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.

I’m in the middle of planning a family celebration for my daughter’s upcoming Confirmation ceremony. The invitations have gone out, I’ve booked the restaurant where we will have lunch afterwards, and I’m currently sourcing a local bakery for the cake and sweets table. While scrolling through Facebook the other day, one of my friends “Liked” and tagged a new local bakery.

On the recent Q3 earnings call, N-able CEO John Pagliuca perfectly captured the mood in the MPS market. “Some in the industry refer to the MSP era we are in right now as the golden era for the MSPs,” he said.

Over the past few years, we’ve been seeing large-scale consolidation taking place in our marketplace, with private equity firms and margin-based companies, such as telcos and traditional IT consulting businesses, investing heavily in MSPs.