Making the most of the MSP shift

The managed services market in the UK is strong and growing, prompting many ISPs to make the strategic shift to MSP. For our part, we knew that many customers were overwhelmed by the complexity of vendor management. So we’ve invested in moving up the stack and bringing complementary services together under one roof.

For our channel partners, the benefits of our expanded offer are clear too: higher margins, more opportunities for recurring revenue and lower churn, increased value in relationships. All supported by one technology partner, one dedicated account manager, and an intuitive portal that simplifies and easily builds orders across the portfolio.

This blog discusses some of the most pertinent market changes impacting MSPs, how they might impact partners and how partners can react to make the most of these new opportunities.

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The market change: The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSRB)

The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSRB) explicitly mentions Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as high-risk targets because of their privileged access to clients’ IT systems, infrastructure, and data. ‍

It will be interesting to see how much impact this legislation has in practice; we’ve seen previous regulations fall short of their promises often. But across the channel, we still need to be prepared. For partners selling managed IT or security services, responsibility and accountability is about to increase substantially. You’re now a key part of the national cyber resilience framework.

‍Making the most of it

Partners that provide proactive solutions such as pre-emptive cybersecurity, network monitoring and management and endpoint protection, can position themselves as essential risk-reduction providers. This makes your services more compelling, sticky and easier to sell at premium recurring rates.

Partners offering these services will see increased demand, as organisations aim to comply with CSRB before enforcement later in 2026.

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The market change:  Pre-emptive cybersecurity

Pre-emptive cybersecurity, as one might imagine, is about preventing threats before they cause harm, rather than reacting after an incident occurs. It’s recently been called out as one of Gartner’s top technology trends for 2026.

In light of the CSRB, pre-emptive cybersecurity is no longer optional. It will be part of regulatory compliance and national resilience requirements, and customers will urgently need new solutions, including pre-emptive threat detection, endpoint and network monitoring, incident response planning, vulnerability and risk management.

‍Making the most of it

We can help you offer customers exactly this, and get ahead of the new regs. We use AI Wi-Fi / LAN network management at the network level, and we also provide 24/7 monitoring, threat detection and response.

SD-WAN and SASE build pre-emptive security into solutions, managing access and policy enforcement centrally, to improve performance and consistency with integrated threat intelligence. SD-WAN provides a secure, resilient foundation through encrypted connectivity, segmentation and intelligent traffic steering. 

SASE goes further. Embedding security directly into the network fabric by combining zero trust, continuous traffic inspection, identity-aware controls and real-time threat intelligence, SASE enables threats to be identified and mitigated before they can impact users or data. This cloud-native approach ensures security policies adapt dynamically to changing risk, scaling with businesses while delivering truly proactive and pre-emptive protection.

Partners can take as much or as little as this as they want to. MIST acts as a real differentiator when talking to end customers, and bundling other services on top builds that stickiness and recurring revenue.

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The market change: The push to be provider agnostics

Recent AWS outages have highlighted over-reliance on too few hyper-scalers. MSPs and partners in turn need to diversify, especially in cloud or colocation solutions, to improve resilience and give clients the best fit for their needs.

Making the most of it

Partners can differentiate themselves by embracing multi-cloud, hybrid and provider-agnostic strategies. Rather than tying your business to a single hyperscaler, look to more resilient architectures that distribute workloads across clouds and colocation environments. 

A focus on consultancy services is an immediate way of offering value while also identifying further services to support customers. Ultimately, success lies in delivering trust, flexibility and assurance. And a provider-neutral approach allows you to recommend what’s truly right for each client’s needs.

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Final thoughts: Providing options and selling outcomes

Channel success over the next 12 months hinges on two things: providing options and selling outcomes. By providing choice across platforms and providers, as per the example of cloud and colocation solutions, partners can meet diverse customer needs, add value and reduce dependency on any single provider. 

As the channel aligns even more closely with the ISP to MSP shift, the focus should be on business value rather than individual products. Lead with drivers like the CSRB and its impact on end users, particularly for critical services and bundle offerings around the outcomes that matter most to your clients.

If you would like to chat about how Elevate Wholesale can help support your business through these market changes, or to help deliver services to your customer get in touch and let’s see how we can help.