UK SME reliance on MSPs rises but some still have 'no plans' to work with them - report

JumpCloud’s sixth biannual SME IT Trends report found that the cost effectiveness of MSPs is driving growth in SMEs

UK small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are upping their use of MSPs as they feel the crunch of macroeconomic conditions.

According to JumpCloud's Q1 2024 SME IT Trends report, 62 per cent of respondents are using an MSP to some extent within their IT programme, up from 57 per cent from the last report.

JumpCloud CTO Greg Keller (pictured) tells CRN this increase boils down to the cost effectiveness of MSPs.

"MSPs can be way more cost effective for organisations than onboarding new IT staff themselves," he says.

"Without question, it's a force multiplier effect for a smaller company, start-ups and scale-ups that basically form the backbone of the SME.

"They do not have the capital or the budgets to hire and onboard IT staff directly."

Keller adds UK SMEs are feeling the brunt of the macroeconomic conditions which is leading them to MSPs.

"SMEs are smaller boats in a bigger stormy sea of economy. Bigger companies can afford these macroeconomic impacts way more than the SME can. So the ability for an SME to defer to and leverage an MSP is way more economically feasible for them."

Meanwhile, the report also found that 19 per cent don't work with an MSP, and don't plan to.

Keller believes SMEs that don't plan to leverage MSPs have a uniform technology stack which doesn't require them.

"Very specifically, what we're seeing is, in companies that largely leverage a pure top to bottom Microsoft stack, meaning this is what they've chosen to run their entire business on, an IT person who is well trained, MCSE certified, can generally operate it," he says.

"The moment a company starts to diversify its resources, for example, bringing in Macbooks, you start to have a breakdown in expertise.

"This is where MSPs that focus on device deployment security, especially for Apple products, become a really attractive option for companies like that."

He adds there are two things he believes MSPs can do to try and capture that 19 per cent.

"Number one, security. Just by virtue of an IT person using the whole Microsoft stack doesn't mean that they're well equipped to understand threat patterns.

"MSSPs can be really well tuned to sell into those businesses cost effectively."

Secondly Keller states that any company thinking about cloud transformation, can and should be thinking about MSPs.

"There are highly focused MSPs in this space that can work on the digital transformation of traditional, on-premise IT stacks into a much more diverse cloud forward world. Those are the two main things that we're seeing quite often and MSPs are tuned to help that."