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What MSPs Should Prepare for in 2020

 

The business landscape is becoming more competitive and having the right operational strategy in place can help organizations differentiate themselves, improve margins and free up resources to invest in core priorities. Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in particular are realizing that they can adopt a managed services approach to many mission-critical operational functions, including technology training, cybersecurity/compliance strategies, workflow and process improvements, policy development and implementation, and onboarding new technologies. MSPs investing in professional services practices will be uniquely positioned to provide SMB clients with affordable, high-quality alternatives to trying to carry out these functions with thin or non-existent in-house expertise. For smaller companies that may not have dedicated staff, these unique, value-added services can complement managed IT, security, SD-WAN and other MSP wares.

The Internet of Things

The rise of connected devices has been spinning up for years now – but IoT devices are finally crossing the chasm into the mainstream, with 10 billion of them expected to be deployed by the end of next year, according to Iota. A full 22 billion are expected to be in the field by 2025. Much of the business investment will come from “smart manufacturing” deployments, logistics/fulfillment and transportation – but everything from connected video displays to product sensors to smart lightbulbs and thermostats will find their way into a range of offices going forward.

All of this promises to revolutionize how businesses collect, manage and use data to inform strategic operational decisions. However, as with any emerging technology, there’s a substantial gap between the possibilities and practicality. Among other things, implementing an IoT ecosystem requires a solid cybersecurity strategy, an end-to-end device management stack, and options for managing bandwidth and connectivity – a tall order for many resource-constrained SMBs. Fortunately, the right MSP can help businesses bridge the gap by designing and deploying IoT solutions that add long-term value to their operations.

Multi-cloud Adoption

Digital transformation is continuing for organizations of all sizes as they look to harness the power of virtualization, DevOps and on-demand everything to accelerate their businesses and gain competitive advantage. To support these efforts, the rise of multi-cloud architecture will be the most significant trend in cloud for 2020.

Multi-cloud refers to the strategic decision to use multiple private and public cloud providers to meet different technical or business requirements. More specifically, applications and microservices can be built using component services from different cloud providers, depending on their specific requirements. There are multiple benefits of this approach, ranging from avoiding vendor lock-in and building redundancy, to segregating for security and exploiting best-of-breed solutions.

However, building these new platforms takes expertise in planning, migrating, optimizing and securing infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors – and multi-cloud being a new area, many businesses are at loss for where to turn to acquire it.

Automation

Automation can dramatically reduce workloads in IT and server environments. As standard processes become increasingly automated, look for complex and proprietary automations to become new sources of competitive advantage for MSPs. From onboarding to helpdesks to billing – and everything in between – opportunities for automation scripts to drive new efficiencies abound.

Partnership

MSPs are perfect partners to help companies through all of the stages of this digital transformation journey. Managed planning services include evaluating infrastructure needs, assessing vulnerabilities and planning for disaster recovery and business continuity; migration involves selecting applications and services to implement in the cloud; optimization requires evaluating tradeoffs between performance, agility and efficiency, on the right combination of platforms; and, security requires protecting apps and data from breaches, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and the remediation of malware threats.

2020 promises to provide plenty of opportunities for managed services to play a crucial role in companies’ growth trajectories through professional services, IoT and multicloud rollouts. If you are looking for a good company to join forces with, contact us today.

 

About the Author

Lori Hannan is the Product Manager for the MSx Managed SD-WAN Service for TPx Communications, a leading provider of UCaaS, Managed IT services and Managed Connectivity services, with approximately 30,000 customers and 53,000 customer locations across the U.S. Hannan has more than five years’ experience in SD-WAN technology and networks. She recently launched a second managed SD-WAN solution for TPx, which has been a great success. Previous to her network career, she worked with a variety of voice solutions and also launched a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) cloud-based managed solution.

 

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