A Digital Dilemma for Managed IT Service Providers & some Latest Trends

IT is a multi-faced and evolving landscape; catering to the increasing technical needs can be daunting for businesses. Therefore, the IT ecosystem has ushered in a strong demand for managed IT service providers.

Textbook examples of Managed IT services include application maintenance and support services to IT infrastructure monitoring, and more.

Many businesses are looking to configure hybrid infrastructure solutions while also trusting Managed service providers (MSPs) with the everyday functioning of their mission-critical systems and technical processes.

However, with a new managed IT solution partner, businesses face many obstacles while integrating disarrayed systems, facing downtime, and overcoming the inevitable culture clashes.

There are four key challenges that MSPs face in today’s competitive landscape. Let us go through these challenges and their respective solutions in detail:

• Rapid Cloud Adoption: It is time taking for MSPs to adapt and offer various cloud-based solutions.However, managers can easily resolve this issue with an innovative approach and some extra training.
• Changing User Behavior & Expectations: Market saturation of MSPs has raised the bar for user expectations. Moreover, people are getting more tech-savvy; thus, they might engage in a lot of cost-benefit analysis, which results in analysis paralysis and delayed purchase decisions. Hence, MSPs need to look for unique ideas on how they can add value to the user’s life.
• Security Problems: Cyber security is the major challenge MSPs are facing over the years. Ransomware, DDoS attacks, and other malware have threatened organizations. Thus, MSPs must stay up to date with recent and most advanced security protocols to protect the client against cyber thefts.
• Cultural Differences: Syncing in with the culture of organizations can affect project outcomes. Thus, MSPs employees should become a part of the business asap.

Managed IT Services: Top Five Trends You Should Know About

Here enlisted are some hardcore Managed IT Services trends that prompted a drastic change in the IT landscape.  

Cloud Automation

Modern MSPs have marked automation, and cloud-native solutions as the answer to the ever-changing technical IT needs. The on-demand scalability of managed IT services equipped with cloud computing is remarkable. In case there is downtime, the security protocols of cloud storage also capture any risks associated with data loss—additionally, automation of any manual errors.

Cybersecurity Mesh

Currently, BYOD (bring your own device) culture is catching on which is intended to support remote operations, but they pose security threats.

 As a standard practice MSPs should employ a cybersecurity mesh to mitigate any associated risks. It is a monitoring IT infrastructure that ensures network safety. Regardless of location, its comprehensive framework maps security to device identities.

With advanced security measures managed IT services will continue to provide the same benefits in 2022 and beyond.

App Performance Screening

Application support and maintenance services are pivotal to managed IT services. For example, Application performance monitoring (APM) drives a quick feedback mechanism for programmers and software engineers.

ADTD (for application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics), front-end monitoring (for studying user behavior), and AIOps analytics (for identifying any app lifecycle anomalies and patterns) contribute to APM. All these solutions will support your DevOps team in evaluating the root cause of issues. Moreover, it will reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR).

Network Agility

In the face of disruptions such as 5G and AI (Artificial Intelligence), enterprise networking is evolving at a fast pace. You can protect your networking platforms from end to end with the help of managed IT solutions. To catch up with the speed of digital transformation a robust network operations center (NOC) is somewhat necessary.

In the coming years, many organizations will also move towards server virtualization. Additionally, a virtual server will be a step up for you in case of any unexpected downtime and network losses.

CX & Helpdesk Support

CX aka customer experience is now the driving force behind any enterprise operations. Customers need chatbots, knowledge forums, and service catalogs, i.e., multi-channel communication. Therefore, managed helpdesk support will reduce the workload for your IT technicians and cater to all these aspects of helpdesk.

Additionally, you can direct your in-house team to focus on the strategic elements of CX to enhance the buyer journey.

In the future, helpdesk automation will also be a rising trend. It will work toward augmenting client satisfaction and expediting resolution time.

Final Verdict!

In conclusion, keeping up with technological advancements, industry trends, and business climate is crucial for organizations to thrive.

The shift in the entire digital arena created new challenges and scopes for DevOps services & managed IT service providers. All the discussed MSPs trends predict that in the coming years, managed IT services will be at the top of their game because they are more agile and constantly adapt according to changing environments.