What are the biggest challenges facing MSPs this year? CRN recently asked top MSP executives what keeps them awake at night. The findings should come as no surprise.
Compliance and cybersecurity remain perpetual challenges. Compounded by talent gaps, a constantly evolving regulatory environment, and new threat vectors, MSPs are working overtime to stay ahead of changes.
MSPs are also grappling with client inquiries about AI and generative AI applications, while simultaneously exploring the potential uses of AI technology within their own business processes and service delivery options.
These challenges are validated by the ScienceLogic MSP team. Many of our clients describe similar concerns – and more. Thankfully, with help from ScienceLogic’s observability and automation capabilities, MSPs can address many of the top obstacles they face with comprehensive support to not only overcome these challenges, but also capture additional benefits. These key considerations include:
Tools Sprawl and Siloed Workflows
When asked, 47% of MSPs reported that they are seeking to modernize and consolidate siloed IT tools, citing costs as a significant concern. Currently, 60-80% of IT budgets are allocated to maintaining legacy systems, leaving little room for investment in transformative technologies. Additionally, 40% of MSPs report that they are held back by siloed operations, tools, and data, substantiating the significant need for tools consolidation and modernization.
Tools consolidation can be a game changer of IT and the wider business. With a unified, intelligent IT monitoring platform, like the ScienceLogic AI Platform, MSPs and their clients can retire outdated tools, speed decision-making, reduce costs, and better respond to market opportunities and threats.
By consolidating tools, IT teams can also eliminate silos and improve data availability and observability. Enterprises need strong observability to ensure system reliability, proactively detect and resolve issues, optimize performance, enhance security, and maintain seamless business operations across complex distributed environments.
Skills Shortage and Demand for Automation
Unsurprisingly, nearly half (48%) of MSPs are bogged down by human-intensive operations, illustrating the need to automate IT management. Staffing also continues to be a big issue for MSPs, with 41% reporting shortages in resources and skills.
These findings were echoed in CRN’s survey, with executives reporting that they are exploring more ways to automate to lessen trouble ticket backlogs in their clients’ environments. ScienceLogic helps MSPs overcome these challenges with strong visibility and mission critical tools to support automation. ScienceLogic empowers IT teams to leverage automation throughout their workflows and streamline fixes and synchronization across IT operations, softening the skills gap and maximizing efficiency. For instance, support for Run Book Automations enables IT teams to automate routine processes and enhance system responsiveness with more than 350+ automated workflows, saving critical time.
Shorthanded IT management teams can also automatically synchronize data from their environments to their configuration management database to keep data current and drive more automated processes. Instead of manually creating a ticket, which can take up to 30 minutes and an additional 90 minutes to route to the right team, CMDB data can help automate the ticketing process for network infrastructure needs.
Additionally, as part of the Skylar AI suite, IT teams can also automate down to the server and application level with automated root cause analysis. Skylar Automated RCA enables teams to automatically process enormous volumes of log messages in real-time to identify the root cause and automate ticket creation, enrichment, and more.
ScienceLogic’s automated capabilities enable MSP teams to do more with less, offloading manual, repetitive tasks from IT personnel and enabling them to focus on strategic business objectives. The focus is not on machines or AI replacing humans; it’s about helping users of all skill levels quickly resolve complex IT challenges.
Compliance and Security
46% of MSPs consider compliance and security limiting factors for business efficiency and operations. For these challenges, observability holds the key to ensure cyber resilience and data management. After all, the biggest challenge to securing data hinges on an enterprise’s ability to visualize that data.
The ScienceLogic AI Platform also shines here. With the platform, MSPs and their customers can bridge visibility gaps to see broadly across physical, virtual, software-defined, and cloud-based networks, storage, and compute resources running on-premises and/or in a multi-cloud estate. The platform’s advanced AI capabilities further augment its observability insights, enabling organizations to intelligently process and respond to challenges, whether a system error, cybersecurity issue, or something else entirely.
For the 36% of MSPs who report that they’re stuck in a reactive mode of managing their IT estates, these insights enable them to leverage automation so they can quickly and proactively resolve issues. For instance, Skylar Automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) enables MSPs to shift from reactive to proactive by automatically and quickly identifying root cause in real-time while providing a human-centric generative AI summary and remediation recommendations.
ScienceLogic enables MSPs to ensure system reliability and rapid issue recovery. By leveraging the platform’s comprehensive vulnerability scans together with authentication, authorization, and compliance logs, MSPs can ensure systems remain secure and aligned with regulatory requirements.
ScienceLogic: Delivering growth for MSPs and value for clients
Consolidating tools, busting siloes, addressing the skills shortage, and turning to automation to support human-intensive operations can also help address another key MSP challenge: cost control.
With ScienceLogic, MSPs are positioned to move beyond the limitations and challenges that hold them back, to capture efficiency and cost savings as they establish a more modern and agile operation that will improve their effectiveness and speed solution delivery.
ScienceLogic’s AI Platform and Skylar AI suite serve as fantastic partners for MSPs because of their natural support for driving such innovation. Whether MSPs’ objectives are to quickly respond to business demands or to increase renewals and referrals, modernizing with the ScienceLogic platform has proven to be beneficial. This is especially true for large enterprises where complexity and scale are significant challenges.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.
