MSPs: Time to Reinvent

MSPs as strategic cloud advisers. .Cloud investments are expected to double as a percentage of IT budget over the next three years, according to Deloitte Insights Tech Trends 2020. How organizations invest is important, as there’s so much choice today in terms of vendors, solutions and architecture. CIOs and CXOs need expert, outside advice on how to design and implement the optimal IT environment from a cost, performance and business innovation perspective. They need advice on whether to choose a hybrid, multicloud or pure cloud architecture and how to manage it all. Certainly, MSPs can serve as filters in the market, recommending the optimal public or private cloud provider to the client, based on expertise, usability, price and other characteristics. They can help answer questions like: which assets should remain on-premise and which cloud provider can adapt most easily to future needs? MSPs should reconfigure operations and services (including their own staff composition) to meet these growing needs.

MSPs as technology simplifiers. Tools and app sprawl are choking the ability of DevOps and ITOps teams to be efficient and gain needed visibility into status, cost and health of the infrastructure and production environment at all points in time. A recent study found that large companies receive nearly 3,000 alerts daily in IT, and most of them are either redundant or irrelevant. This adds cost and confusion for IT organizations, and hinders the ability to quickly see issues of real business importance. Another survey, conducted by my employer, OpsRamp, found that the proliferation of legacy IT operations management (ITOM) tools is among the top three barriers for IT modernization. MSPs can help IT leaders analyze the tools environment and rationalize existing investments as well as identify requisite replacement technologies. Top goals should be reducing data noise, bringing data sets together for central visibility and applying analytics in the right areas to continually improve IT performance.

MSPs as automation experts. The strategic application of automation can help IT teams work smarter and faster. But determining which solutions to use and for which use cases requires ample investigation and domain knowledge. MSPs that can develop this credibility and help CIOs select and optimize AI, machine learning tools and robotic process automation technologies will bring a lot of value. As well, MSPs that can bring data science and machine learning and cloud development skills to the table will be hugely valuable, since IT organizations need help configuring automation platforms for specific use cases and analyzing the outputs to improve future policies and decisions. MSPs are well-equipped to deliver these new skills at scale for their clients.

MSPs as innovation enablers. The end goal for MSPs in leading some of the activities outlined above is to free up time and resources so that IT organizations can focus on business alignment. If MSPs deliver expertise in strategic areas such as cloud orchestration, intelligent automation and platform modernization, they give CIOs the foundation for building new customer-facing services that can win market share. Progressive MSPs establish relationships across the business, working closely with the CIO on building bridges internally as well as externally, given their network of CIO customers. There’s a high value on real-world experience that can be quickly shared between companies knee-deep in transformation projects.