How MSPs Can Stay Relevant As Companies Bring Cloud In-House
As companies begin to host their cloud infrastructures internally and relegate all management and responsibilities to their IT departments, you can’t help but wonder if outsourcing to MSPs will be a thing of the past.
But it will be a MSP's ability to roll with the changes that determines whether their services are needed or not, including cloud-based file sharing. Technology and software is constantly evolving, and MSPs will always have to evolve with it and adapt to new customer needs. So rather than throw in the towel, a good MSP will look at their own capabilities and reassess how they may be of value to their customers in a different, more relevant way.
1. Be the foundation they can fall back on. Rather than trying to assume full responsibility of a client’s IT department, MSPs should be the solid support they can rely on if things come crashing down. Companies want to feel like they are in full control their systems and operations, but when an unforeseen issue arises like a system outage for example, let them pass the burden on to you. Your ability to reduce downtime and provide timely incident response will be a huge benefit to them, along with your ability to consistently update and maintain systems to prevent future incidents. Especially when taking care of minor cyber issues, clients will be happy they didn’t have to put their business operations on hold to clean up the mess themselves.
2. Play up the consultant role. Clients will continue keep you around if you are the go-to person when they have a question. Always be readily available to answer them and offer plenty of resources on your website that your clients might find useful. Do your best to understand customer needs and communicate this to the cloud provider. Being a reliable mediator between client and provider will make for a trustful relationship and smooth business operations that wouldn’t occur unless you were there. Just like hiring a real-estate agent, people often feel a lot better making a big move when they have someone there already familiar with the space.
3. Focus on your ability to mitigate risk. If there is one area that is evolving to be a great area of opportunity for MSPs, it’s security. Focus on mitigating security threats and offer security options like virus scanning, patching and providing help desk support. MSPs can advise clients on how to prioritize or encrypt certain applications being sent to the cloud, scale services, monitor applications and help with compatibility issues that could open a system up to a breach. With the recent cyber-attacks in the news, companies should be more likely to invest in more ways to stay secure and this will always benefit companies and organization.
MSPs can be flexible in scope that the help their clients. They can assume a large role of the IT staff, operate remotely, or offering limited support depending on a company’s needs.
How else might MSPs be able to stay relevant and needed in a world where everyone is trying to do it on their own? Leave a comment in the section below.
