As the cloud becomes the dominant way many MSP customers consume technology, N-able is looking to make managing the cloud a lot more managing on-prem or private cloud customers.

At its Empower 2022 event in Las Vegas this week, the managed service software vendor previewed a new offering to integrate Azure assets into its flagship RMM platforms.

Subo Guha, vice president of RMM product manager, offered a preview of Cloud Asset Manager at the event, showing how CAM will allow MSPs to more efficiently manage their customers’ Azure footprint from the familiar confines of N-central or N-sight.

It has been “very difficult” historically for MSPs (or customers for that matter) to see all the cloud assets their customers have, Guha said. And that’s the problem CAM will try to solve.

“We need a unified way to see all their customers together,” Guha said. “We need the capability to make our RMM product cloud-ready.”

Due early next year, CAM will aim to give MSPs visibility into what their customers have in Azure and manage costs in the cloud, particularly when hunting down and turning off “orphaned” or otherwise forgotten cloud resources and apps for which customers are often still playing.

Once an MSP authenticates into a user’s Azure account, CAM will operate in a very familiar way for RMM users, creating a dashboard that covers everything under the cloud account and the associated costs.

The tool will start with Azure-based virtual machines and, in early releases, will add support for SQL databases and Microsoft backups. And while the company will “go deep” with Azure first, Guha said they would add Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform over time.

CAM joins N-able’s existing and developing tools for cloud management. Also, at Empower, the company showed off its newly-launched Cloud User Hub, coming out of its acquisition of Spinpanel this summer. CUH aims to help MSPs administer and secure Microsoft 365 accounts in a multi-tenant environment. In upcoming releases, the company will focus on integration internally with N-able’s RMM tools and externally, with the company mentioning cloud distributors Ingram Micro and Pax8 in particular.

Its third cloud-first offering is Cove Data Protection, introduced earlier this year. It will be expanded to backup Microsoft Teams instances and add the ability to restore directly to Azure.

Mike Adler, executive vice president, chief technology and product officer, described the company’s strategy for the cloud as “executing on parts of the business you’re most familiar with,” bringing automation to the things MSPs spend most of their time on.

“You can go all-in on the cloud and be successful, be more successful with your cloud business than you have been with your on-prem and infrastructure business,” Adler told MSPs in attendance.

N-able CEO Jon Pagliuca said the company aims to get the channel ready for “MSP 2.0,” with MSPs moving their focus from managing on-prem infrastructure to managing digital workloads. While many MSPs embrace that shift as their customers have, they need the tools to bring the experience of managing those customers up to the level they’re used to with more traditional managed services customers.

“MSPs are spending hours or weeks onboarding customers with Microsoft 365. We want to help them automate, run a script, and take that down to minutes. That’s the goal,” Pagliuca said.