As an MSP today you have a greenfield of opportunities ahead. According to Gartner, 56% of business leaders are engaging with service providers to deliver long-term development and maintenance for their digital business. However, Gartner also notes that the MSPs that best align with digital business infrastructure operations (DBIO) priorities will realize greater success — estimating that by 2023, 63% of MSPs will gain their revenue through these DBIO-specific services.
The bottom-line? MSPs that tie their services to specific digital business outcomes will realize greater market success. But doing that isn’t always easy. For the MSP – even more than for end customers – efficiency is critical. To be ready to capitalize quickly on the growth opportunity to support DBIO, you need to unify IT processes and optimize efficiency. Consider these following MSP challenges and how to overcome them:
1. Tool Overload Drains Management Time, and Margins
Throwing new tools at every new challenge will inevitably create complexity which will take more of your staff’s management time to use and manage. Wherever you can, you need to modernize how you keep your customers’ IT operations up and running so that you can devote more of your staff time to solving more strategic business challenges. By unifying IT operations and processes – from IT service management and IT asset management to security, endpoint management and identity management – you have the key to helping customers stay productive while you deliver value through more strategic projects.
2. Tedious Manual Tasks Limit Efficiency, and Resources
Just like tool sprawl, reliance on manual processes will limit the MSP’s ability to scale to support new or growing customers. To overcome the manual task burden, leverage automation and self-service solutions that can unify action across IT silos. By using a solution that can automate processes across multiple areas of IT operations, you’ll be delivering rapid, even proactive, response to your customers when fast action is needed. Automated actions that can span service management, IT operations and security – both in the cloud or on-premises – will not only save your team time but improve your customer responsiveness. Even more, when you can empower your customers, and their users, with self-service capabilities to resolve challenges on their own you will build customer satisfaction as well as improve your own efficiency.
3. Operating in Reactive Mode Stalls Innovation, and Security
We’ve all faced it – you can get so bogged down in the minutia of dealing with fire after fire that you neglect to focus on the bigger issues. But there’s one challenge that your customers can’t risk, and they trust in you to help protect them: the threat of a cybersecurity breach. In this case, it’s critical to get out of reactive mode, and into a proactive approach. Here is where you need to add real-time infrastructure visibility to your strategy for eliminating complexity and automating actions. The key here is “real time.” When you have insights into everything that is happening across your customers’ IT infrastructures – right now – you have the knowledge to act. You can resolve issues before they escalate, resolve security gaps before a cyberattack hits, or patch machines you may not have even known existed. With real-time visibility – across your customers’ enterprises – you’ll be on top of every situation before your customer even knows there’s a risk.
4. Not Knowing the Best Practice for Rapid Resolution
Yes, your team is comprised of great experts – some of the best in the business to support your customers. But no one can know everything and sometimes it’s a tremendous advantage to compare your resolutions with best practices and recommendations derived from thousands of other environments. Look to a unified IT solution that offers expert advice which can tell you what actions are suggested for your customers’ unique needs. Here your team can quickly analyze your customers’ estate and get a dashboard view into what your team should recommend for your customers. See things such as when to re-image or replace a machine, discover how many Windows machines are running end-of-life versions or what devices are out of warranty, then get prescriptive advice or even automate what you need to do next.
Imagine the productivity gains you can realize if you could reduce tool complexity and automate tedious manual actions all while having a real-time view across your customer environments with smart advice into what actions you need to take. You’d have the secret to scale your MSP business and support more and larger customers. By unifying IT across operational silos using a common solution and process you’ll unlock the key into gaining new revenue opportunities and align your services with DBIO-specific priorities. 
