Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions that defeat cyberattacks, recently released its inaugural “MSP Perspectives 2024” survey report, which found that the biggest day-to-day challenge facing Managed Service Providers (MSP) is keeping up with the latest cybersecurity solutions/technologies, cited by 39% of the MSPs surveyed. Alongside this, MSPs indicated that hiring new cybersecurity analysts to keep up with customer growth and keep pace with the latest cyberthreats were also top challenges.
The survey also reveals that MSPs perceive the shortage of in-house cybersecurity skills to be the single biggest cybersecurity risk to both their own business and their clients’ organizations. MSPs also perceive stolen access data and credentials and unpatched vulnerabilities to be amongst the biggest security risks to their customers. The latest State of Ransomware 2024 report found that nearly a third (29%) of ransomware attacks started with compromised credentials, showing the prevalence of this entry vector.
In response to this complex threat landscape, there is growing demand for managed detection and response (MDR) services to provide always-on coverage. Currently 81% of MSPs offer an MDR service, and almost all (97%) MSPs that do not currently offer MDR plan to add it to their portfolio in the coming years.
Data for the MSP Perspectives 2024 report comes from a vendor-agnostic survey of 350 MSPs across the U.S. (200), U.K. (50), Germany (50) and Australia (50). The survey was commissioned by Sophos and conducted by research house Vanson Bourne in March 2024.
