The UK’s small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly turning to MSPs to help them address IT challenges, such as tool sprawl, external threats and security, even if they have been slower to adopt managed services than peers in the US, according to new research from JumpCloud.
The company’s latest SME IT Trends report, Flexibility and Ingenuity: What’s Powering Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise IT Management in 2023, shows that 57% of IT admins in UK SMEs currently use MSPs to some extent, compared to 79% in the US and a global average of 69%.
However, the report suggests that UK SMEs are catching up, with 30% of UK respondents considering working with an MSP, compared to 22% globally. Interestingly, the percentage point difference between MSP take-up in the UK and in the US is almost identical to that between job satisfaction in the two countries. In the UK, 48% of IT admins said they were happier in their roles this year than they were last year, compared to 71% in the US.
Half of UK respondents that are not currently employing MSPs say they prefer to handle IT themselves, even though 53% of UK IT admins that do use MSPs cite increased effectiveness in managing IT as the biggest benefit. More than four in 10 UK respondents (43%) say they have concerns about how MSP manage security.
Security is the top challenge for IT admins in the UK, cited by 47%, followed by device management (43%), both of which have become more complex due to remote working and BYOD trends – 61% of UK IT admins report using their own devices to access work-related IT resources and tasks and 53% estimate that 10-30% of their organisation’s employees do too. On a positive note, 70% of UK admins agree or strongly agree that remote workers are better at following security best practices now than they were last year. Tool sprawl remains a problem.
While 76% of UK IT admins would prefer to use a single solution or tool for managing IT, 48% use 3-7 tools/applications and 38% use 8 or more. Commenting on the findings, Denis Dorval, VP International (EMEA & APAC) for JumpCloud, said: “UK admins are less satisfied than their global counterparts, even though they are working less overtime and are less likely to report feeling overwhelmed.
This implies that it is the nature, not the volume, of work that is getting them down. Adoption of MSPs in the UK is also less mature than in other regions, meaning UK-based admins are bearing responsibility for a greater proportion of routine tasks, in-house. This may be contributing to job dissatisfaction; it isn’t surprising that 30% of UK respondents are considering engaging an MSP.”
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