N-able Empower: N-able Broadens 'Ecoverse' Vision with New Integrations
N-able wants to be the partner that helps MSPs innovate and increase efficiency.
![N-able Empower, Frisco, Texas, March 26, 2024 N-able Empower, Frisco, Texas, March 26, 2024](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt989e12f55911aee5/66036a4f413e8e040ace66fb/N-able_Empower_2024_Cover.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Rewst integrations allow MSPs to:
Automate end-to-end workflows across multiple products, which can streamline operations, increase consistency, and free up technicians for higher-value work.
Shorten time to value with 100-plus pre-built automations, including a new user onboarding workflow that ties together PSAs, domain management, licensing and other tools to reduce manual efforts.
Connect applications together without having to write and maintain scripts or use APIs, expanding relevance in the larger MSP tool ecosystem.
“When it comes to their tools, MSPs value freedom of choice, but not at the expense of interoperability,” said Aharon Chernin, Rewst’s CEO. “That’s why Rewst has taken an open, vendor-agnostic approach from day one, and why we’re excited to be part of N-able’s Ecoverse. Using Rewst, MSPs can combine API actions from N-central and more than other 50 tools to automate full processes, allowing them to save time and scale more efficiently.”
HaloPSA integrations are designed to:
Provide artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted ticket resolution, leading to significant time savings.
Streamline the workflow between RMM and PSAs, increasing efficiency even when manual decision-making is involved.
Allow for better management and auditing of tickets within HaloPSA for alerts, which helps in resource management.
“This integration is set to be the most comprehensive integration of Halo with an RMM that is available,” said Tim Barton-Wines, executive at Halo Service Solutions. “It stands out on three key aspects: providing access to RMM fields previously out of reach for Halo, an event-trigger from N-central that updates Halo, and a real-time event integration and synchronization, moving beyond the traditional interval-based sync.”
The integrations with HaloPSA and Rewst are currently available for N-central, with plans to include additional products in the future.
David Weeks, N-able’s vice president of partner experience, issued a challenge for MSPs at this week’s N-able Empower.
“The idea is challenge, challenge yourself, challenge your thinking,” he said. “I was talking to a few partners last night at the party and they said, 'I was sitting at a table and somebody was there and they said something that I hadn't thought of, and I got a new idea for my business.' And they said, 'We talked about how they implement it, and I'm going to do it.' And that's a win. That's a win for everybody because that's what this is all about, learning from yourselves. The answer is in this room. It doesn't sit with us. It sits with all of you. So collectively, if that's working, we have to continue that over the next day and tomorrow. And that's going to be the benefit of all of this.”
And in the expo hall, Weeks challenged MSPs to “challenge us.”
“What are we missing?” he asked. “What do you want to see that we're not doing or that we should be doing, or areas that you believe will help your business?”
MSPs should be thinking about their next big thing, Weeks said.
“And I'm not saying the next six months or 12 months, I'm saying 24-36 months, what's the next thing that you're thinking about in your business?” he said. “And if we all ask that question, it changes our mindset. It's those deliberate goals and ideas. And then we can build and plan from there. So as you think and you look around the room, and you're sitting with your different cohorts, have the discussion at the table and ask the question, what's your next big thing? What's your next big idea? How are you going to innovate? Technology is doing this, it's moving so fast and it's getting more complex. And so as a group, we can all work together to say, 'This is how we harness it; this is how we benefit from it and this is how we find the opportunity in it.”
Mike Adler, N-able’s chief technology and product officer, outlined the three key beliefs of the N-able Ecoverse. Those include modernize, innovate and unify.
“And in each of these words, we think about some of the work that we're doing to move toward the N-able Ecoverse and deliver it, some of which we've already done,” he said. “We've already delivered some pieces of modernization, and some of them have been in the background, and some of them you've probably already seen and experienced. But we delivered a new unified agent framework as we start looking at how we're driving out our agent technologies across our entire product suite. We're quietly deploying this technology and modernizing our agent technology.”
