Emerging cyber-threats and data protection concerns
Between the impact of the pandemic and the current geopolitical environment, IT professionals continue to face significant challenges in 2022. Organisations must now manage hybrid workforces, which has stretched IT professionals as they juggle managing both home and office environments. Another key concern, which has in part been fueled by the growing incidence of hybrid working, is the need to effectively protect data across data centres, endpoints, cloud and SaaS environments. Ever-evolving cyber-threats are another issue impacting businesses of all sizes—a concern that is even more pronounced due to the war in Ukraine. Since these challenges will not disappear anytime soon, MSPs need to adjust their service offerings and cybersecurity strategies to better prepare for the IT landscape of the future.
Finding an IT approach that delivers for the new hybrid work world
Technology enabled many organisations to stay afloat during the pandemic—and now remote and hybrid work arrangements are here to stay. Businesses will continue their focus on cloud migration and enabling effective collaboration for remote teams, which provides MSPs with significant opportunities to move workloads to the cloud, manage these cloud solutions and reshape work environments to ensure maximum productivity. Though servicing employees both in office and at home brings its own set of challenges, MSPs that adjust their service delivery strategies and pricing to effectively cater to the hybrid work environment will see significant growth.
A transformation in how data is protected and secured
The shift to remote work completely transformed the way organisations secure their data, with a greater focus on protecting information no matter where it lives. In addition to external threats, organisations are under pressure to more quickly mitigate data loss events from factors like employee negligence, hardware failures, and natural disasters. As the sheer volume of data grows and the number of threats increase, it’s crucial that businesses equip themselves with unified business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions that span both traditional security and backup functions. Unified BCDR solutions allow IT professionals to manage data across multiple locations from a single user interface so technicians can easily detect anomalies across the entire IT environment. By using unified BCDR solutions, MSPs can more efficiently protect their customers from data disasters.
Countering cyber-threats
Due to the evolving threat landscape and prevalence of remote and hybrid work, cybersecurity continues to be top-of-mind for IT professionals across the globe. MSP customers are much more aware of cybersecurity threats than they were in years past, but often do not understand exactly what tools, policies and procedures they need to adequately protect their organisations.
To address this issue, MSPs will need to enhance their own technology stacks and security strategies to protect their customers’—and their own— businesses from cyber-threats. MSPs will also need to take on more of an advisory role than they may have in the past to educate their customers on cybersecurity best practices. When assessing new solutions, MSPs should consider managed detection and response (MDR) technologies that provide 24/7 threat monitoring and breach detection as well as cybersecurity training solutions that equip employees to recognise cyberattacks like phishing and business email compromise.
Looking ahead
Though no one can predict the future, it’s safe to say that the next few years will see IT professionals adjust the technologies and processes they deploy to account for the rising number of cyber-threats, the need to protect and store data in different ways and the new challenges of the hybrid work environment. The MSP landscape is growing increasingly more competitive, so service providers that prioritise enhanced cloud, BCDR and cybersecurity solutions will stay ahead of the pack.
