A remote workforce, new collaboration strategies and increased security risks. The events of the past two years have brought several changes to business operations. These changes came about unexpectedly, but they will now be commonplace as the workforce adapts and evolves to the needs of modern business.

This “new normal” has ushered in benefits, challenges and forced acclimation. As we look forward, some resulting trends are predictable, but, of course, there will also be uncertainties. There is one certainty because of this change – lucrative opportunities for managed service providers. Here are three key trends MSPs need to focus on as they too adapt to the evolving business landscape.

Trend #1 – Collaboration and Communication Remains a Priority for Organization

Moving forward, collaboration and communication will remain a priority for the organizations and its employees. Continuing with 2021, the workspace of 2022 will depend on the well-being of its employees, remote work flexibility and tools that enable their employees to work collaboratively and securely.

Source: https://lp.buffer.com/2021-state-of-remote-work

In the last two years, organizations of all sizes have prioritized and accelerated their investments in collaborative solutions. Some statistics to note:

• According to McKinsey survey, up to 80 percent of businesses already use at least one social collaboration tool for enhancing business processes.
• Nearly 250 million people use Microsoft Teams every month.
• Dropbox currently has 16.49 million paying users. It added 1.24 million new users added in 2021 (third quarter ended September 30, 2021). That’s an increase of 8% over last year.
• In October 2020, Google announced that its enterprise platform, Google Workspace, had surpassed 6 million business users after onboarding one million new customers in just under two years.

Trend #2 – Productivity Tools Will Rise

Cloud Productivity was critical for several companies in the past year. Productivity tools such as video conferences, cloud storage and back-up, messaging, eSignature and project management tools will increase significantly in their criticality.

Digital Signature Market alone is expected to reach $61.91 billion by 2030. As more and more business shifts to digital, the need to automate all of enterprise business processes will be accelerated. The transition from paper signature to a digital signature will bring the transformational changes necessary to simplify its customer journey and enhance customer experience. Digital signature will be key as it will dramatically reduce the amount it takes to get contracts signed These will include sales contracts, NDA, supplier contracts, employee offer letters and confidentiality agreements, among many others.  

According to Forrester, the growing amount of data being hosted in SaaS applications opens an opportunity for data resilience vendors looking to differentiate themselves in the market by easing the process of backing up an enterprise’s entire SaaS hosted data environment.

Trend #3 – Security & Compliance - Choose the Right Security Controls

Another trend will be an increase focus on Software-as-a-service (SaaS), and in turn, Application Data Protection (SADP). While deploying these productivity SaaS applications, it will be imperative to understand how those conversations can be kept secure and how to protect that data. Data loss, cyber risk, and compliance liabilities will all become major pain points for organizations to focus on after adapting modern collaboration solutions. The right tools will need to be put in place to reduce privacy and security risks and protect data across various collaboration platforms.

A Forecast of Opportunity

The challenges of change will be a reality for businesses of all sizes in the short, and long term. Savvy managed service providers should be able to present critical solutions to meet the new needs presented by this change.

AvePoint and DropBox through Ingram Micro Cloud can equip service providers with key solutions to meet the needs of tomorrow’s business.

Learn more about increasing your revenue by adding AvePoint and Dropbox to your modern services arsenal.