N-able has also delivered N-central multi-instance management, Adler said.
“We delivered brand-new Apple capabilities into N-sight and into N-central, and also expanded our Apple capabilities in the rest of the portfolio so that Apple devices could fit more naturally into the entire ecosystem that you're running,” he said. “And of course, we've introduced cloud management to continue to bring cloud devices and cloud workloads closer to the physical devices and workloads that you were working on before. So we've made a nice start and it feels good, but we have a lot of work still to do in the next 12 months.”
Looking ahead, real-time monitoring and others will be delivered in the next 12 months, and digital employee experience and modernized network discovery are planned beyond that, Adler said.
In terms of innovate, N-able has delivered Cove Teams backup, enhanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) and on-demand restore Azure, he said. And N-able Managed Detection and Response (MDR) has just been introduced, and future deliveries include vulnerability management and Cove fortified copies.
And in terms of unity, N-able has introduced analytics, N-central Rest APIs and Gen AI Script Generation. Cove N-sight analytics are among features that will be delivered in the next 12 months, while on/offboarding workflow integration and PSA integration will be delivered later.
Robin Ody, principal analyst with Canalys, joined Adler on stage to talk about insights from the 2024 MSP Horizons Report pointing to optimism among MSPs this year.
“We were really looking at how the MSP community is moving forward over the next three to five, potentially even peering into the next 10 years,” Ody said. “Now, obviously, what was encouraging is we found that 97% of you are expecting to grow, and that's great, but I think many of you are expecting that anyway. About two-thirds of you are expecting growth over 10%. Looking outside of your four walls and being on the inside, our expectation at Canalys is this year the total IT addressable market, all of the spending in IT over 2024, will grow about 6.2%. Now, if we're looking at double digits for over two-thirds of the MSP community, that tells you that your four walls are growing faster than everything outside, which is excellent. And in some cases, it's perhaps just a way for us to verify what we perhaps already know. But we need to check in with these stats every now and then. So 2024 is looking like a pretty good year in managed services.”
Cloud and cybersecurity are the two areas where MSPs are seeing the highest growth, he said.
“We talk a lot about complexity in the managed services world,” Ody said. “Customers every year are always having to deal with a new stack, new opportunities and new threats. So for anyone that's in managed services, helping them with that complexity is always the durable truth, essentially helping them manage the complexity of the IT.”
While 44% of MSPs are looking to acquire, only 13% are interested in selling, Pagliuca said.
“What it means to me is that MSPs look at tomorrow as a brighter opportunity as compared to today,” he said. “So for me, it was a real bright light in the report that shows the sentiment index of the MSP community looking at the future, saying the opportunity is bright, so why would I sell today if I believe I can be bigger, more profitable and the opportunity tomorrow is right there and I can get at it? That means they believe that they can actually realize that opportunity. If they thought they couldn't realize the opportunity, they'd say, 'Hey, let me hit the button, I'll sell today. So the fact that that level of depth of MSP respondents said, 'Hey, I'm not looking to sell when we know that the industry is frothy for M&A,' it was a good sign of the overall health of the channel.”
(Canalys and Channel Futures are both owned by Informa.)
Robert Johnston is CEO of Adlumin, an N-able partner helping to deliver N-able's new MDR service. He gave an overview of the importance of MDR.
“First, the threat is real; 76% of organizations came under attack in 2023,” he said. “That's an incredible number and it's growing year over year, it goes up and up, and up. That's the first reason why I would say why MDR is the breadth and depth of the security problem as a whole. These attacks don't necessarily start as an endpoint problem. I would actually bring it further. They nearly never start there. Organizations today are moving to a cloud-first environment. Nine times out of 10, cloud applications, cloud email applications and external access points like VPNs, that's where the problem actually begins. Those problems over a period of a couple of weeks become a ransomware problem and they become an endpoint problem. But they were a cloud first, problem first.”
