of cyber attacks for their customers, with this uncertainty only set to increase as demand for remote digital services soars.
With the complexity of the IT stack continuing to rise, malicious actors are looking to take advantage while businesses can expect to see growing threats like 2020’s Solar Winds and 2021’s Kaseya attacks.
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