How MSPs can help IT departments overcome talent shortages
Back when MSPs first burst onto the scene in the ‘90s, it caused a stir. Their existence piqued the curiosity of the business community, exciting business leaders and their teams with the prospect of handing over daily IT responsibilities to an expert on the outside. Understandably, their arrival on the scene also sparked fear in some. Many in-house IT professionals found themselves questioning what this meant for them: Would MSPs make their jobs redundant? The media’s positioning of in-house IT as the opponent of MSPs did little to quell these concerns, circulating the narrative that this is a ‘pick one or the other’ scenario.
Today, looking back on the perceived rivalry (however fleeting) between MSPs and in-house IT is almost amusing for how far it is from reality. It didn’t take long for the world to realise that MSPs aren’t the big bad threat they may have been pumped up to be. Conversely, they’re a partner; a supporter; and when you take into consideration that nearly 70% of ICT occupations are facing major talent shortages, they’re a lifeline.¹
Despite what fabricated dichotomy may have once circulated, it’s not a matter of MSPs or in-house IT. It’s MSPs and in-house IT. In fact, it’s rare for businesses to rely solely on MSPs with no internal IT resources of their own.² Most businesses engaging an MSP will adopt a hybrid model, drawing on external resources to empower their internal team.
And that’s exactly where the value of managed services comes into focus. Not as a replacement for internal teams, but as a practical way to extend their capabilities, especially when recruitment gets tough and internal resources are stretched thin.
Our Head of Services, Paul Wegner, has seen time and time again how managed services can help businesses overcome recruitment challenges.
“The talent market is very challenging at the moment. It’s hard to find good talent, particularly for specialised roles. That’s often what brings our clients to us in the first place: situations where someone’s resigned or retired and they’re struggling to find a suitable replacement,” says Paul.
Paul’s insights are echoed by our recent customer council, which confirmed that one of the biggest challenges for internal IT departments is the skillset gaps that are left in the wake of staff retiring or moving on.
The talent shortage isn’t only a problem for businesses who have had key IT team members exit their business. Even for IT departments with virtually no staff turnover, the malnourished talent market is a big problem.
Many of the IT teams Paul meets with have been built, though not intentionally, with a single point of failure. Having all the critical information living in the head of one person is fine, so long as they never leave, take a holiday, or fall ill.
“When your coverage is reliant on just one person, it can be a problem. Should that person take four weeks of holiday across the year, that’s four weeks that you’re not covered,” he says.
Paul continues: “It’s one of the common things we hear from clients—that they have a team member who hasn’t taken annual leave for a long time and they’re overdue for a holiday. Of course, there’s important tasks that need to be done in that time, and that’s where having an MSP on your team can really help because we can scale up easily and quickly to meet those demands”.
“The alternative in that situation is to go out to market and try to recruit a part-time contractor and that whole process takes a lot of time and money,” he says.
It takes time, because in this climate, finding someone who embodies such a specialised skillset is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And it takes money, not just for the cost of the new hire, but also for the resources it takes to recruit and manage them.
“Sometimes the perception can be that MSPs are more expensive than hiring someone, but what typically isn’t taken into account is all the administrative overheads of finding and managing that resource—not just recruiting, but all the administrative overheads too,” Paul says.
That hidden burden is why predictable, per-device pricing feels like relief rather than risk. When a retailer opens a new store, the support cost is clear upfront; if they scale down, next month’s bill shrinks with them. There’s no recruiters’ fees and no scramble for short-term cover.
“Retail is a good example,” Paul notes.
“When a client sets up a new store, there’s transparency across how much it’s going to cost for us to manage the technology footprint of that store, because it’s based on the amount of connected endpoints such as Point-of-Sales lanes and WiFi Access Points.”
Paul notes too, that MSP costs buy outcomes. Patch cycles, licence renewals, compliance checks and 24/7 monitoring move from one overworked engineer to a specialist team bound by a service-level agreement. And for stretched departments, that peace of mind is invaluable. It frees them to step away from the help desk queue and back into the projects that move the business forward.
In a market where seven in ten ICT roles are still unfilled,¹ MSPs help keep the wheels turning.
The talent gap may not close overnight, but with the right MSP alongside your internal team, it doesn’t have to stall progress.
Sources
¹ Jobsandskills.gov.au
² Gov.uk
