MSPs Should Prepare for a 2024 of AI, Resilience: Gartner

Ahead of a year in which skills shortages and macroeconomic conditions are expected to push organisations into more conservative spending, MSPs should focus on areas where there will be the greatest strategic value for these customers.

According to Gartner’s predictions, this will mean a greater emphasis on AI, risk management, and resilience.

The top 10 trends for 2024, according to the research and consulting firm, are:

• AI trust, risk, and security management (AI TRiSM)
• Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM)
• Sustainable technology
• Platform engineering
• AI-augmented development
• Industry cloud platforms
• Intelligent applications
• Democratized generative AI
• Augmented connected workforce
• Machine customers

As Gartner notes, all of these trends are related to three key business themes that will dominate in 2024. Firstly, enterprises will be concerned with protecting and preserving past and future investments. They’re also going to be focused on building the right solutions for the right stakeholders at the right time. Finally, they’re going to prioritise delivering value for the changing environments and demands of both internal and external customers.

What MSPs Need to Understand About Gartner’s Trend Predictions

Gartner’s methodology for selecting these trends underscores the urgency with which organisations will view them. Each trend is strategically important because it will have a significant impact, require a response from C-suite executives, and/or need to be actioned on within the next 36 months.

“Your next steps will depend on which innovations are most likely to impact your ability to achieve business goals and how soon you can begin to adopt or plan to adopt them,” Gartner notes in its report.

For MSPs, this means that they’ll need to be on top of new innovations and trends in order to deliver answers to each of these growth and pain points for their customers. The skills shortage will continue to be an issue into 2024 (and likely beyond), so organisations will be looking to their service providers for support with both the strategy around these emerging technology trends and the best path toward successful implementation.

With the global economic climate likely to remain constrained in 2024, organisations will be conservative with spending and focus on the highest priority items. MSPs that are able to offer support in alignment with these 10 strategic considerations are the ones that will be stickiest and most effective with their customers.