The current ongoing pandemic has dramatically changed the way organizations execute their business plans. This pandemic has forced organizations to face many challenges, implement new initiatives, and follow up different paths to stay ahead in the market. They have now realized that they need to continuously upgrade with the new changing landscape or else they will be left behind soon.
When we look back, we notice that a large number of organizations had slowly begun to adopt cloud computing services to accelerate their business process. But after the COVID-19 hit across the globe in early 2020, there have been rapid changes to the business operations and procedures, causing these plans and adaption to increase rapidly.
Like in many IT sectors, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the MSP provider sector too. The year 2020 can be remembered as the year of transformative for the Managed Service Providers. While Managed Service Companies were significantly performing well, they quickly adapted to the pandemic as many other businesses did for survival. But to be fair enough, in comparison to other industry sectors, MSPs have shown rapid growth.
Let us understand what exactly MSPs are?
Adopting a cloud strategy requires changing the dynamic of your company’s work culture and IT approach. Sometimes, it may seem complicated, with little knowledge about migrating the entire infrastructure into the cloud and handling it later. That’s where MSPs come to your rescue.
MSPs are IT managed service companies that remotely manage a customer’s IT infrastructure and end-user system on a cloud platform on a daily basis. Unlike on-demand service providers, MSPs take responsibility for hosting websites and then managing their customers servers. They ensure that their customers will entirely focus on improving their services and increasing their productivity and efficiency without worrying much about downtime and interruptions.
As per the report published by IT Glue Global MSP Benchmark Survey, the most significant challenges Managed IT service providers faced in the pre-COVID era were:
- Lack of adequate time to complete work (54%)
- Inability to find good technical employees (53%)
- Changing technologies (32%)
- Lack of information sharing (27%)
But once the pandemic hit, priorities have entirely changed, and cloud MSP companies started reporting different sets of challenges such as:
- Cybersecurity threats
- Customer churn
- Price pressure, etc.
Concern for cybersecurity saw the most remarkable change. Reducing security risks is the common challenge most managed support services are facing. In addition, some other aspect MSPs need to focus on is to enable remote working at scale for most of their workforce.
Change in staffing strategies
The pandemic has opened up a whole new sourcing channel. It has amplified already existing direct sourcing models. Flexible talent helps organizations to get the skills they need to get their work done on time. Hence, they have turned towards managed service programs to manage their contingent workforce.
MSPs are adopting new staffing strategies and are now learning more about their client’s businesses to help them make sourcing decisions based on the best way to get work done. They help an organization in numerical ways like hiring temporary staffing, independent contractors, freelance employees, and many more. They are taking complete responsibility of day-to-day management of the program. MSPs have built of a pool of talent advisors, using which they also working on resource planning to optimize deployment.
What MSPs can do to stay ahead in crisis:
As discussed earlier, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire enterprise sector to shift into a new work culture. WFH has become the new norm these days. Many SMBs and large enterprises are now adopting new infrastructure and more advanced technologies that enable them a better and more secure environment while working from home. We have observed that as many organizations are moving to fully cloud or hybrid infrastructure, the adoption of cloud-based collaboration, cyber-security, and IT managed services are on the rise.
This provided a way for MSPs to prove their value in the cloud computing market. Since MSPs have to enable new infrastructure for their customers in a record time due to the COVID-19 crisis, meaning that businesses realize their real potential like managed services offerings never before. Thus, MSPs converted this crisis into an opportunity for their business growth.
Final words: COVID-19 outbreak changed entirely the way the business functions now. Now every enterprise including aws managed services companies, is adopting different work strategies to maximize their profit and deliver a better service to their clients. They knew that they have to face even more new challenges in the coming days and need innovative strategies to tackle their competitors to stay ahead in the race.
