Despite the difficulties to business caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, managed service providers managed to grow Microsoft Office 365 business, according to a new survey from backup solutions firm Altaro.

According to the survey, 87% of the 370 MSPs who answered the survey in March say they saw increased Microsoft Office 365 business last year.

As organisations scrambled to move their teams to remote working, and as some industries were being decimated by the recession that came along with the pandemic, other sectors shifted gears to ensure business continuity for all, thriving through the chaos. In fact, 70% of MSPs said that they saw an increase in business when their clients shifted to working remotely.

MSPs working with Microsoft Office 365 were paramount in facilitating this shift, over half of the MSPs (55%) told Altaro that they saw an increase in implementation business for Microsoft Office 365.

Altaro Software, which is part of the Hornetsecurity Group, is a developer of robust backup solutions. It conducted the survey to gauge the effect of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent shifts of organisations' employees increasingly working from home, on MSPs' Microsoft Office 365 business.

Two thirds of the managed service providers surveyed felt that Microsoft 365 helped them (and their clients) transition smoothly from office-based working to remote working, and they largely agreed that this transition gave them increased business opportunities, matching the findings of Altaro's survey in 2020.

Support volumes increased, too, but the survey showed quite a rosy picture for MSPs. Over the course of the last year MSPs have been implementing more Microsoft 365 solutions than ever before, with clients flocking to collaboration tools like Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint (Cloud). MSPs also saw increased revenue opportunities from the availability of third-party tools to manage their clients' Microsoft Office 365 deployments.

These tools help both MSPs and their clients to have increased peace of mind, and it is clear that businesses are seeing the value in them: 85% of MSPs use secondary tools to enhance clients' 365 setup, and 84% of MSPs who chose to go with third-party email security solutions also set up third-party backup solutions for their clients, showing that the opportunities for cross-selling these two services is very high.

Altaro develops backup solutions for managed service providers (MSPs), IT resellers and companies. It has more than 50,00 customers in 121 countries, 10,000 partners and more than 2,000 MSPs.