From The Great Resignation to Another Recession — Why MSPs Should Be the Answer to Your Customers’ Biggest Tech Talent Challenges

This is the first in my blog series: “Business Success Insights for Telarus Cloud Partners”. Each article will focus on an industry topic meant to provide value you can pass along to your customers as they navigate this new ever-changing and oh-so-exciting world of digital transformation.

By Koby Phillips – VP of Cloud Practice, Telarus

Very few, if any, economic turns have presented as much opportunity for our channel as The Great Resignation. Since the pandemic, employees have been quitting their jobs at historic rates. 47.8 million people left their jobs in 2021 through Q2 2022, and that pace looks to continue.¹ Even with a possible recession going into 2023, the trend for seeking out new opportunities for increased pay and benefits, more job fulfillment, and a better quality of life remains strong.² For the IT industry, the Great Resignation is compounded by a much longer talent gap that has increased wage expectations in a space with limited qualified candidates. When asked how the sudden lack of talent is affecting tech giants like Amazon and Google, Graham Waller, VP of Gartner noted, “Compensation is a big driver for IT pros in data science, cloud, product, or agile development.”³ Earlier this year, Amazon announced their plan to double tech workers’ maximum base pay from $160,000 to $350,000 to better compete with other top tech companies, along with compensation adjustments during employee reviews to help boost retention.⁴

With the big tech companies increasing the floor on salaries and benefits, many small enterprise and mid-market companies are struggling to retain their tech talent. Losing skilled team members while keeping up with digital transformation has become a major challenge for CIOs and CTOs. According to the Gartner Worldwide Labor Market Survey, which was released in the first quarter of 2022, rising labor costs are spiking the cost of technology services, which will result in a $1.3 trillion increase in global spending on IT services by 2023. Another aspect contributing to increased spending is outsourcing IT services since it fills the skills gap in businesses.⁵ The outsourced IT companies, or Managed Services Providers (MSPs), are being called on more than ever. By partnering with trusted and experienced cloud MSPs – third-party companies designed to manage cloud infrastructure, security and provide related administrative support remotely – on an as-needed basis, organizations can alleviate long-term shortages and foster growth from within.

Here’s a look at the three key challenges MSPs can help businesses solve during the Great Resignation and beyond:

MSPs help keep digital transformation strategies on track.

These days, cloud vendors (AWS, AZURE, GCP, etc.) roll out new services, features, or enhancements at dizzying speeds. Maintaining the in-house expertise needed to keep pace with the latest innovations is an ongoing struggle. At the end of 2021, Gartner named talent shortages as the most significant barrier to emerging technologies adoption.⁶ If companies cannot attract the right candidates for business achievement, it could cost them in the market. As competitors move ahead at an accelerated pace thanks to the advancement of technology and automation processes, can your customers afford to fall behind? With the right MSP partner, they can stay on top of innovation right when and where they need it.

MSPs can mitigate the administrative and cost burdens of employee retention.

It’s a common scenario I hear in the marketplace: Businesses make a significant investment to successfully onboard a new cloud engineer who has accepted their offer. Dope, right? Well, kinda. On top of their regular responsibilities, existing team members provide the training and knowledge transfer necessary for the new engineer to ramp up quickly. Then, as soon as the team is whole again and operating efficiently, someone else decides to leave. This becomes a frustrating and never-ending cycle of rinse and repeat, where productivity and timelines stall as the fight to find and recruit qualified replacements ensues.

Could your customers benefit from an MSP? Here are 6 common issues to look for.In addition to labor costs, businesses must also consider tooling expenses for monitoring, patching, ticketing, alerting, code repositories, security, databases – the list goes on. This is yet another area where MSPs can benefit companies.

MSPs can take care of unanticipated issues so in-house talent can stay focused on development. 

What better analogy for this point than a lyric from the great Rob Van Winkle aka Vanilla Ice’s classic hit “Ice Ice Baby”: “If there was a problem, yo, I’ll solve it. Check out the hook while D-Shay revolves it.” (You’re welcome.) MSP providers have the resources to solve a breadth of issues throughout the cloud journey and allow customers to focus on what matters most: running and growing their business.

For example, MSP providers can:

• Maintain the environment to relieve IT teams from day-to-day cloud operations.
• Take over the burden of “Day 2” operations – including monitoring, patching, security, database administration, reporting, monolith applications, and remediation — in cases where the customer is utilizing more traditional services, like infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
• Cover advanced features, such as serverless, containers, and infrastructure as code, and operate like a DevOps model. You can have access to these features for your customers.

Additionally, MSPs take on the responsibility of ensuring resource availability, instead of your customers carrying the cost of finding, attracting, negotiating, hiring, training, and maintaining all of these employees.

Key Benefits of a Managed Service Provider:

• Cost savings: MSPs have experts that know how to efficiently utilize the cloud, so companies get the most out of their resources while reducing cloud computing costs.
• Increased data security: MSPs ensure proper safeguards are utilized while proactively monitoring and preventing potential threats to security.
• Increased employee production: With less time spent managing the cloud, in-house IT managers can focus on strategic business operations.
• 24/7/365 management: MSPs provide cloud management around the clock, giving your customers peace of mind that nothing is falling through the cracks.
• Overall business improvement: When a trusted cloud advisor manages cloud infrastructure, businesses can optimize their environments while allowing more time to focus on core business operations. MSPs can also recommend cloud-native solutions to further support the business agility required to compete.

Top 3 myths about MSPs, and how to address them.

Conclusion

Today, companies all over the world realize that having an MSP in place outweighs the cost of continuing under their typical IT structure. Many companies see that MSPs are not an acquisition of a new service but rather a partnership to make their current system more efficient and cost effective. The value of an MSP is to:

• Assist companies in defining application strategies to support their business direction to increase efficacy and impact to the overall bottom line
• Deliver a wide range of application management and development support services
• Optimize the ROI of existing applications

Positioning these key points and bringing insight to your customer should allow for a conversation to take place. You now have access to more technology than ever. Your customers need to not only purchase it from you but often need them managed as well. Take advantage while you can; there is no better time to prioritize this topic with your customers. As always, you will have Telarus resources to support your conversations, however and whenever needed.

Could your customers benefit from an MSP?
Here are 6 common issues to look for.

Top 3 myths about MSPs, and how to address them.

1. q.ai The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting Right Now: Is It Safe to Quit a Job in a Recession? (October 23, 2022) https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/10/23/the-great-resignation-quiet-quitting-right-now-is-it-safe-to-quit-a-job-in-a-recession/?sh=13b43e1e62b1
2. The Great Resignation is Not Over: A Fifth of Workers to Quit in 2022. (June 24, 2022) World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/the-great-resignation-is-not-over/
3. Agarwal, M. The Rise of The Restless: How Can We Regain Sanity and Clarity After the Big Reset? (July 6, 2022) https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/07/06/the-rise-of-the-restless-how-can-we-regain-sanity-and-clarity-after-the-big-reset/?sh=37e755324fd0
4. Bishop, Todd. Amazon More Than Doubles Max Base Pay to $350k for Corporate and Tech Workers, Citing Labor Market. (February 27, 2022) https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-more-than-doubles-max-base-pay-to-350k-for-corporate-and-tech-workers-citing-labor-market/
5. Jacques, M. The Impact of the Worldwide Recession on the Tech Industry. (November 7, 2022) https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/the-impact-of-the-worldwide-recession-on-the-tech-industry/147089/
6. Koelsh, E. Lag in Adoption of Emerging Technologies Due to Talent Shortage. https://nationalcioreview.com/articles-insights/leadership/lag-in-adoption-of-emerging-technologies-due-to-talent-shortage