MSPs have to cover at the endpoint, through the network and into the cloud, not just one aspect of the cloud, but the entire cloud that may support your SME organizations, Johnston said.
“That's an incredible breadth and depth of a security problem,” he said. “You've got to be able to run MDR across all of those. The second is the resource intensiveness of MDR is a problem, and I'm not just talking about the monetary expenses involved. Of course, those are incredible, too, you see $1.2 million, that's kind of the starter pack a year. You've got to run 24/7 operations, someone's got to be on this problem at 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve. So that's an incredible problem. But with this, you've got the people, the processes and the technology to be able to provide a robust solution that provides security for your customers at the endpoint through the network and into the cloud.”
During an Empower keynote, Chris Krebs, SentinelOne’s chief intelligence and public policy officer, and former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Dave McKinnon, N-able’s CSO, discussed the latest threats to MSPs and the correct response.
Krebs said for the longest time it was “Hey, let's just go knock on the front door of the big banks, the defense industrial base, the telcos and transportation.”
“It took awhile to get that full understanding and appreciation that once you step out of the Fortune 100s or so, there's this massive ecosystem supporting the U.S. economy that doesn't quite have those resources, it doesn't have the personnel stacked up against it and they do rely on MSPs,” he said. “And I think once the current ransomware epidemic really took off in 2018 and it brought the fact that MSPs played this pivotal role, they're big, big, big targets.”
In addition, the Russians, Chinese or other cybercriminals are not innovating through “really fancy malware,” Krebbs said.
“Those days are, for now, a little bit past,” he said. “Now they're just popping vulnerable edge devices, and they're hopping into networks and then moving laterally,” he said. “So it's just the basic quality of vulnerability management. It's the basics that everybody else talks about. But I would just really stress that … when the government's been focused on the big organizations, they've been focused on really higher end advanced persistent threats, you guys are sitting right there in the meaty middle that ransomware actors have figured out. And downtime is probably one of your KPIs, I assume it is, at least the bad guys get that. They understand that if they bring you down, you're going to do everything possible to get back up just because of the ecosystem, the network of customers that you have to continue to support. And they play that against you. So if you look at ransomware trends or broader cyberattack trends for 2023, it was like 35-36% of targets are manufacturing. The same rationale applies: downtime, downtime, downtime. Every pressure that they feel on downtime is to get it back up, so you're seeing a lot of payments in there. You can’t afford downtime, you pay the bad guys off as much as possible.”
Increasingly going forward, transparency is going to be absolutely critical, Krebs said.
“So the conversations you have with your customers, particularly about risk management and who owns what aspect of the risk management strategy or framework, are going to be important,” he said. “And don't hide behind the contract; pretend it's not there. You have to have those because that conversation is going to happen when they have an incident. They're going to call you and say, 'Hey, I'm having this problem' and you can say, 'Hey, it was in the contract; that's your problem.' That's just not a great conversation to have. So really having that transparent conversation upfront gets you to a much better spot.”
All anyone ever wants to talk about is what's Russia doing and what’s China doing, Krebs said.
“Those are very important threats for everyone to keep in mind, but the thing that you should be thinking about first thing in the morning when you get out of bed and before you go to bed is ransomware,” he said. “That is the threat actor that doesn't care who you are or what you are, because they're not trying to necessarily steal your sensitive data. They're trying to lock you up and they're trying to take stuff from you that they know you want to get back. And the conversation has changed over the last couple of years away from, in ransomware specifically, where it's just a pure lock-up because organizations have learned and they've gotten better because they had at least one attack and they're like I don't ever want to do that again, so they bring in a recovery solution.”
Now it's shifting to data extortion, Krebs said.
