Kaseya’s 2022 MSP Benchmark Survey, the company’s 11th, was released. Here are some key insights, quoting from Channel Futures:
- Compliance. Three in four (74%) MSPs said their customers struggle to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Seventy-five percent of the MSP respondents either offer or are interested in providing compliance services. Nearly three in five (59%) have clients required to comply with HIPAA guidelines. This was followed by PCI DSS (41%) and GDPR (27%).
- Cybersecurity. One-half said their business is more at risk of cybercrime than one year ago. This is an 11% increase from 2021’s data. Almost half of the MSPs reported that a significant portion of their clients fell victim to a cyberattack within the last 12 months. Though cybersecurity is a significant concern for MSPs, it has also been a revenue driver; the survey found that one-half of MSPs evaluate the threat landscape quarterly to add new services to their lineups.
- Remote work. 22% of respondents state that remote workforce setup was the top service requested by their clients — followed by cloud migration (21%) and business continuity (13%). Remote work is also a significant pain point for MSPs’ customers, with 36% of respondents selecting it as one of the top three IT problems for clients in 2022.
- MSPs value integrated solutions. Two in three (64%) MSPs said integration among core applications, including RMM, PSA, and IT documentation software, is either critical or very important, with 78% stating that this integration helps drive profit.
- Supply chain issues and hiring. The lion’s share (92%) of MSPs have had supply chain issues impact their ability to sell solutions. One in five (19%) said hiring would be their primary challenge in 2022 — a 15% jump from 2021.
- Active incident response plans. Only 4% of respondents said their entire client base has an active incident response plan. About half of the respondents reported that only one in four of their clients had an active incident response plan. Eight percent of MSPs stated that none of their clients had an incident response plan in place.
- Disaster recovery capabilities. Kaseya’s 2022 survey found that 30% of MSPs simulate disaster recovery capabilities quarterly, 25% test annually, and 9% test monthly — with 15% admitting that they never test.
Or how about the Channel Company’s State of Partner Profitability 2021 report, which was released at the company’s Xchange event last week.
MSPs received 28 percent of revenue via the resale of services, 43 percent via partner-managed services, and 29 percent via partner-owned and managed services. Partner-owned and managed services had the greatest gross margins at 59 percent, followed by 37 percent for partner-managed services and only 22.5 percent for resale.
I don’t think there are any big surprises here.
Security, compliance, and supply chain management are reactive problems, where I view remote work as one that services companies can lean into proactively. A business HAS to do those reactive ones, but remarkable ones will lean in and innovate experiment with solutions in proactive ones.
The more one can link that spending to revenue generation, the better.