N-able Sheds Light on AI’s Shadows
The company’s new Shadow AI Visibility solution is its first step into AI security and governance, as well as a precursor to forthcoming system of action functionality.
Lately, it feels like a lot of what I’ve been writing about reflects a widely shared sense that there’s no time to lose with AI.
Anthropic’s feeling it, certainly, which is why it’s building AI solutions for SMBs directly before OpenAI or Google has a chance to do the same.
Pax8’s feeling it too. The marketplace recently rolled out an enablement program designed to help managed service providers become managed intelligence providers, plus a set of outsourced professional services they can sell while they’re making the transition. And just in case anyone at the marketplace operator’s recent Beyond conference failed to appreciate that completing the MSP-to-MIP journey quickly matters as much as completing it at all, CEO Scott Chasin walked onstage for his keynote to the sound of a ticking clock.
Last but not least, business leaders are feeling it. As a couple of my posts have noted in passing lately, SMBs aren’t so much receptive to AI proposals from IT providers as pleading for them, and often charging ahead on their own at damn-the-torpedoes velocity.
“They’re signing up for every AI platform they get an Instagram ad for,” says Robert Johnston, N-able’s chief innovation officer.
And then promptly losing track of them. Fully two-thirds of businesses surveyed by researchers from The Economist don’t really know how many agents they have and what they’re all doing. It’s just like shadow IT except worse, notes N-able CEO and president John Pagliuca (pictured).
“The potential outcome is even more devastating with shadow AI as opposed to shadow IT because of what the agents could potentially do,” he says. Like delete a company’s entire production database or leak customer PII.
Protecting clients from that fate is both an opening for MSPs feeling time pressure to add AI services, according to Pagliuca, and the function performed by the Shadow AI Visibility solution N-able quietly unveiled last week.
“We’ll show an MSP what the end customer is installing and what’s being used from an AI perspective within that environment,” Johnston says. Securing it all is both an immediate source of one-time project revenue and a long-term source of recurring monitoring and management fees.
“It’s a perfect tool in the MSP’s toolkit: discover it, build a project around it, launch it, and then wrap a service around it,” Pagliuca says.
Perfect, perhaps, but not unique. Kipling Secure, ShadowLock, and Nudge, among others all make similar products. According to Johnston, however, using one requires MSPs to add another item to an already sprawling tool stack.
“I don’t think they want yet another tool,” Johnston says, noting that N-able partners get the same functionality through the RMM and/or MDR solution they already use at no extra cost.
Both/and versus either/or
The logic of that last thought applies more broadly to how market-leading MSP software makers are thinking about AI.
Like all businesses, managed service providers rely on systems of record for comprehensive, trustworthy data. Large numbers of them now rely on AI-powered systems of action as well to boost profits and accelerate growth. There’s strategic power for vendors in playing either role, but as ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo recently said here and as his counterpart at Kaseya would undoubtedly say too, the true sweet spot for software makers is to be both a system of record with massive data gravity and a system of action with autonomous AI functionality.
N-able concurs.
“We believe that putting an AI-infused system of action on top of a system of record is the right formula,” Pagliuca says. Partners are completely welcome to use N-able solely as a source of data, as its recent MCP server launch makes clear. Those looking for more value with fewer interfaces, tighter integration, and less spending, Pagliuca predicts, will get their AI from N-able too.
“We believe that provides the best path and the best experience,” he says.
At present, N-zo, the AI assistant N-able introduced in April, is the closest thing the company has to system of action functionality. That’s set to change in the future, however.
“We’re in the process of building coworkers right now,” Pagliuca says. As in agents capable of performing tasks like patching and vulnerability management mostly or entirely on their own.
“When we look at the top, call it, 10 or 15 tasks that MSPs and technicians do, our plan is to automate that leveraging AI so we can take the burden off some of the L1 technicians,” Pagliuca says. “We’re expecting to put that in preview later this year.”