News Flash: Networks and Endpoints Still Exist
Managing both requires skills that can be hard to find in the age of AI, security, and cloud, though, which has network and endpoint management vendors innovating in automation.
SMB technology is veering so sharply toward AI and security that it’s easy to believe there’s little runway ahead for the on-prem network and endpoint infrastructure services MSPs have long specialized in. Just don’t try selling that story to Steven Frank, strategic partner executive for MSPs at Lansweeper.
“I was in the copier business,” he says. “I worked for Toshiba many years ago, and everybody always told us, ‘oh, we’re going to be done with paper.’”
Yeah, right. “You can’t eliminate those types of things,” says Frank of old school IT.
“Traditional technology is going to evolve to adapt to AI and continue to grow with it, but you can’t get rid of traditional technology.”
Still, the older that old school tech gets, the harder it becomes to find people trained to support it. That’s grown especially true today in networking, according to Frank, who says MSPs are investigating Lansweeper and its heavily automated IT asset management platform in growing numbers as a result.
“It’s very easy to set up,” he says, and capable of building a complete, detailed network topology on its own. “Within a very short period, you have all of this information at your fingertips.”
AI functionality that Lansweeper’s currently building into the system then scrutinizes that information, inventories security gaps and other issues, and suggests next steps based on what MSPs have done successfully under similar conditions in the past.
“The AI will actually go through and say, ‘this is what MSPs of your similar stature did to remediate this vulnerability,’” Frank explains.
Network management vendor Auvik is using AI to bridge LAN skills gaps too. “For example, we have a really powerful custom alert engine,” says Mark Ralls (pictured), the company’s president. “At a lot of our partners, frontline staff aren’t necessarily comfortable creating custom alerts, but they are comfortable typing into an AI tool and saying, ‘hey, I need to create an alert.’”
The endpoint network monitoring feature Auvik added to its platform early this year similarly helps MSPs with limited network expertise and limited remote visibility figure out the root causes of sluggish connections and other common end user complaints.
“We’re not an RMM and we’re not trying to be an RMM, but what we identified in talking to our partners is there was a real gap in understanding performance all the way to the endpoint, particularly in a heavily remote and hybrid world,” Ralls says. Auvik has recently introduced an unlimited endpoint licensing option for the solution designed to make adopting and pricing endpoint monitoring simpler, he adds.
Nile, a networking vendor turned networking and security vendor since the introduction of its first product three years ago, similarly relies on simple, entirely subscription-based pricing to lower adoption barriers.
“It’s an as-a-service model, not a box sale,” says Shashi Kiran, the vendor’s chief go-to-market officer and CMO. “What would take a partner maybe eight to twelve months to close, they can do at a much faster velocity” because there’s no capex involved for the networking hardware.
AI functionality in the platform accelerates deployment and ongoing management after the sale as well. “We compress a lot of what typically takes a fair amount of time and steps,” Kiran says. “It allows our partners to service a lot more customers as a result because they don’t need to be manpower-heavy.” Merging security with networking in an integrated package further makes supporting end users at scale easier, he continues.
“We don’t believe that you can have a connectivity conversation without it being a secure connectivity conversation,” Kiran says, which is why Nile has added security features normally associated with wide-area networks to its local-area network solution.
“It’s SASE for the LAN,” he says.
Easy-button security on the LAN and beyond is a big part of Absolute Security’s appeal, according to Gene Kim, the company’s VP of MSPs. Thanks to partnerships with Dell, HP, Lenovo, and 25 other hardware makers, some 600 million endpoints currently in use worldwide have Absolute Security firmware pre-installed in a tamper-proof corner of the BIOS and ready to help technicians quickly tackle a variety of otherwise extremely difficult challenges.
Like removing the kernel-level flaw in a CrowdStrike sensor update that shut down thousands of businesses last year, including an estimated one-fourth of the Fortune 500. “We can actually manage a device before it boots into the operating system,” Kim notes, which makes fixing problems like that relatively painless.
The CrowdStrike incident actually inspired a recently introduced feature in the company’s Absolute Resilience solution called Rehydrate that automates the recovery of devices compromised by bad patches, cyberattacks, and other problems, remotely, with one click and in what Absolute says is typically a half hour or less.
On a more routine basis, users can employ Absolute’s software to ensure that dozens of widely used security applications are up, running, and functioning properly. “They can look at the security posture of those devices and whether those security applications specifically are within the compliance framework that they should be in,” Kim says. A new, MSP-ready edition of the product designed to align purchasing, provisioning, and management workflows with an MSP’s business model, he adds, is coming shortly.
“It’s just around the corner.”