MSPs are seeing cybersecurity as their top priority, according to Kaseya’s 2019 MSP Benchmark Survey,
The survey found that nearly a fifth of managed service providers listed cybersecurity services as their top IT problem this year followed by ‘public cloud adoption/migration/support’ (11 percent and ‘private cloud adoption/migration’ (nine percent).
The survey, which gathered data from both Kaseya and non-Kaseya customers during Q4 2018, received responses from more than 800 MSPs of all sizes in more than 40 countries. It found that security was the most lucrative service offering over the last 12 months, delivering increased revenue for two thirds (66 percent) of providers. Infrastructure monitoring (60 percent), desktop support (58 percent) and connectivity support (55 percent) featured high on the list.
The survey discovered that compliance represents an additional opportunity for revenue, with half of the respondents now managing their customers’ compliance obligations.
Additionally, MSPs are beginning to provide some specialist security services, such as dark web activity (18 percent), high-availability security solutions centre (29 percent), automated incident response (33 percent), single sign-on (40 percent), and network usage scanning (49 percent).
“Almost every MSP today offers some security offering – 98 per cent of respondents to our survey indicate that they do. The four most popular services – firewall and VPN management, OS patching, ant-virus and anti-malware; and managed firewall – are so widely used that they are now viewed as standard”, Lippe said.
The survey found that the proportion of providers offering appliance-based solutions has increased to 38 percent across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA. Onsite-to-cloud has also grown, with 75 percent of respondents now offering the method, while just 16 of respondents offer cloud-to-onsite backup.
Despite the general growth in cloud service offerings, there remain some gaps amongst MSPs, Kaseya added, with 13 percent not providing any form of cloud service at all and 30 per cent still not offering cloud monitoring services.
