Cloud management and security vendor Augmentt plans to add enhanced functionality to its Engage solution within the next month.
“You’re going to see us going a lot deeper on user and license management and really helping the MSPs resolve tickets faster,” says Derik Belair, the company’s CEO. Belair spoke with ChannelPro last week during an SMB Forum event in Los Angeles.
Engage, a cloud administration and configuration solution, is one of four Augmentt products, along Backup for protecting SaaS data, Secure for safeguarding SaaS workloads, and Discover for inventorying both SaaS and desktop applications. Entry-level versions of all those products are included in Augmentt’s Essentials subscription. Partners get the first 100 seats of that package for free and then pay of $300 a month for a total of up to 2,000 seats.
An advanced edition of Augmentt Secure, called Augmentt Secure Premium, debuted last month. That version of the system adds templated, automated policy setting and configuration features, among others, to the base monitoring, alerting, and remediation functionality in the Essentials version.
“We want our MSPs to be able to do SaaS security management immediately to all their customers for one low fee, and then to pick and choose the customers where they want to go deeper, knowing that maybe not everybody will want to convert right away,” says Belair.
Secure Premium licenses sell for an average of 50 cents per seat per month.
A premium edition of Engage is due to reach market as well in the first half of next year. While the Essentials version of the products lets technicians create individual users in a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account, assign them licenses, and add them to existing mailboxes, the advanced version will provide features for configuring new mailboxes, setting up user groups, and performing other organization-level tasks. Automation, auto-remediation, and templating features will be included with the Premium subscription as well.
“You can say, ‘here’s exactly how I want all of my end customers to be configured,'” Belair explains. “MSPs ultimately want all of their customers to be configured in a very similar fashion.”
A Premium edition of Discover, due in the second quarter of 2023, will collect more detailed information about applications to assist with regulatory compliance. “We’re also starting to look at tie-ins with firewall and DNS [solutions] for potentially blocking applications,” Belair says.
Augmentt expects SMBs to continue spending heavily on security even if the recession economists and others fear is approaching becomes reality. “While the end customer is potentially facing some economic uncertainty, there’s sort of one area where every customer seems to be still very actively spending, even at the expense of other things, and that’s around cybersecurity,” Belair says. That’s good news, he adds, for the many Augmentt partners currently investing in cloud security skills and service offerings.
“They see it as an easy way to create competitive differentiation in a market that is somewhat saturated with a lot of MSPs,” he notes.
