Shining a New Light on the UK’s Managed Service Providers (MSP) Sector.
Managed Services Underpinning a Digital Economy
The UK’s Managed Service Providers (MSP) sector is a dynamic and essential force underpinning business IT services and has just been mapped with unprecedented clarity. This latest 2025 MSP research, commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and produced by Frontier Economics, delivers the most comprehensive snapshot yet of this fast-evolving sector. Central to this has been our advanced AI research capabilities, which have significantly enhanced the depth and granularity of the research, allowing the Government to assess change and regulatory implications with rigour and confidence.
Understanding a Critical Industry at Scale
The MSP Sector Deconstructed
Managed Service Providers Market Study, DSIT, 2025.
The research reveals a thriving and diverse MSP landscape in the UK:
An estimated 12,867 active MSPs are generating £51 billion in revenue and supporting 343,000+ jobs.
A sector spanning from micro-providers to large firms dominating economic output.
Core services centring on cloud computing, IT infrastructure and cybersecurity.
Yet beyond these headline figures lies an even richer picture.
Driving Insights Deeper
Traditional data collection methods struggle to keep pace with the MSP market’s breadth and dynamism. Our contribution to this project was instrumental in overcoming that challenge. We leveraged natural language understanding, large-scale web crawling and semantic analysis to build a granular dataset that paints an even more detailed picture.
Richer Analytical Headlines
Managed Service Providers Market Study, DSIT, 2025.
By web reading and analysing millions of online sources, including company web presences and sector-specific mentions, and combined with Frontier Economics’s technology and economics expertise, we helped identify thousands of UK MSPs and extracted nuanced insights into what these firms do, from products and services offered and identifying taget markets, to analysisng vendor relationships, technology reliance and the presence of cybersecurity accreditations like ISO/IEC 27001 and Cyber Essentials. This level of analysis would be prohibitively resource-intensive without AI and infeasible using manual methods.
Informing Policy: Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
A key purpose of the research was to support policy development, especially the Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR) Bill, which aims to bring more digital service providers under robust regulatory oversight. The research estimated that over 1,200 MSPs could fall within the Bill’s scope, meaning policymakers are better-equipped with evidence to assess how updated regulations might impact firms of different sizes and service profiles. This is a key objective for the Government: balancing its policies to regulate a sector that is key to national security, whilst maintaining the conditions that will continue the growth of the digital economy.
This analysis helps the Government understand not just the size of the MSP sector, but its makeup too, essential knowledge for crafting regulations that strengthen national cyber resilience without stifling innovation.
Collaboration That Matters
We are proud to have partnered with Frontier Economics, whose economic expertise ensured the analysis was both rigorous and policy-relevant, and to have supported the MSP team at DSIT throughout this vital project. The results underline how AI-enhanced research can identify, monitor and transform data into actionable insight, empowering better decision-making at the highest levels.
For more information on this important research, please find the official report here.