If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it: isn’t that what people always say?
The problem for MSPs with this attitude is that businesses need more proactive support, especially given the epic rise in the number of SaaS products they use.
No longer is IT infrastructure rarely something you need to service. It requires constant expert care to be effective because it’s never static.
On top of this, getting paid by the hour or the incident when something goes wrong means you never know how much money you’ll make in a given month. It also means that a great month for you is a terrible month for your clients.
That’s why the break/fix model for IT services is dying away and instead, MSPs are looking to increase productivity and reduce their clients’ expenditure on costly infrastructure year after year.
Therein lies a ton of opportunity for proactive MSPs. We’re talking about offering services centered around:
- Cloud migration
- Business intelligence
- Monitoring employee productivity
- Enhancing security
To grow faster, MSPs should seek to offer a lot more consultative value to customers. This starts with offering services centered around SaaS apps.
The Role of SaaS in the Modern Organization
In 2015, 83% of US firms with 100-999 employees were using SaaS. By 2019, this figure reached 98%. In other words, there were only 2% of US mid-market businesses without any SaaS services in use last year.
The increase in SaaS applications hasn’t changed the role of an MSP as they’re still tasked with delivering the applications to the employees who need it most while doing so in a secure and compliant manner.
Put another way, virtually all software applications are moving to the cloud, making their technical management less problematic but still leaving your clients with their administration.
The sheer volume of players–ERPs, CRMs, B2B, B2C, cloud applications, integration software developers, and web developers–are overwhelming companies.
The MSP is doing its job, but there’s a role going unfilled: someone who puts all this together.
Why SaaS Services Are the Answer
One way that MSPs can play a valuable role is by advising on SaaS services and apps.
There are many SaaS apps available today, but businesses need to know if they are effectively using the ones they are paying for.
This has been confounded by COVID: when people started working from home, SaaS adoption went through the roof. People at home started using whatever tools they needed to get their jobs done.
Now up to 30% of companies’ annual SaaS spend is wasted. For an 800-person U.S. company, this translates to more than $4M lost in a year.
Another SaaS issue is the loss of data access control: employees may accidentally delete data resulting in data loss or expose sensitive data to unauthorized users resulting in data leakage.
The darker side of employee risk involves acts with malicious intent. The results are devastating.
MSPs can provide valuable support by offering insights into the SaaS apps businesses should be using as well as how to manage data, and how to keep them as secure as possible.
A SaaS management platform (SMP) allows MSPs to manage the day-to-day operations for Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, and other frequently used SaaS applications.
It also allows MSPs to manage application policies, take corrective action, track application usage, and automate IT administrative tasks such as onboarding and offboarding employees.
With every added application, there comes contracts, licenses, renewals, fees, users, and owners. It forms an entangled web of solutions that can add up to exorbitant and mushrooming costs–as well as security and compliance issues.
MSPs must gain control over their clients’ SaaS environment, and it shouldn’t involve spreadsheets or email.
These desktop tools are no match for this complicated ecosystem that continually evolves. It’s time to invest in a unifying SaaS management tool that can provide the much-needed insight into this complex world.
Trust us, your clients will thank you for it.
