September 2022

The SaaS Market is Booming and MSPs are Cashing In

A recent analysis of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market found the top 10 SaaS apps to be Zoom, Slack, Lucidchart, Atlassian Cloud, Salesforce, Figma, LinkedIn, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Smartsheet. Taken from a survey of hundreds of customers and more than 50,000 SaaS instances, collaboration apps were clearly popular along with CRM and office productivity suites.

This data highlights a gradual shift towards SaaS in the enterprise. And MSPs are carving out a slice of the SaaS pie. Why? Organizations are running into management headaches in trying to stay on top of the needs and nuances of the growing legion of SaaS apps in user in the business. Some MSPs focus squarely on managing multiple SaaS apps for the enterprise. Its far easier to have the MSP deal with every aspect of licensing, productivity, latency, performance, and cost than to do so internally.

MSPs Fill the SaaS Need

An emerging trend is businesses being more willing to turn to MSPs for their SaaS apps than going directly to vendors. COVID-19 pushed the number of people working remotely to unheard of numbers. According to ALM Media Properties, 58% or American knowledge workers now operate remotely, up more than 30% from before the pandemic. These employees need IT assistance and businesses are increasingly looking to MSPs to provide it.

In cybersecurity and device management, in particular, there is growing demand for MSPs to help organizations manage cybersecurity. This is part of a larger trend of applications migrating steadily to the cloud. Organizations, these days, are demanding that they establish a much larger presence in the cloud. But as they move gradually from an on-prem to a cloud model, they inevitably begin to struggle with complexity. They end up with a great many apps running in multiple clouds with multiple vendors. They are looking to MSPs to bring about simplicity.

MSPs Partnering with Security Vendors

Over the last decade, the infrastructure and application spaces have seen drastic changes in the way they’re hosted, deployed, and maintained as public, private and hybrid cloud models have taken shape. In parallel, we are seeing cybersecurity vendors partnering more with MSPs. The smart vendors permit white labelling of their apps, and allow the MSP to deal completely with the customer interface. After all, that is the core competency of the MSP: managing the apps, integration, processes, and performance of their customers.

MSPs benefit from such partnerships by having a wider range of attractive offerings for their clientele, as well as by eliminating the need to deploy their own infrastructure for the app. The vendor provides the underlying infrastructure, app maintenance, software updates, and so on. All the MSP has to do is sell the subscription, deliver the service, ensure quality remains high, and keep the customers happy.

For MSPs wanting to transition into security, such relationships save them from a tough learning curve in cybersecurity and avoid them having to develop their own applications from scratch. After all, they have little chance of competing with security vendors that have been innovating in this space for decades. It is simpler, cheaper, and much faster to partner with the companies that are already providing the applications. MSPs avoid the need to erect expensive infrastructure for service delivery. Instead, they can piggyback off the infrastructure already in place at the security vendor. Updates and patches are pushed out by the vendor via the MSP to existing customers. The net result is that the MSP has more services available that can be delivered much faster to existing customers. The MSP can also respond quicker to changing market conditions by finding the right partner to be able to offer new security services.

The Syxsense Managed Service provider program is designed for MSPs and MSSPs looking to provide a higher level of management services to their customers. It consolidates multiple solutions together into a single offering that includes IT Management, Patch Management, Security Vulnerability Remediation, and a robust policy based Zero Trust product.

Syxsense is a leading provider of innovative, intuitive endpoint security and management technology that combines the power of artificial intelligence with industry expertise to help customers predict and remove security threats across all devices including mobile. Our unified security and endpoint management platform centralizes the three key elements of endpoint security management (vulnerabilities, patch and compliance) and layers on a powerful workflow automation tool called Syxsense Cortex,™ all through a single cloud-based platform, enabling greater efficiency and collaboration between teams. The always-on technology performs in real-time so businesses can operate free of disruption from security breaches that cripple productivity and expose them to financial risk and reputational harm.