Cost-effective security key demand for MSPs

Acronis has released the results of a new survey conducted by Omdia (formerly Ovum), which shows that the most requested service that customers want from managed service providers (MSPs) is security.

In the research report titled "Understanding the Security and Data Backup Market for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)," an Acronis-supported survey was conducted involving 263 that serve small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

In the results, MSPs showed an overwhelming demand for reliable security offerings: 97% of respondents indicated the importance of ensuring minimal data loss or corruption in the event of an attack, and 88% report needing to be able to rapidly mitigate damage for discovered cyberthreats.

In addition, 89% of respondents expressed the need to offer a service that goes beyond anti-virus, anti-ransomware, and firewalls.

Acronis chief cyber officer Gaidar Magdanurov comments that the findings are in line with the feedback the company has received in the last few years.

"Service providers are looking to earn higher profit, avoid customer churn, and improve the ease of use of their technology stacks for their teams. In the survey, 84% of respondents confirmed that it is difficult to work with multiple vendors and suppliers for each aspect of the security stack. Instead of using multiple tools for backup, anti-virus, anti-malware, vulnerability assessments, URL filtering, patch management, etc., a single, integrated cyber protection solution would greatly improve their ability to efficiently provide better services to their clients."

Keeping costs down' is a key concern for MSPs, according to the survey: 92% of respondents say acquiring the skills and expertise to deliver security services is a major business challenge because many available services are expensive and scarce.

"COVID-19 continues to have a relentless grip on the world, resulting in the most challenging business environment we've seen since last decade's Great Financial Crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930s," says one of the report's lead authors, Omida distinguished analyst Roy Illsley.

"In these environments where organizations are facing a new threat that they are ill-prepared for, cybercriminals can only thrive. To combat this, MSPs and their clients must have the ability to implement the most appropriate solutions to deal with these increasingly sophisticated attacks."

"The challenge for MSPs is to understand the risk of continuing to use legacy solutions from multiple vendors to provide protection for their customers. The need for agile yet integrated solutions designed specifically for the MSP market is very high in these most challenging times.

Cyber protection, which IDC calls the new IT discipline, addresses the need to combine data protection and cybersecurity, which have historically been treated as separate practices, to mitigate risk and meet the emerging challenges created by modern data use.

The Omdia survey also lists the top three areas MSPs feel are important with regards to backup and recovery: being able to automate the backup process; providing protection against ransomware; and backing up the most popular SaaS applications, such as Microsoft 365.

The report shows the results of a survey of MSPs serving SMBs across the U.S. and the U.K.