“So they're going to lock you up and they're going to exfil data,” he said. “So while we're seeing on the volume side, fewer payments, even though the payments are getting larger, on the encryption side, we're seeing more and more on the extortion side. I was talking to somebody two weeks ago out in San Diego at the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), where … they heard of 600 million-plus ransom payments in the last six months. Those are just the ones we're hearing about and there are likely others. So this ransomware problem is not going away. The U.S government and allies cannot stop it. It's just the install base remains easy pickings and then we've got a pretty sporty set of adversaries that get free rein coming out of Russia.”
During Empower, N-able’s Head Nerds were available to discuss the latest issues facing MSPs. The Head Nerds were a concept created in 2019, but officially launched in 2020 with an initial team of four Nerds lead by the “godfather” of the MSP industry, Mike Cullen. Since the inception of the Head Nerds, the team has grown to seven Nerds now lead by Marc-Andre Tanguay, who went from one of the original four Head Nerds to now the manager of the team. Collectively, the team has over 100 years of industry experience, and some of the Nerds worked for or ran an MSP themselves.
Cybersecurity is a big way MSPs can differentiate themselves from the other 330,000 MSPs globally, said Stefanie Hammond, Head Nerd of sales and marketing. She will be leading Boot Camps focused on price-market-sell security programs, leveraging N-able’s new MDR, and leveraging its partnership with Sentinel one and Vigilance.
Lewis Pope, Head Nerd of security, said it’s all about the “security maturation story.”
“Some MSPs have already come to terms with it,” he said. “Some have been doing it great for years, but that need to start treating the relationships with their clients as a risk-transference exercise of knowing and understanding the risk exposure that you represent to your clients and the risk exposures they represent to you, and you have to be willing to stand firm and proclaim that I am the professional in the room that knows and understands how this stuff works, and I need you to follow my guidance always. You're not going to go to the dentist, sit in the chair and tell them how to pull your teeth. You have to take that same stance as an MSP. Some MSPs are better than that, but that's not what I spent a lot of time with, helping to build confidence.”
Hammond said when it comes to cybersecurity, it’s important to realize you don’t need to “pick up every nickel that you find, and it's just OK to churn customers if they are going to put your MSP at risk in your life or in your employees’ livelihoods.”
“Bad MRR is a big problem we deal with,” she said. “Continuing to keep a poor book of business and not focusing on how to build a better book of business is what we talk about day in and day out," he said.
Pagliuca said N-able tries to preach a layered security approach for MSPs.
“We try to preach a level of transparency for the MSP community and so I would say we've come a long way,” he said. “It's amazing to see the level of sophistication. I think folks are keen to see how the compliance landscape will change over the next three to six months that may impact the MSP community, because if compliance and regulatory bodies enforce a little bit more change on the MSPs, that might accelerate what MSPs need to do from a compliance standpoint. But overall, I believe the MSP community is on the right track. Gone are the days where you have to explain to folks why they need layered security. MSPs understand the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework, and I'd say it's more about figuring out their how. They understand their what, and they understand their why. They're now trying to figure out their how.”
During Empower, N-able’s Head Nerds were available to discuss the latest issues facing MSPs. The Head Nerds were a concept created in 2019, but officially launched in 2020 with an initial team of four Nerds lead by the “godfather” of the MSP industry, Mike Cullen. Since the inception of the Head Nerds, the team has grown to seven Nerds now lead by Marc-Andre Tanguay, who went from one of the original four Head Nerds to now the manager of the team. Collectively, the team has over 100 years of industry experience, and some of the Nerds worked for or ran an MSP themselves.
Cybersecurity is a big way MSPs can differentiate themselves from the other 330,000 MSPs globally, said Stefanie Hammond, Head Nerd of sales and marketing. She will be leading Boot Camps focused on price-market-sell security programs, leveraging N-able’s new MDR, and leveraging its partnership with Sentinel one and Vigilance.
Lewis Pope, Head Nerd of security, said it’s all about the “security maturation story.”
