The MSP coding renaissance has begun

Often, a managed service provider (MSP) is best placed to establish what technology a customer needs and identify where gaps exist in the available offerings.

From that point, traditionally, the only option has been to raise the issue with vendors and hope a solution is developed, but increasingly, given the ease with which coding can now be undertaken, MSPs are coming up with the answers themselves.

A case in point is RoboShadow, which emerged in response to a need to provide small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with affordable risk assessment services.

Terry Lewis, CEO of RoboShadow, had a career as a contractor and consultant for banks and financial institutions, as well as establishing an MSP, before immersing himself in the security application development world.

Customers were looking for help with security vulnerability, but found that existing penetration testing options were too expensive. They required an alternative that approached the same problem differently.

“RoboShadow started because we couldn’t find good security products for our customers that weren’t too complex for the teams to use,” Lewis recalled.

“At the time, there wasn’t really anything in the market, and as a good MSP does, we started building scripts and playing about with stuff. Then, all of a sudden, the scripts turned into something else that turned into something else that turned into RoboShadow,” he added.

“We spent a lot of time dealing with cyber security issues, so we thought, ‘Right, we could do this ourselves’,” he said.

Lewis then made the jump to employing developers and designing a solution that could be sold by MSPs to meet the needs of customers unable to work with expensive penetration-testing vendors.

“Building tech is my background. I ran development teams for nearly 20 years, but never my own development team,” he said, adding that there was a learning curve, but he knew from the start that the solution was meeting a need in the market.

Lewis said the advantage of developing technology alongside the existing capabilities provided by MSPs was that gaps could be identified and filled with a combination of solutions and services.

“There are gaps with complexity, but also product as well. What I mean by that is getting a cyber security product and offering end-to-end is not just vulnerability detection. There’s a fixing element, there’s an automated patching element,” he said.

“There’s a lot of complexity, which we do a very good job of at RoboShadow. We fix 90% of problems, but I think the gap is still trying to make that as end-to-end as humanly possible, and I think that’s where the good teams are using a combination of their own tech in-house that they’re vibe coding and products like RoboShadow,” he added.

Lewis has seen other MSPs embrace application development and is eager to share his experiences as he expects this trend to gain momentum over the next year.

He said that many MSPs excelled technically but had not seen themselves as developers, but that was changing as they saw the potential to use coding to solve more problems.

“There is definitely a renaissance period for MSPs that have always had tech bursting out of them. This would be good, this would be good, always not happy with what they’ve got, and now they’re vibe coding stuff left, right and centre,” he said.