What a modern MSP does differently

By Don Barlow, Senior Vice President, Service Delivery Management, Ensono A good provider keeps you running. The best ones help you win your race.

For technology leaders in today’s enterprise environment, the question is: What race are you running and are you in the right shape to run it?

Maybe your team is in an all-out sprint toward a product release or compliance deadline. Maybe you’re grinding through the marathon of an end-to-end digital transformation or long-term sustainability initiative. More likely, you’re running many different races at the same time. No matter how fast or far you must run, the last thing you’ll want to worry about is your next breath of air.

In 1943, noted psychologist Abraham Maslow identified five basic human needs with his hierarchy of needs. At the risk of oversimplification, a person’s basic physiological needs must be met before one’s attention can turn to looking for love, belonging, esteem and self-actualization. Think of it this way: if deprived of water, food or shelter you would become fully consumed by meeting these needs.

Enterprises are no different. After all, they are comprised of humans whose basic needs must be met first. You need look no further than the Gallup Q12 employee satisfaction survey methodology, which is firmly rooted in the principles of Maslow’s hierarchy.

So, what are the basic physiological needs enterprise IT delivers to its business? I would argue there are three:

Availability: Mission-critical applications must have levels of availability that can be taken for granted, just like the air we breathe.
Security: Safeguarding your data and operations and ensuring your business is protected from the ever-evolving threat landscape.
Responsiveness: How quickly and accurately enterprise IT’s core ITIL processes for incident, problem, change and risk meet the needs of the business really matters, regardless of the race you’re running.

When these above needs are consistently met, enterprise IT leaders can turn their attention to what really creates value for their business. Words like “optimization” and “transformation” for the sake of improving business agility while optimizing security and the cost of delivering mission-critical applications predominate thinking, plans and budgeting. Said another way, with their basic needs of availability, security and responsiveness met, they can focus on moving up the stack to the pinnacle of Maslow’s pyramid, self-actualization—in this case, business actualization. And if done well, with the needs of the business met, IT leaders are better positioned for career advancement.

Traditional MSPs focus on meeting these basic physiological needs for enterprise IT with results measured monthly in the form of SLAs, so you can take the air you breathe for granted. The thing is, you’re not in the race just to run it. You’re in it to win it. And the type of race you need to run matters because it dictates the kind of training required to maximize fitness. Modern MSPs recognize their role is that of an elite training coach, getting you ready for the race you need to run. In the case of physical conditioning, it comes down to ensuring maximum efficiency in delivering oxygen to your muscles as measured by VO2 max. When it comes to enterprise IT, modern MSPs do it in the following ways:

Modern MSPs focus on outcome-based SLAs

Traditional SLAs are about ensuring you can get your next breath of air; they don’t ensure you’re in the best possible shape to win the race. A modern MSP focuses on SLAs required to meet the desired business outcomes of its enterprise customers. Whether it’s about improving business agility or lowering the overall cost of IT a modern MSP will ensure SLAs and service delivery are targeted to achieve meaningful business outcomes.

There is momentum behind this approach. Gartner expects that by 2025, over 70% of outsourced business relationships will be evaluated based on actual business outcomes as outlined in SLAs—up from 15% in 2021.¹ And it makes sense because outcome-based SLAs enable enterprise CIOs to shift the burden of risk to their MSP, freeing up time for them to focus on what really creates value for their business.

Modern MSPs provide proactive service management

Traditional MSPs operate on a reactive paradigm: they monitor, react and repair, and report results monthly on SLA attainment. It’s a bit of an archaic approach given the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which modern MSPs are leveraging to create a more valuable paradigm of predicting, preventing and optimizing. Ask yourself: is your organization and/or MSP providing you with proactive recommendations every month that will improve your application availability, performance, security and cost? If not, you should question whether they are living in the past.

Modern MSPs make proactive service management a basic expectation for its customers. They leverage AI/ML along with a staff

of highly technical resources to identify and recommend specific steps that can be taken before, not after the fact, to save money, improve security and harden availability/performance of mission-critical applications.

¹DD Mishra, “Establishing XLAs When Engaging With IT Service Providers,” Gartner, October 28, 2024.

Modern MSPs are innovation-obsessed

Any MSP worth its salt is going to bring proven experience and a solid bench of experts to your engagement. But a modern MSP isn’t just gesturing proudly to the road behind them; they focus on the road ahead. Like that elite coach working to keep an athlete in peak condition with state-of-the-art equipment and fresh workouts based on cutting-edge science, a modern MSP obsessively focuses on the forefront of technological advancements. They bring ideas to you, mapping the problems and opportunities found in your environment to new solutions that can mitigate and exploit them—and they do it without you even having to ask.

Modern MSPs drink their own water. They pilot the latest and potentially greatest tech within their own environments first and provide practical use cases on achieved business outcomes. For example, an MSP that isn’t extensively leveraging AI across its organization, documenting and iterating on its impact and then sharing those learnings with clients, may not be the right partner for this technological and market moment.

Modern MSPs offer contractual flexibility

It may sound cliche to say we live in a world where change is the only constant, but it’s true, now more than ever. Unforeseen opportunities and unexpected challenges can strike any time (remember COVID-19?) Your needs tomorrow may be totally different than today. Service contracts that don’t offer the freedom to migrate workloads across platforms and pay only for what you use should raise the red flag that you are working with a traditional and not a modern MSP. Modern MSPs care more about helping you achieve your desired business outcomes than locking you into a specific technology platform. Why? Because doing so is how they earn customers for life.

They measure employee satisfaction and/or engagement. The very best of the modern MSPs have been doing so for years and will freely share their approach to improving employee satisfaction/engagement as well as their results achieved over time. So, ask them, and judge for yourself how transparent they are about what it takes to sustain and grow a strong culture.
They lead with culture in sales pitches. MSPs priding themselves on a strong culture are replete with statistics and stories on their journeys to improve employee satisfaction/engagement. They take tremendous pride in what they have achieved. They will also be the first to acknowledge that the journey continues, because sustaining a strong culture is not a project—it is core to the DNA of any successful modern MSP.

They actually like working together. This may sound a bit cheesy—but look for how they interact in meetings and what they say about each other in one-on-one discussions. A lot can be said for a company’s culture simply by how they treat and speak about each other.

Modern MSPs know culture matters

Providers who don’t stay at the vanguard are going to hold their clients back until the next contract renewal comes around

I know what you’re thinking: Every MSP talks about the importance of culture. You’re right, but they do so for good reason. After all, the ‘S’ in MSP stands for “service”, which is conceived of and largely delivered by people.

Modern MSPs understand culture is the fundamental key to unlocking the power of an outcome-based SLA, the risk-busting promise of proactive service management, the relentless focus on finding ways to optimize and innovate, and the confidence to enable freedom and agility.

So, if every MSP touts its culture, how do you know which one is right for your business, beyond surfing Glassdoor reviews or asking about retention rates? Here are three things to look for:

Modern partnership is allyship

Like just about everything else in business, the role of the MSP is evolving to meet a new set of market factors and client expectations. Providers who don’t stay at the vanguard of this evolution are going to be left behind and hold their clients back until the next contract renewal comes around.

IT leaders can and should expect a more strategic, invested kind of managed service partnership with their MSP—one focused first and foremost on alignment and commitment around required business outcomes. Doing so will enable IT leaders to unburden themselves of managing risk so they can spend more time focused on creating business value.