“Some MSPs have already come to terms with it,” he said. “Some have been doing it great for years, but that need to start treating the relationships with their clients as a risk-transference exercise of knowing and understanding the risk exposure that you represent to your clients and the risk exposures they represent to you, and you have to be willing to stand firm and proclaim that I am the professional in the room that knows and understands how this stuff works, and I need you to follow my guidance always. You're not going to go to the dentist, sit in the chair and tell them how to pull your teeth. You have to take that same stance as an MSP. Some MSPs are better than that, but that's not what I spent a lot of time with, helping to build confidence.”
Hammond said when it comes to cybersecurity, it’s important to realize you don’t need to “pick up every nickel that you find, and it's just OK to churn customers if they are going to put your MSP at risk in your life or in your employees’ livelihoods.”
“Bad MRR is a big problem we deal with,” she said. “Continuing to keep a poor book of business and not focusing on how to build a better book of business is what we talk about day in and day out," he said.
Pagliuca said N-able tries to preach a layered security approach for MSPs.
“We try to preach a level of transparency for the MSP community and so I would say we've come a long way,” he said. “It's amazing to see the level of sophistication. I think folks are keen to see how the compliance landscape will change over the next three to six months that may impact the MSP community, because if compliance and regulatory bodies enforce a little bit more change on the MSPs, that might accelerate what MSPs need to do from a compliance standpoint. But overall, I believe the MSP community is on the right track. Gone are the days where you have to explain to folks why they need layered security. MSPs understand the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework, and I'd say it's more about figuring out their how. They understand their what, and they understand their why. They're now trying to figure out their how.”
On day two of N-able Empower, the IT management tools provider unveiled it has broadened its 'Ecoverse' vision with new integrations with Rewst and HaloPSA.
N-able’s Ecoverse vision is to harmonize and transform the management of modern IT, allowing MSPs to be more efficient, resilient, and drive more opportunities through an open, unified ecosystem.
Integrations with Rewst and HaloPSA enhance this vision, helping MSPs to work seamlessly, reducing the chaos that comes with managing multiple environments, according to N-able.
N-able has been embarking on this journey for some time, with recent examples including the expanded integration capabilities for endpoint detection and response (EDR) and Apple management capabilities across its remote monitoring and management RMM platforms, Microsoft 365 protection within Cove and more.
N-able president and CEO John Pagliuca said the industry has really grown up around efficiency, but while some vendors would love it if an MSP’s complete tech stack is with them, “we know that's not really feasible.”
“On average, MSPs we hear are using anywhere from eight to 17 different solutions in their tech stack to help them gain scale and efficiency, but also even from a security and compliance point of view," he said. "They can actually standardize the process and standardize some of the tech stack. The interoperability between different solutions was key. So the [Ecoverse vision] started from listening to the MSPs. If you think about the industry … we all started as point solutions with heavy integrations because we were all dependent on one another. That's the origin of the industry. And then it transitioned in around 2016ish or so to the single pane of glass where everyone really pushed to be a platform play, which is good for the MSP. It's also good for the vendor because you're getting the cross-sell and you're building the business.”
Ecoverse Vision Part of ‘Next Frontier’ in Channel
However, the next frontier is companies born for the sole purpose of servicing the MSP industry, Pagliuca said.
“What that means is the proliferation of new innovation, proliferation of new solutions, and for us to avail all of that innovation to our MSPs, we actually think it's a competitive advantage,” he said. “RMM we know will be the cornerstone for the MSP, and that's their cornerstone offering. So if we can have better integrations, and better push and pull, and better efficiency with all this great innovation that's been proliferated over the last couple of years and will continue on, we know it's a winning solution for us because it's a winning solution for the MSP. So that's really the fundamental root of Ecoverse. It's unifying and it's opening up this Ecoverse with more of a modern API call. Others in the space have gone more to what I'd say is a closed environment. We think that actually gets in the way of innovation. So we want to be the partner that is helping MSPs innovate, helping MSPs get to that level of efficiency. And we believe the Ecoverse is perfectly situated to do that.”
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