End-to-end network allows MSPs to bring more value to their customers

Within the last few years, digital transformation has spread across the globe, indefinitely influencing how businesses and consumers go about their daily processes. The rapid advancement of revolutionary technology has enabled businesses in nearly every industry to improve and optimise their systems and techniques.

Digitalisation has had an impact on many businesses, and innovative devices and applications have allowed entire sectors to grow in the midst of the digital age, with the managed service providers (MSP) industry leading the way.

As cybersecurity became more prevalent, many businesses realised they lacked skilled IT professionals as well as secure IT infrastructure. As a result of these factors, the MSP industry experienced unprecedented growth, as they became IT experts in all functional areas, including trial, installation, training, management, support, maintenance, and upgrades.

The development is owing to the fact that MSPs have evolved into technological "jacks of all trades," with numerous industries relying on them to assist with selecting, implementing, and correctly leveraging innovative technology. MSPs now provide a wide range of digital services, such as network, application, infrastructure, and security, through ongoing and regular support.

However, even though MSPs have worked hard to become digital experts in today's fast-paced, technology-driven world, they still face some challenges when assisting clients. One of the most notable challenges MSPs face today is a lack of network visibility.

Network visibility has always been vital, but the increasing volume and variety of data carried by typical enterprise networks makes full visibility increasingly important. Enterprises are fully responsible for the data that moves on their networks, and as this data becomes much more comprehensive, network monitoring is becoming more challenging, and potential threats become more likely. This is not only an operational challenge, but also a compliance risk for highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and others.

Customers' security and optimal performance are top priorities, but there are some challenges posed by our modern digital environments that must be overcome. For example, as cloud computing and mobile traffic grow, there are more blind spots than ever before for MSPs to look out for, as cloud and mobile both create new blind spots for MSPs to contend with.

One way MSPs are improving their network visibility offerings is by utilising artificial intelligence for IT operations, also known as AIOps platforms, which ConnX has pioneered. AIOps is the application of AI and related technologies to traditional IT Operations activities and tasks, such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). With AIOps, teams can manage the enormous complexity and volume of data generated by their modern IT environments, preventing outages, maintaining uptime, and achieving continuous service assurance.

By consuming activities directly from contrasting apps and utilising automated noise reduction, deduplication, context enrichment, event correlation, incident resolution, and predictive analytics, MSPs that frequently support customers with a mix of tools, applications, systems, and processes across on-premises and hybrid-cloud infrastructures can onboard and achieve value quickly.

With the market expected to grow at its current rate, MSPs must recognise that the AIOps trend is a truly useful and beneficial one for them to join. Future networks will be more intricate than they are now, with much more potential openings for would-be cybercriminals as digital advancements continue. This means that network visibility will only become more important than it is now, making the adoption and use of AIOps sooner rather than later a necessity for MSPs.