EP22 - SaaS Management for MSPs with Auvik

Speaker 1:

<silence>

Justin Esgar:

What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. My name is Justin Esgar. I'm your host of the show, and with me always is my good friend, podcast producer and OG host, Mr. Eric Anthony. What's up, buddy?

Eric Anthony:

Not much. I don't know why I'm throwing gang signs now. I, it's just getting there with the show.

Justin Esgar:

A gang sign. I don't think throwing a peace sign is a gang sign. That's just, that's old man yells at clouds.

Eric Anthony:

Well, I fit the bill.

Justin Esgar:

There you go. <laugh>. I hope you're having a great week. Listen, we have we have, we have guests. I love it when we have guests on the show. Not that I have to, I get to talk less. I think I just get to talk at other people, <laugh>, which is better. We have some guests in the show. Steve and John from Auvik are here. Let's bring them on. Yay. Round applause. Yay.

Eric Anthony:

I'll add some applause in the soundtrack.

Justin Esgar:

We'll throw it. It'll be in the show notes as we always say. It's in the show notes. hey guys, how are you? real quick, John, you wanna go first? And Steve, John, why don't you introduce yourself. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself and when was the last time you had to fix your home wifi

John Harden:

<laugh>? Okay, I can do that. so hey, my name's John Hardin. I'm here. I'm a senior product marketing manager over at Auvik, but I've spent about 16 years in the IT T M S P space, born and bred as a tier one tech a long, long time ago in the M S P world. but it switched over to the SAS side a handful of years back with SAS E and now Sasso was wrapped up under Auvik, and now I'm working here at Auvik solving fun, new problems. when was the last time I fixed my wifi? We had an electrical storm that came through. It was, I guess not wifi, it was the I s p, but we had an electrical storm come through. But I'm sure they loved me because when I opened up the ticket or opened up the support ticket, I had trace routes, I had drop packets, I had everything because I knew that they weren't gonna come out and fix it, and it was all dropping from them. So, nice. I'm sure they loved me when that ticket came in.

Justin Esgar:

Nice. Steve? Yeah, a little bit about yourself and when was the last time you fixed your home wifi?

Steve Petryschuk:

Yeah, sure. So my name's Steve Petryschuk . I've been with the Auvik team for what feels like an eternity. It's just over seven and a half years now which in the tech space is, is quite a long time. But I, I've had the pleasure to to do a number of different things over my time here with Auvik always in sort of a customer facing capacity and, and, and the product team as well. and, and so excited to to continue that that here and, you know, be guests on, on the show. you know, before I was at Auvik, I, I was an IT security var so I lived in, in the shoes, not as an M S P, but in the channel as, as a var. So definitely walked lived, lived and breathed that. and, you know, now get to flex the muscle from the vendor side. in terms of the wifi, like any good Auvik employee, I have Auvik deployed here in my home that is monitoring all my access points, my switches, my firewall at any given time. so I actually can't remember the last time I had to fix a, a, a wireless issue, but I am notified every now and then of, of, you know, various drop packets and those type things, which probably just need a little bit of fine tuning.

Justin Esgar:

A good a, a good cobbler has their own treat, right, doctor, he physician healed by self, as we like to say at our company, which is a great lead in to, to let people know. So Steve, I'll let you go this one. For those who don't know, why don't you tell a everybody a little bit, you know, who is Auvik, what is Auvik, what are you about? Obviously I think we led in a little bit about why you use it at home, but why should people be using it at their clients?

Steve Petryschuk:

For sure. Yeah. So, so most people who are listening have probably heard of the Auvik name before. Auvik is network management and monitoring for, for MSPs. And that's what we were for, for a number of years. and, and that that sort of started off, I think, early in the, in the 2010s and over the past number of years, we've sort of, you know, seen, identified new trends in the market and we're really excited to start to introduce additional value streams for our clients out there. And one of the areas that we really went into focus in on is SaaS discovery and SaaS management, which we'll sort of, you know, be the primary topic of our conversation today. And this is driven in part because, you know, like, like most vendors, we want to grow and evolve, but we didn't wanna do more of the more of the same thing, right?

Didn't want to sort of follow that standard path. And given that, you know, SaaS discovery and SaaS management was, was new, exciting and different, it actually fit really well with sort of the <inaudible> of, of a few years ago where, you know, we sort of came in and helped define what network management monitoring was for MSPs. And so it, it was really exciting new opportunity for us to partner with, with John and his team from, from SASS e there, bring them into the fold and start to define what it means to, to discover and manage your, your SAS ecosystem.

