Acronis stated that, according to a survey of managed service providers (MSPs), customer demand in cybersecurity is shifting dramatically from traditional software and hardware purchases to managed services subscriptions. The survey was conducted by Acronis in cooperation with Omdia at the end of 2020 among 244 MSPs of all sizes from around the world.
One of the biggest challenges currently facing IT resellers is the pace of change—in customer demand, the MSP technologies used, and human resources organization. The trend of digitalization and cloud migration, initiated by the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic less than a year ago, is far from slowing down, and according to the survey results, can be expected to continue over the next several years.
Key findings include:
- Since the beginning of 2020, MSPs have seen the greatest customer interest in support for remote workers, cybersecurity services, support for digital transformation, and cloud migration.
- MSPs expect their revenue in the managed IT security services segment to grow by an average of 89% over the next 2 years, and cloud managed services revenue by 51%, while software resale revenue will decline by 20% and hardware resale revenue by 63%.
- This year, MSPs plan to enhance their offerings with protection against zero-day threats (18% of respondents), endpoint security beyond antivirus (17%), and AI-based malware detection (14%).
- In the area of backup, MSPs want to improve their offerings with anti-ransomware protection (24%), recovery to dissimilar environments (15%), and fast RTO and RPO platforms (13%).
- According to MSPs, the most important backup features currently include automation, ransomware protection, and backup for SaaS solutions (typically Office 365).
“We are also seeing rapidly growing interest among our partners in the Czech Republic in delivering managed cybersecurity services,” said Štěpán Bínek, responsible for sales of Acronis cloud solutions at ZEBRA SYSTEMS. “This is quite a significant shift—while just three years ago most IT resellers viewed the cloud as a novelty, today our partners talk about almost nothing else. Thanks to the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud platform, they can meet their customers’ dramatically growing requirements and, in addition, transition more quickly from the traditional software sales model to a financially more stable service sales model.”
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is a unique backup service with next-generation anti-malware protection and a wide range of endpoint management features. It simplifies the management of customer devices and enables service providers to reliably protect customers at cost-effective rates. More information at https://www.zebra.cz/produkt/cyber-protect-cloud/.
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
