ANZ MSPs struggling with turnover, outages

Australian and New Zealand managed service providers (MSPs) are grappling with a skills shortage and struggling with IT outages, according to new research from LogicMonitor.

The cloud-based IT operations data collaboration platform has released a new report which shows that it is taking ANZ MSPs an average of four months to fill an engineering role from job posting to first day of work.

Meanwhile, close to half of respondents to the survey conducted for the report (44%) report having experienced significant employee turnover in the last 12 months.

This is coming at a time when the role of the MSP has never been more important due to the considerable disruptions that businesses are still grappling with amid the ongoing pandemic, according to LogicMonitor VP and GM for Asia-Pacific and Japan Richard Gerdis.

“MSPs have been at the forefront in managing IT and industry disruptions [during COVID-19]. Our new research has revealed that MSPs, global enterprises and other technology organisations are struggling to operate efficiently and ensure uptime as they remain short-staffed,” he said.

“However, with the adoption of full-stack observability platforms that feature widespread automation and AIOps capabilities, companies are able to fuel productivity and foster the valuable technical and business insights needed to help teams evade disruptive business outages and collaborate and innovate faster.”

This may increase staff retention, with the research finding that in ANZ, 41% of an engineer’s work week is spent on repetitive, routine tasks, while it takes on average 89 hours for ANZ MSPs to onboard new customers. And 89% of respondents agree that these repetitive tasks take time away from innovation and advancing strategic goals.

Three in four respondents meanwhile reported not being completely confident in their ability to manage the threat of a cyber attack to their customers, with 84% of ANZ MSP customers having been affected by cyber attacks such as the 2020 Solar Winds (45%) and 2021 Kaseya (43%) security breaches.

The research also found that 89% of ANZ MSPs have experienced a brownout or outage in the past year, with five experienced per company on average. More than four in 10 (42%) have lost revenue due to such outages.

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