Perspective

Do you still need an MSP? An honest answer from someone who runs one

For most of two decades the answer was automatic. Too small for your own IT department, so you outsourced to a managed service provider. I want to question that default, which is an odd thing to do when I run an MSP myself. But the honest answer was never yes or no. It depends entirely on which of three things you were actually paying for, and one of those three has just changed underneath all of us.

Serious tooling was gatekept, and not by technology

Start with the thing nobody says out loud. For twenty years, the software that lets you run IT properly has been kept away from small organisations by pricing models rather than by any technical limit.

Per technician. Per endpoint. A sales call before you are allowed to see a number. Three year terms with the auto renewal buried in clause 14. The message was consistent: this level of control is for organisations with a procurement department, or for the MSPs who aggregate everybody else's demand. So if you were a two person IT team, a founder who knows their way around a server, or a junior engineer trying to do things properly, you had two realistic options. Pay the big vendors, or hold it together with duct tape and goodwill.

I think that world is ending, and I think it deserves to.

What you were actually buying from an MSP

Strip away the brochure language and an MSP contract has always bundled three quite different things:

1. Tooling. Monitoring, patching, a service desk, security visibility, remote access.
2. Expertise. People who know what an alert means, which patch is safe to push on a Friday, why Outlook keeps crashing on one machine, and what to do at 2am.
3. Accountability. A name on a contract. An SLA. Someone whose job it is when it breaks.

The bundle made sense because the first two were inseparable. Tooling was close to useless without the expertise to act on it, and expertise did not scale without the tooling. Aggregating demand for both is exactly why MSPs exist, and small businesses were entirely rational to pay the margin for it.

What changed is where the expertise sits

The tooling got good enough to carry part of the expertise.

I do not mean a summary button in the corner of a dashboard. I mean software that reads the event log on the actual machine, works out why Outlook keeps crashing, writes the fix, asks permission, runs it and then verifies that it worked. That used to be a senior engineer's afternoon. It is now something a platform does while you are in a meeting. The same shift is happening to the ticket queue: the easy half of inbound requests can be answered before a human reads them.

The scarce resource was never really the software. It was the senior engineer hours needed to operate it. That is the constraint that has collapsed, and it is the constraint the old pricing was built on.

This does not make expertise worthless. It moves the line. A capable generalist with the right platform can now look after an estate that would have needed a small specialist team five years ago.

Who genuinely does not need an MSP any more

Be honest with yourself about which of these describes you:

• You have one or two capable IT people who spend the week firefighting instead of improving anything. They do not lack skill. They lack leverage. A platform that investigates, fixes and triages is that leverage.
• You are technical enough and the estate is modest. Under a hundred devices, with a founder or ops lead who can hold it. The 2am problem is real but rare, and a platform that resolves what it can and only wakes you for the rest covers most of it.
• You are a startup MSP. You are the counter example that proves the point. The same shift that lets in-house teams serve themselves lets you take on clients from day one without the bench you cannot yet afford.

Who should absolutely still use an MSP

This piece would be dishonest without this section, and since I run an MSP I know exactly where the line sits.

• Nobody internal owns IT. A platform with no owner is a dashboard nobody opens. If no one in the building will genuinely hold it, pay someone whose job it is.
• Compliance carries the weight. If your insurer, regulator or largest customer expects a named accountable provider, then accountability is the product you are buying, not the tooling.
• You need hands. Hardware, offices, cabling, starter and leaver days. Software does not crawl under a desk.
• The estate is genuinely complex. Multiple sites, regulated data, legacy systems held together with string and institutional memory. Experience earns its margin here, easily.

So the interesting conclusion is not that MSPs are finished. It is that the lazy default is finished. Any MSP whose fee was justified mainly by gatekeeping access to tooling is in trouble. Any MSP that brings judgement, accountability and hands on top of a modern platform is more valuable than it has ever been, because the platform takes away the toil that was compressing its margins in the first place.

The test to apply to any platform, including mine

If you are going to hold IT in your own hands, the platform is the hire. So interview it like one. I would hold any vendor to this, and that includes us:

• Published pricing, flat, with no per seat games
• Every feature on every plan, so you are never upsold in the middle of an incident
• AI that acts and shows its working on the machine, rather than a chat window bolted onto a dashboard
• Guardrails you control: suggest only, approve first, or fully autonomous, set per site or per client
• Monthly billing you can cancel from your own account page, without an email to anyone
• Your data reachable over an API, so leaving is always genuinely possible

Where this fits with Helios

Full disclosure, because it matters: I build one of these platforms, and I run my own MSP on it every day. So of course I would argue all this. Do not take my word for any of it.

Helios is my answer to the shift: monitoring, patching, security, Microsoft 365, backup monitoring, remote access and an AI service desk in one product, at one flat price per organisation with every feature on every plan. It is built multi-client for MSPs, and an in-house team simply runs its own organisation as the only client. The AI, Helio, investigates alerts on the machine itself, fixes what you allow it to fix, and answers the routine half of your users' tickets. We publish honest comparisons with the alternatives, including the places they beat us, and a plain English account of how we handle security. Judge it against the list above rather than against my opinion.

The tools finally got good enough that you do not automatically need the big guys. What you need is the right platform, and the nerve to take control of it.