Barracuda MSP builds on earlier integrations with LabTech/Automate with new automated deployment capabilities, as well as improvements to manageability.
Neal Bradbury, Director of Business Development at Barracuda MSP
Today, in conjunction with the ConnectWise ITNation event this week in Orlando, Barracuda MSP is announcing a new integration between Intronis Backup and ConnectWise’s Automate RMM platform. While an integration with Automate had existed previously, this one significantly increases the amount of automation, to reduce the time the MSP will spend both in deploying and managing Intronis Backup.
“We had earlier integrations going back to when Automate was LabTech,” said Neal Bradbury, Director of Business Development at Barracuda MSP. “Those integrations were more about monitoring, however. We had alerting, but we did not have the deployment and dashboarding that we have with the new plug-in. Simplified onboarding and the dashboards are all new with this integration.”
This integration is designed to streamline daily workflows and tasks, building on the same kind of automation Barracuda MSP has already put in place within ConnectWise Manage, the PSA offering.
“We had an integration on the ConnectWise Manage side for automating billing,” Bradbury said. “We started to get requests from MSPs for a similar integration into Automate, so we started down the path of implementing that.”
The new integration streamlines deployment of Intronis Backup.
“What this allows us to do is silently and remotely push backup agents to multiple machines with a single click, making automation and deployment much more simplified,” Bradbury said. “Management is also simplified, through a plug-in which will also take over the alerting, creating backup monitors which feed directly into Automate alerts.” Linking Intronis Backup and ConnectWise Automate also allows the MSP to see agents that are already installed.
“Most MSP techs also want to stay in one portal, one application, without flipping between multiple ones,” Bradbury said. “So we folded this into the Connect Automate UI. Its a single pane of glass to manage Intronis Backup from within Automate.”
Bradbury said that the enhancement of the Automate integration should make Barracuda MSP more attractive to ConnectWise MSPs. He also said that Barracuda MSP – which combines both Barracuda security offerings and the backup capabilities that Barracuda acquired with Intronis – has a market advantage in being deeply focused on both security and storage offerings for MSPs. While historically MSPs have not typically offered both security and backup to their customers, going forward Bradbury said that such a more full-featured portfolio is indispensable.
“IT security and data protection have both become top priorities for customers,” he stated. “As a result MSPs need to embrace both IT security and data protection, and Barracuda MSP provides both. Not every MSP offers both, but all businesses need both.” Bradbury referenced a study by The 2112 Group Barracuda MSP commissioned several months ago, which found that MSPs are moving in this direction. While only 15 per cent of channel companies are presently offering security services, 62 per cent said that they planned to add them in the next twelve months.
