Top Business Priorities for Successful MSPs

Posted by Trevagh Stankard on Thu, Aug 26th, 2021

Creating a successful Managed Service Provider (MSP) is hard work, but it’s also satisfying and a great opportunity to bring skills to small businesses. Most small businesses need the help of an MSP to ensure that their infrastructure and applications are secure, because they don’t have the talent in-house. To stand out as an exceptional MSP, you can set priorities that will help your MSP succeed in a competitive market.

Have the Right Technical Resources

Small businesses vary widely in the industries that they target and the services that they offer. The MSP must be as resilient as a small business needs, especially as the small business grows and needs more support. A startup might not need much technical expertise, but a small business growing into a mid-size business will need more technical expertise from the MSP to support expanded infrastructure.

It’s not uncommon for MSPs to offer cloud infrastructure to small businesses. The cloud offers an affordable way for a small business to leverage advanced technology at a fraction of the cost compared to hosting the same infrastructure on-premises. It also gives the MSP an easier way to provision and scale the small business infrastructure as it grows.

To offer advanced technology, the MSP needs internal staff that understands it, can maintain it, and can support it should something go wrong. This staff can be contractors or employees, but they must be available any time the small business needs it. If the small business needs support, someone on staff should be able to help them. Better support will create a great reputation for the MSP as a leader in the industry.

Determine Growth Capacity and Create a Strategy

The more small businesses that you support, the more overhead staff will experience. Technology also evolves and changes year to year, so the MSP must be able to adapt to changes. The small businesses that you support will also change, and the MSP must be nimble and flexible to support customer changes.

To handle growth, the MSP must have a plan and a strategy on their path to success. The plan should include current and new customers. How will you handle current customers during a growth period? What resources will be needed during growth? How much additional staff will be needed after a growth period?

It’s important to note that the strategy should always focus on customer support. MSPs have an incredible responsibility to support critical infrastructure that powers business productivity and revenue. The strategy must include ways that customer business infrastructure can continue to function at a peak performance while the MSP onboards additional customers.

Cybersecurity Should Always Be a Priority

Small businesses are a primary target for threat actors online. Attackers know that small businesses do not have the sophisticated cybersecurity resources to protect from cyber-threats. Ransomware, phishing, and other threats are common and can cost a small business thousands of dollars in litigation, containment of the threat, managing the aftermath, and potential compliance violations. By having cybersecurity as a priority, MSPs can save their customers from being the next victim.

The cloud offers sophisticated cybersecurity protections to stop threats, so MSPs that work with cloud infrastructure can provision resources immediately. For example, phishing is quite common, and attackers use it to launch several attacks. Attackers use malicious email to install ransomware on client systems, steal credentials, and trick users into downloading malware that can steal data from the small business network.

To stop attackers from launching a phishing attack against the small business, an MSP can provision email cybersecurity to stop phishing email messages from reaching the recipient’s inbox. MSPs can also configure DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) to ensure that users do not receive spoofed email messages.

DMARC and email security are just two ways MSPs can stop attackers from breaching small business systems. MSPs can offer numerous other cybersecurity advantages for a small business that does not have the staff to properly provision and configure cyber-defense resources. An MSP can offer firewall configuration, monitoring tools, a help desk to help users with passwords and user authorization, basic antivirus support, server cybersecurity configurations, and many other services that small businesses need.

Conclusion

Successfully running an MSP is no easy task, but it can be a successful venture for the right IT people. It’s important to have a strategy in mind and always keep the customer’s best interest when rolling out new business changes. As the business grows, always keep cybersecurity as a priority to protect small businesses from becoming the next victim in a massive data breach.

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