There Are Plenty of New Opportunities for MSPs in 2023

Heather Murray

Even with a potential recession on the horizon, the demand for managed service providers (MSPs) is strong, with plenty of new opportunities for growth this year. In fact, Gartner predicts that worldwide IT spending will grow by 2.4% in 2023, and IT services spending will accelerate. That opens the door for MSPs to help businesses amid new and escalating digital obstacles, such as how to modernize their digital experiences, safeguard critical data and optimize cloud investments.

Three Ways to Support Customers

Here are three ways MSPs can support their customers amid new challenges.

Prioritize automation in data protection: Given the increase in cyber threats over the last few years, many professionals in the cybersecurity space are experiencing burnout — with some leaving the industry According to Omida, 32% of global decision-makers believe the skills shortage has created significant cybersecurity challenges for their businesses. This is further supported by the global annual cost of cybercrime, which is predicted to top 8 billion in 2023.

Therefore, MSPs that provide automated network and digital collaboration security solutions can add great value to businesses around the world. Autonomous data management solutions that can ensure your customer data is available and protected against ransomware. Today, advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning can help to eliminate manual tasks and quickly identify when a data breach occurs, mitigating the negative impacts.

Collaborate with customers to optimize cloud structures: While IT spending continues to grow this year, many businesses are actively looking to make the most of their existing cloud environments and eliminate any inefficiencies. MSPs have an opportunity to help their customers maximize the software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and digital collaboration technologies they have in place. For example, many businesses are looking to MSPs to help identify which technologies are being used, for what purposes and how frequently so they can double down on investments that make sense and remove superfluous ones.

Additionally, many businesses once assumed the cloud was a low-cost, if not free, alternative to on-prem environments when they needed to migrate early in the pandemic — only to now realize growing costs of cloud consumption. MSPs can provide long-term, cost-saving solutions for their end customers with information life cycle management technology and services.

Technology isn’t enough, partnership is key: Just having the right technology to solve your customers’ needs isn’t enough. The products from your vendors aren’t the value drivers alone, but they can help to create a full ecosystem opportunity. That’s why partnerships are so critical — and why MSPs need to partner with vendors to maximize their investments and build full-service solutions.

The right partners will work with you on go-to-market strategy, training and development and even DevOps. Similarly, MSPs know better than anyone else how important it is to connect with customers on a personalized level. Be responsive, transparent and communicative with your end customers.

In conclusion, IT modernization will continue. Economic realities will not halt IT spending, but may heighten the need for quality MSPs. This year, MSPs need to prioritize data security and cloud optimization technologies, and of course, invest the time into truly partnering with their customers to see long-term success.

Heather Murray is chief channel officer at AvePoint. She joined AvePoint after nearly 25 years at TD Synnex (Tech Data before its merger with Synnex), where she most recently was vice president of vendor marketing. You may follow her on LinkedIn or @AvePoint on Twitter.