Enterprises turn to MSPs to mitigate huge skills gap concerns

A huge skills gap coupled with security worries is driving IT decision makers to engage Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to handle their IT needs, according to NTT Com.

Of the 417 IT decision makers in the US from large enterprises across all industries who participated in the research study, 26 percent put security risks as their biggest challenge in managing in-house IT. This was followed by infrastructure complexity (10 percent). In addition, 16.5 percent said that they expect the skills shortage to impact their decision making in the next 10 months.

“Balancing security with accessibility is a critical challenge for IT decision makers in 2019, ensuring they can secure a growing threat landscape and deliver on business agility. At the same time, they are facing a widening skills gap which makes it almost impossible for them to stay ahead of tech trends,” said Jeffrey Bannister, Executive Vice President for Global Enterprise Services, NTT America.

“These are the very reasons enterprises are realizing that MSPs make perfect operations partners, enabling in-house workloads to be decreased so that IT teams can focus on projects that proactively drive business value. They can also take advantage of MSPs’ economies of scale when it comes to new technologies that can provide them with real competitive advantage,” adds Bannister.

In-house IT teams spend 67 percent of their time simply keeping the lights on, managing IT infrastructure, troubleshooting, and monitoring systems and applications, according to survey respondents; followed by developing and maintaining internal IT applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.

Cloud infrastructure is by far the biggest sector enterprises currently outsource to MSPs. It is also the one area IT decision makers (99 percent) will outsource to MSPs to some degree over the next 10 months. The next-largest category is security. Today 57 percent of respondents outsource security to MSPs – 70 percent are planning to do so in the same timeframe.