A paradigm shift in terms of recent trends and technologies has completely altered the way business is operated. With all the technological benefits, it has also given rise to various challenges which need to be immediately dealt with, some of it being - volatile, unpredictable macroeconomic environment, increased pressure to innovate while keeping pace with technological advancements, the need to meet demands of regulatory compliance and lack of internal and deep technical expertise. Therefore, there has been a growing demand for an efficient managed services provider to deal with these aforementioned challenges.  Furthermore, the increasing dependence of organizations on IT assets to boost their business productivity and growing demands for cloud-based managed services have been major factors in the shift towards managed services and their applications for both short and long-term strategic decisions.   

While outsourcing rest of the tasks to the service providers who hold the operational expertise in that domain, companies can target their core strategic area with managed services enabling companies to access enhanced applications and services that could not be possible in-house.

Current Managed Services Trends

Managed Security is expected to hold a significant share with advanced threat detection and remediation capabilities are enjoying high adoption rates. Worldwide spending on security-related hardware, software, and services is also expected to reach USD 120 billion by 2022. Many major organizations are adopting managed security services to tackle rising security threats, regulatory compliance, and data breaches.

Furthermore, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness rapid growth as more Asian enterprises and government agencies migrate their infrastructure to the cloud, MSPs can provide a variety of services to help these organizations address advanced persistent threat (APT), monitoring, and perform scheduled maintenance.  And also due to the requirements of data sovereignty and other security compliance regulations released by governments, most of the customers in this region prefer MSSPs that have local security operations centers (SOCs).  

With various Managed Services benefits come various challenges that need to be dealt with, two of the critical ones being: Pricing methodologies  - There has been a undervalue of MSPs services in order to  win customer contracts with low pricing;  Applications’ integration - Integration between the customers’ application and cloud principles is one of the major challenges faced by MSPs.