These two apps become the first of Augmentt’s Free Community Software Program for MSPs.
Derik Belair, CEO & Co-founder at Augmentt
Augmentt, which makes a SaaS security and management platform for MSPs, has announced the release of two new tools to enhance MSP productivity. They are free in perpetuity, even to MSPs who are not currently Augmentt customers. The two tools are an actionable email alert and notification console, and a Salesforce security tool that lets MSPs and VARs better manage and secure SaaS and cloud applications.
“As we talk to more and more MSPs and prospects, we want to help them with SaaS to do more than sell than licenses,” said Derik Belair, CEO & Co-founder at Augmentt. “Today, the end customers buy software online. Those customers don’t use their MSPs for this. This SaaS money trend already exists, so this model is there regardless of whether the MSPs want to use it or not. MSPs are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this, because while buying the licenses is easy, making them all work together securely is hard for the customer. These tools get them to think more about management, like other things we do, such as giving away free licenses at the start.”
The Salesforce security tool is something MSPs have been requesting.
“We were being asked all the time if we did anything for Salesforce security,” Belair said. “Investing time with our developments to help them chip away at the SaaS opportunity is good for us and good for the MSPs, because it helps them get more interested in SaaS security and management. A lot of our developers also like to work on these little projects.”
The Salesforce tool can be installed on any local or cloud system and can connect to multiple Salesforce accounts from one central console, to provide detailed security information for Salesforce applications.
“Salesforce was designed around a specific use case,” Belair said. “They do a very good job at gathering all these metrics, but they don’t centralize it. It’s complicated and requires going into their back end to address the questions that MSPs want to be able to do, like run an audit on how well its configured and show it to the tenant in a multi-tenanted manner. We connect all these metrics, showing what polices are in place, what’s missing, suspicious users and things like that. They can go with this to the customer and talk about Salesforce with a stronger case.”
The Augmentt Email Alert & Notification Console lets the MSPs centrally monitor for critical security alerts including failed backups, billing notifications, role and licensing changes, and more; and forward critical emails to their notification channel of .choice. They can also create an unlimited number of dedicated email addresses within the Augmentt platform, add unique addresses for tracking critical systems and application alerts, and design an unlimited number of email rules to ensure that actionable email alerts or notifications are never missed.
“Almost every company does something for email alerts, which leads to an insane amount of alerts,” Belair said. “95% of these can be ignored but a small % should be paid attention to. Partners have been asking us to centralize all of these email alerts. Now, they go into an admin box in Outlook and they don’t get looked at right away, so that often they turn out to have been a warning of a major problem, that was never acted on. They asked us to create a box in the Augmentt system for what should be escalated, and what should be low security. So if the sender is Microsoft and the message is deemed high risk, and has multiple log in attempts, it should be sent to the PSA, effectively acting as a traffic cop.”
The two new tools being announced today will be followed up by additional cost optimization and free tools. Look for them in Q3, Belair said.
