Sophos: Cybersecurity Skills Shortage is the Biggest Risk to MSPs and Their Clients

Sophos, a UK-based cybersecurity company, has released a new study suggesting that the biggest day-to-day challenge facing MSPs involves keeping up with cybersecurity. According to the company’s inaugural “MSP Perspectives 2024” survey report, this issue was cited as the primary challenge by 39% of the MSPs surveyed.

Respondents also indicated that hiring new cybersecurity analysts to keep up with customer growth and keep pace with the latest cyberthreats also ranks among the top challenges. 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 speed of innovation across the cybersecurity battleground means it’s harder than ever for MSPs to keep up with threats and the cyber controls designed to stop them,” said Scott Barlow vice president of MSPs at Sophos. “When you couple this with a global skills shortage, which has made it infinitely more difficult for many MSPs to attract and retain cybersecurity analyst resources, its unsurprising that MSPs feel unable to keep pace with the changing threat landscape.”

Sophos sees a 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.

Two-thirds of MSPs use a third-party vendor to deliver the MDR service and a further 15% deliver jointly through their own SOC and a third-party vendor. Topping the list of essential capabilities in a third-party MDR provider is the ability to provide a 24/7 incident response service.

Nearly all (99%) MSPs report an increase in demand for cyber insurance-related support, with the most common requests including clients wanting to implement an MDR service to improve their insurability (47%) or to receive help completing their insurance application (45%).

The report is generated through a vendor-agnostic survey of 350 MSPs across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia in March 2024.

Channel Impact^®
The data underscore the growing role played by MSPs in securing their customers’ data and infrastructure.