Justin Esgar:

Well, that sounds awesome, and I'm glad to, let's bring up, let's go right into the new topic now. I hate using techno babble when trying to describe things to clients. Why, when you say sa, I mean, I know what you're talking about. Let's just talk about for other people, it's not, some other guy doesn't know what you're talking about. what, what do you mean by SaaS monitoring and, and alert? What is, what is this product doing for the M S P and how can an M S P who's now buying into this resell it to their clients? Because at the end of the day, it's all about making a buck, right? So what is it that they're going to gain? How are they going to benefit and what can they get to, to using your new products here?

John Harden:

Yeah. I'll hop in here. you know I'm gonna step back a little bit to where the idea really originated from. So I talked about my grassroots really came outta the M S P world. You know, tier one help desk worked all different roles at the M S P world. in one of the problems that I saw as I kind of came to the end of my tenure in my M S P world was this growth and this explosion of SaaS. And more than just like the explosion of SaaS in our industry. I don't know if you've remember going to like a conference a handful of years ago. There were not nearly as many vendor booths that are there now but the SaaS explosion that's happened in our client base. And as we continue to support our customers, I kind of started beating my head against the wall a little bit because I would constantly find myself having to ask them questions about their environment when it came to SaaS that I would never have to ask about anything else.

You know, I wouldn't have to ask them about their firewall configuration because it was all under management. I would never have to ask them about what was installed on their computer. 'cause I had to in my R M M. But when it came to a customer opening, opening a ticket and saying, Hey I'm locked outta Salesforce, or, Hey, I'm, I, you know, QuickBooks Cloud isn't working anymore what do I do? I would find myself without any idea of really where to start other than I know the person internally at the company to probably talk about this with. And, you know, I had tribal knowledge on how to solve the problem, but I really didn't have anything to help guide me to that path. And so that's why I built Sasso. You know, my background's also in software engineering, so help design and build it with my problem in mind.

And we built Sasso now of SaaS management with the intent of discovering SaaS. I mean, fundamentally doing what the R M M does for the endpoint software, but for all this cloud software. And it's naturally evolved beyond that. so now of SA Management's really built on three core pillars, discovering management and security. and what I am so excited about, really about this product is most MSPs aren't doing something with SaaS management, but their clients are using it. you know, compt, I sit on the SaaS Ecosystem Council with the compt council group there, and their survey for the state of the channel said 47%. Yeah, I like it. I still have my com I'm sure I've got something CompTIA here. Those who,

Justin Esgar:

For those who are listening in their car, Eric held up a CompTIA water bottle. But for those who are paying attention to sponsors, it's filled with Liquid Death water,

John Harden:

<laugh>. Yeah, that's good. I I wanted to get some of that. I, I think they have it everywhere now. Everywhere you go get water, you can't just buy bottled water. It's Liquid Death. Hashtag

Justin Esgar:

Hashtag Liquid Death Warn is a sponsor based in

Steve Petryschuk:

Canada. No liquid death here yet. So sent some over. I'm, I'm, I'm in need.

Justin Esgar:

Will do. Sorry, sorry for, sorry for interrupting, John. Yeah, <laugh>,

John Harden:

It's kinda like the Truman Show. It's like my new, my Nutella, you know, or whatever. <laugh>. That's

Justin Esgar:

The second Truman Show reference actually. Okay. So for those who are listening, John wasn't even on the call. Steve was on, and he had asked, 'cause we, we always, I tell Eric just to start recording the second I show up in the room. 'cause you never know what funny stuff's gonna happen. And I then said, and then Steve goes, are we, are we recording? Is this live? And I go, it's like the Truman Show. We're always recording. It never, it never stops. And now John said it too, so like, clearly great minds think alike. wait, so John, I don't, not that I wanna interrupt you. I'm wanna cut in here for a second though. The SAS management thing in the discovery. Like, how's it doing that? Because like, f from, from an MSP's perspective, right? 'cause I still own an M S P, I'll Beit an Apple one.

You guys can, you know, complain in the comments, leave a comment, review wherever you hear our podcast. how is it doing that discovery? Like a lot of clients have to log into Salesforce. Are we throwing an agent on the computer and it's tracking all of their website usage to then figure out what's being logged into? Like how's it doing the discovery? Because I can tell you right now how many clients I've gone and said, like, when we've onboarded them and said, Hey, like what? I mean we don't use the word SaaS products, but just for the sake of argument, like what systems are you logging into? What SaaS products are you having? And they're like, oh, we have office. And then the next thing you know, they have like Salesforce or Dropbox or, you know, some other thing. What's the tool? What's the secret sauce here that's doing that discovery?

