Five big statements from CRN's MSP Transform panel discussions

We round up some of the top statements from MSP and reseller bosses at last week's MSP Transform

CRN hosted its latest MSP Transform event last week, with MSP and reseller bosses gathering to share their views on some of the biggest issues facing the channel.

This included discussions on the biggest trends in managed services next year, cybersecurity and the increasing move towards everything-as-a-service.

MSP Transform aired on 21 October, but you can still register to watch all content from the event on-demand by clicking on this link.

Here are five of the biggest statements from those that took part in the panel discussions…

‘Finding good quality people is probably the biggest challenge that we all have' - Sonny Seghal, CEO, Transputec

As part of a panel discussion looking at the biggest trends in managed services next year, Transputec's CEO Seghal highlighted a shortage of good quality staff as the biggest challenge MSPs are facing.

"Covid has made it even more difficult, I believe," he said.

"People now have a choice and they can work from different environments. So, if I was to talk to my team and say ‘what's your biggest challenge?' it is can we get the right quality of people into our business at an affordable price?"

Iain O'Kane, managing director of Xperience, was also part of the discussion and agreed that it is the biggest challenge facing MSPs next year.

"Resourcing and getting good people is a challenge," he said.

"I absolutely think it's number one - the recruitment and retention of good people."

‘I remain a little bit worried that when we talk about remote and hybrid working, people hear flexible' - Iain O'Kane, managing director, Xperience

Another issue highlighted in the discussion was around the shift to hybrid and remote working, with O'Kane raising concerns that a discussion around the two can often be mistaken for flexible working - which he believes is a different approach entirely.

"The concern I have slightly is that when people talk about remote working and hybrid, sometimes what they actually mean is flexible working," he said.

"One of the things that I tried to ensure when we interviewed and surveyed the staff was that if we go to remote or hybrid working en masse then it has to meet the needs of the business and the client.

"Flexible working, in my opinion, is a completely different conversation. It's giving your team the ability to switch on and switch off when it suits them and I was worried, and remain a little bit worried, that as a leadership team when we talk about remote and hybrid working sometimes our people hear flexible."

‘It's imperative that we move towards as-a-service across all areas of our business' - Howard Hall, founder, DTP Group

Also discussed at MSP Transform was the move towards everything-as-a-service, and how partners are leading that drive.

As-a-service has received mixed reviews from those in the channel but from an MSP perspective, DTP Group's founder and group managing director Howard Hall claimed that it is vital partners embrace it.

"It's imperative that we move towards as-a-service across all areas of our business, not just the traditional print and client device but actually in terms of the datacentre and in our hybrid cloud message by delivering everything we can, that is traditionally on-premise infrastructure and capital based, as-a-service," he said.

Also involved in the panel discussion was Rob Price, practise director for digital infrastructure practise at Logicalis, who echoed the importance of as-a-service and said customers moving towards "consumption economics" and hybrid cloud had driven the uptake in as-a-service offerings.

‘We've got to re-think how we secure users' - Colin Williams, business line CTO, networking and security, Computacenter

As part of a discussion around cybersecurity in the modern workplace, Computacenter's business line CTO for networking and security, Colin Williams, said the shift towards hybrid and flexible working had changed the demands for cybersecurity.

"We've got to re-think how we secure users," he said.

"I encourage organisations to assume all users, regardless of whether they've got a fixed desk in an office location, are remote. Assume all users have the capability to deliver work output from a remote location.

"That could be a café or a park or it could be a different office location from the one you expect it to be, and more recently the home office.

"If you assume that, therefore you calibrate your security so that everybody has a similar level of security to ensure that they can actually work wherever they want to be, and you start to flip how security is delivered in an organisation."

‘A lot of the traditional security controls are still designed as if people are congregating in an office' - Etienne Greeff, CEO, Flow Communications

In a similar statement to Williams, Flow Communications' CEO Etienne Greeff said the shift away from office-centric working had posed new challenges for security - some of which have not yet been met.

"The one thing that we have seen is that a lot of the traditional security controls are still designed as if people are congregating in an office and are going through central security controls," he said.

"Whereas what we have seen from a lot of our customers is that people have used cloud services a lot. Cloud came as a saviour to the pandemic.

"People very rapidly migrated to the cloud but what then happened is people realised that these mobile devices and remote devices didn't connect to the VPN.

"Because they were only connecting to cloud services, they didn't have the same level as protection."