Now that much of the global workforce is familiar with the concept of remote work due to COVID-19 safety restrictions, the time is nigh to capitalize on digital business trends. Some organizations are mulling over making work-from-home a permanent policy or shuttering physical office space to cut costs. These no-brainer adjustments have been delivered to SMBs on a silver platter. The big picture play is two-fold: embrace the trend of e-commerce and take this historic window of opportunity to dominate the post-pandemic market.
E-commerce has already proliferated the modern world, but businesses seldom experience the full advantages provisioned by the dedicated digitalization of transactions. The simplicity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Shopify has led to widespread adoption—and lowered expectations. Depending on sector and size, businesses may be missing out on the highly specialized offerings of managed service providers. An MSP’s e-commerce overhaul would pinpoint the most effective applications to enact the change. For a business to meet its monetization potential in this area, careful shepherding from service providers is required.
Jon Rosenson, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Expedient, said, “We provide a variety of complementary managed services that support the security and compliance needs of these customers…such as operating system management and monitoring which encompasses monthly vulnerability patching, antivirus definition updates, and real-time monitoring notification.” Expedient’s prowess in e-commerce offerings has helped make the service provider a major contender in the market, and a high-ranker in the annual MSP 501 Report.
From the MSP perspective, offering e-commerce would appear an advantageous decision to make. Expanding the portfolio of services is not without its caveats, however, and clearly defined points of demarcation are usually what makes an MSP fit the needs of a particular business so perfectly. Providers must determine if it’s worth divesting resources to add e-commerce to an existing model. More important is taking the time to reflect on the actual capability to flourish in that distinction.
In the event of an MSP focusing on e-commerce, security and compliance are the tenets of the enterprise. Specifically, the retail industry is regulated by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which pertains to all stages of a transaction. There are steep fines for lack of PCI compliance, and targeted MSPs have designed 3rd party Qualified Security Assessors for attestation of met standards. Other industries are riddled with similar red-tape governance surrounding e-commerce, leaving MSPs primed to crack the code and make the complicated language palatable for the client.