Steve Petryschuk:

Yeah, great question. So basically we have a number of different discovery methods, but the one that's used most by MSPs when, when it sort of comes outta the gate is the our sort of integrations into the cloud-based directory services. So think of things like, you know, Google Workspace and Azure ad these systems that I'm using to log into all these applications. And so we're tying into those applications in a non-intrusive way to help to do a, a quick scan, quick discovery and documents that entire application ecosystem. we're then augmenting that with additional data. And like you sort of said, Hey, you know, sitting at, at the endpoint level identifying, you know, what applications that Steve might be using where I'm not necessarily using my work my work login, my Microsoft login, using that username and password. And so we're getting deeper visibility at the endpoint level you know, easily rolled out with an existing R M M that's already rolled out to all those all those endpoints. And, and Justin for you, we do support Mac as well as Windows. So sort of get, get that full support. but yeah, ultimately you, you're gonna see all the sa to see all the sass sprawl you have to sit where the users are using that SaaS and that ends up being at the end point itself. So we sort of do that, that full circle discovery to capture the entire ecosystem.

John Harden:

And, and I can add to that, a good way to, I like to always think about it is not, it's kind of triangulated. You've got what's on the endpoint which we push for the R M M or M D M. We then configure profiles to be in the browser to do realtime discovery of like SaaS usage. So we know if you're logging into Salesforce, for instance, j harden@vic.com or john@jjharden.com, is it a work or a personal account? And then we triangulate that with that I D P. So Google Workspace or Azure, do we see it as a single sign-on login or is this just their own web form based login? So then we do, you know, automated inventory for not only the software but the accounts as well that are accessing the software.

Eric Anthony:

So that's for that you can go ahead and, and kind of control or monitor whether or not they're logging in ad hoc or whether or not they're using an SS s o And if they're logging into something new that's not part of the SS s o, the service provider can then go in and add it to their Ss s o

John Harden:

See. And now you're starting to hit it. Right now you're starting to see why this matter for me as the M S P, because now I'm unlocking opportunities to talk to my clients about securing their cloud and their SaaS environments by pulling 'em in s ss s o I'm having discovery into kind of take it to that next level. You know, we talked about Salesforce, but what if that same user then, you know, took data from Salesforce and went logged into chat G P T to write a email out to one of their clients, put their client data in there. So now I get to have a kind of a strategic conversation around the shadow IT that's happening in our environment. there's lots of areas to push it, but for, for an M S P, one of my favorite things to unlock is during that Q B R cycle a top 10 shadow IT list. Imagine if every time you got to talk to your client, you got to talk about 10 problems they solved on their own with it that you didn't know about prior to this tool. And that now you're getting to have kind of a strategic conversation with them about. And so there's lots of lenses, but for me, that's one of my favorite given that one of my roles was in that V C I TAM role as I kind of rolled out of my M S P,

Justin Esgar:

I'm actually literally writing this down 'cause I wanted to bring this to my team, this top 10 shadow IT things, things are, this is a great concept. but without knowledge I think there's a great concept and a great way to shine light on the shadow it, right? The idea being that like, and going back to a previous episode where we talked about, you know setting expectations and how much work in particular employee's supposed to be doing. And even going so far as to like what that means in terms of the numbers, you can hit better numbers if you know everything that's going on. Like, the problem with being, the problem with doing, and I had this conversation yesterday or last weekend on event all MSPs wanna put on their website, we are proactive and not reactive. And I said to an entire group of people, take that off your website 'cause it's bullshit because we're all reactive unless we find out these things.

And this is kind of one of those tools that is allowing us to actually put that back on our website. Because if this tool can sit on a computer and see what a user's logging into, right? Without being intrusive, without being all creepy spy like, or whatever, but report back you as the M S P owner is going to, or M S P company is going to have a better picture of what's happening at your client. And if all of us as MSPs wanna say, we're your trusted business partner here, you can actually prove that you are as opposed to just being the guy or girl when someone calls and something's broken.

Steve Petryschuk:

Well, I I think you've hit on a, an interesting point there because we are the, like we're the trusted i it business partner and we are generally entrusted to cover the entire IT ecosystem, right? And for the most part, that SAS ecosystem today has been a blind spot for us. And when we say like, you know, think about the operational journeys like a an end, an employee end user lifecycle. When one of them leaves the organization today, how, how do we, you know, operationalize that we disable their, their Azure account or their Microsoft Office 365 account? but think about all the things that we're missing as part of that. It's like every other SaaS application that they've signed up for. You know, I mentioned to start off, I've been with AIC for seven years. Think of the number of of applications that I have that I've signed into that have accounts for, right?

