Cyber security services top priority for fifth of MSPs, says Kaseya

Nearly a fifth (19%) of managed service providers have listed cybersecurity services as their top IT problem this year, according to Kaseya’s 2019 MSP Benchmark Survey, edging out ‘public cloud adoption/migration/support’ (11%) and ‘private cloud adoption/migration’ (9%).

The survey, which gathered data from both Kaseya and non-Kaseya customers during Q4 2018, received responses from more than 800 MSPs of all sizes in more than 40 countries.

It found that security was the most lucrative service offering over the last 12 months, delivering increased revenue for two thirds (66%) of providers. Infrastructure monitoring (60%), desktop support (58%) and connectivity support (55%) also featured high on the list.

“Desktop and connectivity may be most MSPs’ traditional ‘bread and butter’ but focusing on them won’t help their businesses grow,” commented Jim Lippie, SVP of channel development at Kaseya. “As the survey results indicate, security and infrastructure are key to MSPs successfully building their business today – and we expect that to continue for the foreseeable future.”

The survey also discovered that compliance represents an additional opportunity for revenue, with 50% of respondents now managing their customers’ compliance obligations.

Additionally, MSPs are beginning to provide some specialist security services, such as dark web activity (18%), high-availability security solutions centre (29%), automated incident response (33%), single sign-on (40%), as well as network usage scanning (49%).

“Almost every MSP today offers some sort of security offering. Ninety eight percent of respondents to our survey indicate that they do,” Lippie added. “The four most popular services – firewall and VPN management, OS patching, ant-virus and anti-malware; and managed firewall – are so widely used that they are now viewed as standard.”

In terms of backup, the survey found that the proportion of providers offering appliance-based solutions has increased to 38% across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and EMEA. Onsite-to-cloud has also grown, with 75% of respondents now offering the method, whilst just 16 of respondents offer cloud-to-onsite backup.

Despite the general growth in cloud service offerings, there remains some gaps amongst MSPs, Kaseya added, with 13% not providing any form of cloud service at all and 30% still not offering cloud monitoring services.