LogicMonitor study identifies global engineering hiring challenges

The study surveyed 600 MSP leaders in nine global markets across North America, EMEA and APAC to understand the state of MSPs in 2022 and beyond.

Faced with a growing number of challenges as the pandemic continues to disrupt the normal course of business, while also accelerating digital transformation, MSPs are under pressure from global enterprise customers to deliver despite outages, cyber attacks, employee attrition and lack of resources.

Many Australian and New Zealand enterprises (53 per cent) are spending more money with their MSPs, particularly on future-oriented tasks, compared to previous years as they migrate to the cloud (45 per cent) and focus on providing additional employee training around cyber security (44 per cent).

As the pandemic continues to present considerable challenges to business operations, MSPs have been at the forefront in managing IT and industry disruptions,” according to Richard Gerdis, LogicMonitor vice-president and general manager, Asia-Pacific and Japan.

“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.

"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," Gerdis said.

Overcoming Workforce challenges and IT outages

With forces like “The Great Resignation” causing labour shortages across every industry, and rising ransomware attacks, MSPs are challenged to provide support to enterprise customers while also maintaining their own stacks.

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MSPs continue to experience high numbers of outages themselves while simultaneously trying to help customers modernise, move to the cloud, support remote workforces and decrease IT downtime.

• Eighty-nine per cent of ANZ MSPs have experienced a brownout or outage in the past year – recording five on average.
• Forty-two per cent of ANZ MSPs lost revenue due to brownouts and IT outages.
• Forty-four per cent of MSPs in ANZ have experienced significant employee turnover in the last 12 months.
• Once an engineer resigns, it takes four months for ANZ MSPs to fill engineering roles from job posting to first day of work.
• In ANZ, 41 per cent of an engineer’s work week is spent on repetitive, routine tasks.
• Eighty-nine per cent of ANZ MSP leaders agree repetitive tasks take time away from innovation and advancing strategic goals.
• ANZ MSPs are increasingly investing in retaining their top talent, especially through offering flexible work hours (45 per cent).
• It takes on average 89 hours for ANZ MSPs to onboard new customers, pointing to a lack of agile or automated processes.
• Eighty-four per cent of ANZ MSP customers have been affected by cyber attacks such as the 2020 Solar Winds (45 per cent) and 2021 Kaseya (43 per cent) security breaches.
• A majority (75 per cent) of ANZ MSPs reported not being completely confident in their ability to manage the threat of a cyber attack to their customers.
• Based on LogicMonitor’s research results, MSPs have identified a focus on automation, AIOps, and other modern technologies as imperative to limit risk and future-proof their businesses.

Making the case for automation

Growing MSPs that want to lead the market are investing in solutions that will empower engineers and free them from rote tasks that impede scalability.

Many are turning to cloud initiatives, AIOps, and automation to address both immediate and long-term concerns:

• Ninety-five percent of MSP leaders believe automating their processes is necessary in order to gain the time to focus on innovation and strategic goals.
• ANZ MSP leaders estimate only 37 per cent of their manual processes have been automated – while yet another 42 per cent of tasks could still be automated.
• The top benefit of automating tasks, according to ANZ IT leaders, would be improved time efficiency (44 per cent).
• Investing in automation means investing in a company’s future.
• Ninety-five per cent of ANZ MSP leaders recognise that automation is necessary so they can focus more on innovation and strategic goals.

The findings also indicated that an overwhelming 75 per cent of ANZ MSPs admit they are not completely confident in their organisation's ability to manage the threat of cyber attacks for their customers, with this uncertainty only set to increase as demand for remote digital services soars.

With the complexity of the IT stack continuing to rise, malicious actors are looking to take advantage while businesses can expect to see growing threats like 2020’s Solar Winds and 2021’s Kaseya attacks.

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