A global survey of 1,500 managed service providers (MSPs) published this week by Kaseya finds 80% have added four to five additional services to their offerings in the past two years, with nearly three quarters (73%) having added more security services in the last year to drive revenue gains.
At the same time, nearly one-third of MSPs (32%) say they have seen increased demand for compliance services.
Even in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s still an opportunity for MSPs to drive revenues by adding additional security services, says Jim Lippie, senior vice president of partner development at Kaseya.
The top five security offerings made available by MSPs are anti-virus, firewall and virtual private network (VPN), operating system patching and password reset services, says Lippie. That leaves plenty of room for MSPs to expand the range of security services they offer, notes Lippie.
“There’s an opportunity for partners to double down on that,” says Lippie.
The challenge, of course, is acquiring the expertise required to deliver more advanced security services. Competition for cybersecurity professionals remains intense both inside and out of the channel.
The Kaseya survey also suggests there is a change in attitude when it comes to how smaller MSPs are viewing cloud opportunities, says Lippie. MSPs that manage client cloud environments dropped from 70% in the 2019 survey to 56% this year for public cloud. Private cloud services dropped from 59% in the 2019 survey to 49% for private cloud.
Lippie says those results most likely reflect a shift toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications on the part of small businesses that don’t deploy workloads on public or private clouds. In fact, Lippie notes the survey finds that cloud services remain highly profitable for MSPs to provide.
It’s hard to say what lies in store for MSPs given the current level of economic uncertainty. What is clear is that MSPs will need to make sure they are not overly dependent on any one vertical industry, says Lippie. MSPs that have too many clients in the travel sector, for example, are experiencing a lot more economic pain than other MSPs, notes Lippie.
Regardless of what the rest of 2020 has in store, however, it would appear that investments in managed security services at a time when most organizations will not be hiring additional full-time staff any time soon is a safe bet for MSPs of all sizes.
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