5 reasons why your MSP Business Model is Outdated

Cloud MSP

Challenges Facing MSP Multi-Cloud Management:

Sixty-two percent of public cloud adopters are using two or more different cloud environments/platforms, reports Forrester Research. Meanwhile, 74 percent of enterprises today describe their strategy as hybrid/multi-cloud.

Moreover, that is just the beginning of the challenges you face as a mid-market MSP that has built its business specializing in a single cloud infrastructure. Your company must evolve to remain relevant and viable in an increasingly complex and challenging marketplace.

Consider the following:

    • Spreadsheets don’t cut it anymore

Be honest – how many clients can your business adequately serve using spreadsheets and Google docs to manage ordering, provisioning and usage metering for billing? Odds are if you have a half dozen people on your team and a dozen clients, your business is a house of cards, and the wind is starting to blow. You can’t grow further without investing in enterprise-grade business automation and data management tools.

    • Other fish are hungry

You operate in a fragmented industry, where schools of small- to mid-sized MSPs like yours circle the big fish that feed on F500 clients. However, the industry is starting to consolidate. More innovative MSPs that have invested in the tools to be more efficient, profitable and competitive are either acquiring their less nimble rivals or pushing them out of business. This revelation emphasizes the need for your team to innovate.

    • Your clients demand premium service

Mid-market enterprises are struggling to define and manage the right combination of on-premise infrastructure and private and public cloud services that will reduce their IT spend, free vital people and resources to focus on other core business activities and drive their growth in the most efficient way possible.To accomplish all that, enterprises must lean, heavily, on an MSP they can trust as a growth partner for their business. They demand a premium service, coupled with the voice of experience and deep technical expertise. Knowledge and skill are of course necessary, but you can’t deliver a premium service without premium tools that automate service provisioning, consolidate and simplify billing, and provide reliable usage metering.

    • AI will claim tasks

Tasks, not jobs. Billable tasks your team performs for clients today may be automated within the next few years. These tasks include password resets, remote device reboots, and networking monitoring and alerting for suspicious activity. What a machine can’t replace is a human’s capacity for collaboration on highly complex projects. Having the capabilities and the teamwork skills to garner widespread trust and support throughout your client’s organization will make your team indispensable. AI may help this along by freeing your group of more tedious tasks. That means it’s essential to understand and take advantage of the opportunities AI may create and build the skill sets of your team accordingly.

    • Clients need more than storage and processing

What have you done to protect your clients from cyber threats, or to help them proactively prepare for disaster recovery? It’s time to consider what value-added services you can provide that would generate new revenue streams. As market research firm The 451 Group notes, the growing complexity as enterprises adopts a multi-cloud model is “creating new risks for the enterprise and will demand expertise in protecting application and data migrations, securing distributed architectures, managing identities and access, and safeguarding APIs in dynamic and constantly changing environments.”

Ultimately

What new services can you offer to make your clients consider your team an indispensable extension of theirs as the MSP market evolves? So what investments in business automation and data management will this require you to make?

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help with multi-cloud management via billing monetization, or how to deliver your cloud to customers more quickly and efficiently, we’d love to hear from you.

Contact us today and let’s get started.

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