Improving operational efficiency: the biggest challenge MSPs face
The growth of the managed service provider (MSP) business and its ability to increase profits depends primarily on one aspect: efficiency.
However, a recent study points out that improving operational efficiency is the biggest challenge MSPs face in obtaining consistent growth and profitability. To tackle this, 66% believe that automating as many procedures as possible is a key IT operations issue for enterprises in 2023. Improvements in automation have become a top priority for MSPs.
How does automation help MSP operations?
Automation maturity is a competitive advantage, which is why many MSPs are expressing a desire to automate their internal processes.
What are the main benefits of automation?
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It increases productivity while reducing operating costs by enabling MSPs to eliminate repetitive tasks, reduce human error, and optimize processes. This reduces the workload of team members, freeing up some of their time to perform other tasks that require their technical expertise or to add new customers. This can lead to higher scalability, which translates into a direct source of revenue for MSPs.
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It strengthens security with accelerated detection and response: By enabling continuous monitoring of your customers' security, automation ensures faster detection and response to potential threats. In addition, by reducing human error, it also improves the accuracy and consistency of security measures.
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It provides greater visibility and actionable insight: automation provides real-time data, as well as simplified, actionable insights across the network to detect issues.
Automation and integration: the key to MSP productivity and growth
MSPs have limited time and deal with staff retention. If they have to perform manual monitoring of several clients, alternating between several management consoles with a set of different security tools, their work becomes an uphill struggle, and this generates fatigue among cybersecurity professionals. The negative consequences of this fatigue include the danger of losing talent in a sector that is already experiencing difficulty in filling available vacancies.
In addition to automation, 90% of respondents agree that integration between different solutions is critical for their business and the lack of it is perceived as the main obstacle as it hinders daily operations and productivity. According to 63% of MSP leaders, when integration works well, it helps them attract more customers and grow their business. In addition, 49% stated that effective integration helped them reduce costs, and 54% believe that fewer experts are needed to manage the workload, allowing them to focus on other business-critical tasks.
"We have unified our solutions with WatchGuard with firewalls, endpoint and MFA. As a company, the benefits we obtain through this consolidation are achieving operational maturity and efficiency. We don't have to train our staff on multiple solutions, which creates a superior institutional knowledge base within our team," stated Calvin Engen, CTO of F12.net.
These responses show that MSPs need to implement a single solution that enables them to manage security comprehensively and gain deep visibility. Comprehensive security deployment, management, and reporting through a single pane of glass is a significant differentiator in this market, which can help MSPs better service and protect their existing clients, acquire new customers, and grow their business. To increase efficiency and achieve comprehensive security, the different solutions integrated into the platform must share telemetry and threat intelligence and make use of automation in a comprehensive manner to protect MSP customers against today's advanced cyberattacks. Beyond offering integrated multi-layered protection from a single interface, an integrated security approach helps MSPs streamline and simplify their security operations, making their businesses more productive and profitable.
Find out more about WatchGuard's Unified Security Platform and how it helps drive MSP business by checking out our blog posts below:
