N-able calls on MSPs to focus on business resiliency

N-able has gotten together with its partners to encourage managed service providers (MSPs) to pitch a message of “business resilience” to customers looking for partners to deliver an end-to-end solution.

The firm has identified a gap in the market around the provision from a single partner of data protection, backup and restore to small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers.

John Pagliuca, president and CEO of N-able, used his keynote at the firm’s Empower event to the strategy behind a number of product releases and to highlight the opportunity that was being missed by some point product rivals.

“The headline message is about complete end-to-end business resilience,” he said. “A lot of folks are talking about cyber resilience. Here at N-Able, we don’t believe that’s enough. We believe it’s a broader conversation that’s more business-outcome oriented.”

The firm has launched the latest expansion in its Cove Data Protection offering, with a co-managed disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) option.

Pagliuca said business resilience had to be more than just “protect and detect” and had to involve a wider approach that started earlier to support customers after issues had been identified.

“At N-Able, we believe business resilience starts before the attack. Of course, handle security controls and things during the attack, but also have something for after the attack and the ability to recover,” he said.

“My message to both MSPs and IT professionals is: stop talking to your customer about MDR, EDR, XDR or whatever. Talk to your customer about what they want – and what they really want is business resilience, what they’re really looking for is business longevity,” he added.

The Empower event also focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and how the vendor and its partners can navigate the emerging opportunities and threats resulting from its wider adoption.

“AI is both an accelerant and an area of risk because it’s doing a couple of things – one, it’s making the surface area massive,” said Pagliuca. “By some indications, for every human, there’s going be 85 agents. Well, those agents have access to data, so the surface area that MSPs now need to monitor, manage and protect has gotten massively more expansive in the agentic world, so that produces more risk and more surface area.

“Two, unfortunately, the bad guys are using AI to gain access to the data, which is allowing them to propagate and democratise their abilities to get into the SME area as well. We have this double-edged sword where the surface area is getting bigger, our adversaries are going to have more tools at their disposal, and it’s up to us – collectively in the in the community – to help provide not just the MSPs, but the SMEs, with the intelligence, the tooling and the visibility so they can keep their customer environment safe.”

Pagliuca added that although the risks were greater, so are the opportunities from using AI to gain efficiencies and insights for those MSPs managing their SME customer bases.

“This provides a tremendous opportunity for MSPs to climb up the value chain,” he said. “If you think about it, the community started with making sure your printers were working, your Wi-Fi was working, your computers weren’t getting the blue screen of death. Then it got thrust into cyber security, keeping folks compliant, keeping folks secure with ransomware. And then it got thrust into moving to the cloud and helping them with the cloud. Now, this next era of AI presents another opportunity for them to climb up the stack,” he said.