2016: Cloud & Managed Services Year in Review

Brexit & GDPR

If you are a MSP in the United States, you may not have paid much attention to the UK's decision to depart from the European Union (Brexit) or the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. Both of these events hold a lot of valuable information for how governments and private sector will approach data privacy and security, let alone how to govern this thing we call cloud computing.

While the future of GDPR and Brexit may still be in doubt, MSPs conducting business within the EU face a real amount of uncertainty until things settle down in Europe.

US Election & Email Scandal

For US based MSPs, the country's political election cycle was curious indeed. Separating the politics from this, the email scandal and general IT security issues which were a recurring theme throughout this election was both unusual and unprecedented.

While we have not had a thorough examination of the IT issues raised during the election, there is a lot of legitimate debate about how MSPs should treat similar issues in the future. Issues such as orders to preserve customer data, orders by customers to delete data, etc. My suspicion is that we will be discussing this election and its IT related themes for years to come.

Data Security & Privacy Breaches

Whether it was the US election, or the numerous other data breaches disclosed this year, 2016 saw a large number of cyber breaches, both in scope of data lost and in the types of targets selected.

We have left the era of cyber threats being viewed as only existing for larger, more noteworthy targets. Today, cyber security is something every organization (and individual) must be aware of in order to participate safely in our society. Ransomware is proof of the indiscriminate nature of cyber threats today. Cyber criminals no longer need only high profile targets to succeed. There are plenty of financially lucrative ways to exploit everyday citizens throughout the world; all you need is an email or a phone.

Summary

2016 was a year largely waiting for the US (and other global referenda) political cycle to resolve itself. Now that the election is over, the MSP community has a new year to look forward to, along with plenty of challenges, but also a lot of new opportunity. I'm excited for 2017.