Since the start of the pandemic, MSPs have faced extraordinary challenges—in many cases, carrying the burden of responsibility for ensuring their customers are able to continue operating in the face of an uncertain and constantly changing business environment. At the same time, they have also had to adapt their own ways of working in order to continue to operate and survive.

Ransomware is on everyone’s minds these days, with attacks against small businesses, hospitals, and local governments increasingly in the headlines. Managed IT service providers are experiencing a dramatic increase in attempted cyberattacks.

Here at N-able, we have identified three key market segments that today’s MSPs fall into: Emerging Market, Growth Market, and Elite Market. What we are starting to see happening among these three tiers is a growing disparity developing where MSPs will need to make difficult decisions about the future and how they should be moving their business forward in the years to come. Unfortunately, if MSPs fail to address this growing market disparity, they are going to be left behind.

Apple once ran, and caught a reasonable amount of flak for, an ad that implied Macs didn’t get viruses. The PC (John Hodgman) in the ad says there were “114,000 known viruses” for PCs in 2006, to which the Mac (Justin Long) replies, “PCs. Not Macs.” While misleading, it’s technically correct, which may have been sufficient to avoid truth-in-advertising lawsuits.