Presiding over ever-moving maze of tech

Managed services are nothing new in IT. Indeed, managed print has been a mainstay of managed services for many years, perhaps unsurprisingly given that printers’ tendency to cause hair-tearing is only increased when cost controls are not applied. Indeed, looked at in a certain light, even managed print is a newcomer with photocopier leasing acting as the antediluvian ancestor to managed services before the information technology flood swept into every office in the land.

Today, of course, there is a lot more to managed services than paper. From helpdesk to on-premise infrastructure and to cloud, businesses increasingly look to managed service providers (MSPs) to lessen the burden of complex operational requirements.

Increasingly, however, businesses want to simplify things further. John Casey, assistant vice president of pre-sales at Presidio said that in practice, this meant many companies wanted to work with a single MSP across their entire IT estate.

One of the biggest changes this entails relates to cybersecurity.

“We have seen the evolution of managed services,” said Casey. “We would be a traditional infrastructure; cloud and service desk managed service provider. For some companies, cybersecurity sat outside that. In the early days, the thinking was that your managed services shouldn’t [also] be your cyber partners because they would be acting as governor of systems that they ran. It’s now the case that they are two-in-one.”

The consolidation of cybersecurity as a service along with the rest of IT service provision is not being driven by simple efficiencies, though. Instead, it is a response to a growing cyber threat and increasingly complex, and large, attack surfaces.

“You could get into a situation where cybersecurity companies were making recommendations without fully understanding the infrastructure. On the other hand, when it’s all coming in as one contract, you incorporate your infrastructure, your cloud and your cybersecurity into that,” Casey said.

One upshot of this is a clear chain of responsibility. “What you also don’t want is someone saying ‘that’s not really our responsibility’. This way you have one single person as a point of contact.”

Other areas of increasing interest to business, Casey said, included business continuity. This, he said, was often mistaken for disaster recovery but, while the two concepts were related, they were distinct things.

“Business continuity is a big thing these days. We went through Covid, and that really tested your business continuity. Everybody knows about disaster recovery, but what about continuity?”

Whatever degree businesses engage with an MSP to, however, one driving factor is a skills shortage. Not only do businesses want to get on with their own business, rather than getting bogged down with IT, the fast-moving nature of technology today has resulted in severe staff and skills shortages. MSPs can step in and provide the IT backbone that keeps the company operating.

This, Casey said, meant that organisations could continue with growth and expansion plans even in today’s tight labour market, something that is increasingly important as the internet has driven a lot of international expansion.

“There are companies you may have never heard of that are becoming global enterprises. They have an office in Dundalk, they have an office in Atlanta and one in Munich. There are lots of companies out there looking for talent, and that results in a real shortage,” he said.