The way Scott Sacket sees it, MSPs can no longer avoid the need to provide robust security services to enterprises and SMBs, and in today’s world, that means using AI.
MSPs are growing the services they’re offering organizations around governance, resilience, management, and data security, according to Sacket, senior vice president of partner strategy at AvePoint, a cybersecurity firm that is adding such services to its expanding Elements platform.
The Jersey City, New Jersey company 2021 launched its global partner program that now includes more than 3,500 MSPs, VARs, and systems integrators, accounting for more than half of AvePoint’s annual recurring revenue (ARR).
A key part of the program for MSPs is the Elements platform, which pulls together the company’s myriad services into a central spot for managing, optimizing, and securing clients’ IT environments. It also gives MSPs new avenues for building revenue streams.
This month, AvePoint launched the latest generation of Elements, delivering AI-based data security, IT management, and operational efficiency capabilities on the platform. It’s a significant expansion of what the company can offer MSPs, Sacket told MSSP Alert.
“These recent AI-powered enhancements to the Elements platform represent a milestone achievement in AvePoint’s platform offering and channel business growth, now providing MSPs with the fully automated insights needed to enhance security and power success,” he said. “Artificial Intelligence is a critical tool that enables MSPs to streamline threat and risk detection, ensure compliance, and automate data policy enforcement on a constant basis, allowing them to both better secure client data and efficiently scale their own customer base.”
Automating data security policies and compliance requirements and enhancing productivity allows MSPs to focus more of their time and energies on delivering services and generating growth.
Adding Security Services
This becomes increasingly important as MSPs continue to add security services to their portfolios, with some even transitioning to become MSSPs. Cyberattacks are becoming more common and more complex, and organizations’ attack surfaces are growing as their data and workloads are spread over on-premises data centers, the cloud, and the edge.
And the cost of attacks is going up, with the International Monetary Fund reporting that in 2027, cybercrime will cost the world $23 trillion, a 175% increase over 2022. Bad actors’ use of AI in their operations is only increasing the risk.
MSPs “are increasingly recognizing the importance of prioritizing security in their service offerings,” Ahmet Polat, CTO at firewall provider Timus Networks, wrote earlier this month. “As cyberthreats continue to rise, businesses seek partners who can safeguard critical data and ensure uninterrupted operations. By adopting a security-first mindset, MSPs not only enhance client protection but also create new opportunities for recurring revenue.”
AI and Cybersecurity
AvePoint’s Sacket said that as they look to help clients better protect their data and manage risks, “MSPs now need AI-enhanced tools for easier data governance and lifecycle management, enhanced operational efficiency, compliance management, and proactive security monitoring and automated policy enforcement, all under one centralized, easy-to-manage platform.”
Cloud MSP Cloud4C wrote in December that AI in cybersecurity today goes beyond traditional monitoring and predictive analysis.
“Employing advanced machine learning algorithms, AI can now reconstruct attack scenarios, avoid human errors in interpreting data, facilitate 24x7 monitoring, even identify intricate threat patterns that may have remained invisible to human analysts,” the company wrote. “Powered by generative AI and agentic frameworks, AI adapts to, learns from, and evolves for future threats while automating remedial actions.”
Automation for MSPs
AvePoint’s latest iteration of Elements offers a range of AI-driven capabilities, including API integrations that enable automation and remote management for more efficiently delivering services, automated insights, proactive security monitoring and automated policy enforcement, and automating manual tasks to MSP experts can focus more on value-added services.
In addition, the enhanced automation can scale what MSPs can do for security and compliance across multiple tenants, increasing the total amount of data managed and secured, according to the company. MSPs also can standardize their onboarding process for new customers.
“AvePoint’s Elements platform delivers the all-in-one security tools needed for MSPs to efficiently drive robust protection and premium data security across any cloud environment customers may operate within,” Sacket said.