And someone's gonna have to go through and identify what all those are and then remove access to all of those. And so this is now this, this SaaS ops problem that, you know, we're striving to help solve. 'cause first of all, we have to know what those applications are to even start that conversation and then, you know, think about the, the workload that that that's gonna introduce and start to automate some of those problems. And that's really, you know, the, the, the types of things that I think the, the, the M S P of now is starting to feel it. But the M s P of the future is really going to, to be impacted by just managing all these accounts that they traditionally just don't have visibility into Today.

Justin Esgar:

I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about a lot of the clients where they have a small design team inside and there's that one user who signs up for something like Shutterstock that like no one knew. Everyone knows, hey, call Jimmy, he's got the pictures. And you know, Jimmy goes and sh logs into his Shutterstock account with a corporate, you know, work email address and is paying with it with a work credit card. But of course told no one that this is done. And here we're now having that visibility because we ha we will have the AVI software on, what did I say? Jimmy Jimmy's computer and silly Jimmy. And we'll see all those things. So, so where is the line though? Where's the line between like learning and like creepy stalker? Because I feel like even while I'm talking about this, I'm like, this sounds innately dangerous.

John Harden:

Yeah. So let me help there. lemme kind of take what your example of Jimmy though and extract on it a little bit too. so Jimmy may act as Shutterstock, which is a bit innocuous, but maybe they left their credit card on and it's costing them money. So there's waste that you can go fix up there. But what if Jimmy was the finance officer and he accessed third party, you know, Dropbox for the accountant and the online banking portal and all these things that you didn't document. you know, you talk about it being on the verge of creepiness, but what it really is, is fulfilling compliance. I mean, fundamentally these things need to be inventoried. you know, if you look at the c i s controls, you know, c i S two is all about inventory management. Cis 2 1, 2, 3, 2 5 are about inventory management, but additionally reviewing the inventory for access and unauthorized process, which is why we integrated in that Q B R cycle.

And fundamentally, you know, in our platform we do help with the creepy factor, right? apps are personal till they're not. So what that means is if I log in, if I'm Jimmy and I log into my chase.com banking but I log in with J hard@vic.com, that's a work asset. If I log in with john@jjhard.com, that's a personal asset. It's under the fold. It's not in any of the reports. It's not even there to be dug into unless you really need to pull that layer back. Now on the compliance side, it doesn't matter. if I'm how I'm accessing it, it matters that I'm inventorying that it's there. And so we need to make sure that we're fulfilling the compliance. You talk about the reactive and the proactive, and just like everybody says, they're proactive. Everybody talks now about they're securing their environment and they're talking about all the compliance they're fulfilling for 'em.

 but there's this gap here. And so in general, that's where we come in as Auvik and do onboard training on how to use the data to have the right conversations. And we wouldn't be growing at the speed we were if people were feeling it was creepy because we, I can't give you story after story after story where A C E O or A C F O or a C I O that's co-managed or managed it has come back and said, oh my gosh, like this is bad. We need to work all this area of our environment. We need to double click into this product. So it's just a matter of proper use. Just like the r man, you could use it for any creepy purpose you wanted, just like network monitoring can see any DS all you want. Like it's good, good healthy hygiene in it.

Eric Anthony:

Yeah, for sure. Awesome. All right. You got anything? so we've talked about the discovery piece and we've talked a little bit about how it, you know, creates a more secure environment. What is the, the management piece look like?

Steve Petryschuk:

Great question. Well, we, we'll jump in as quickly, as quickly as possible here. so I mean, it starts off with some of the things we've already alluded to, right? So we talked about the employee lifecycle journey. So that's something that today is a very manual process and, and things that I'm, I'm often missing pieces along the way, so we help complete that picture. but it's also things like, as we talk about, you know, structuring application reviews into your QBR is understanding the why behind applications, not just the what is being used helping to identify which applications should be managed by the by the M S P versus which are, are left to be client managed. So it's helping to prioritize and drive those conversations as well as help to introduce a conversation around like application lot license control and cost control.

 and so we think first about you know, getting that handle on the applications, doing that application stack alignment, what is managed by us first, what is managed by by the client and then helping build into things that we're doing today. Like in that, that compliance journey. Those are all the kinds of things that, that play into the management story. and as we think about like where this path is going all that has very much taken and you, you sort of saw this in our, our, in the network management product as well as the SaaS manage one here, where we start off with the, the idea that you can't manage what you can't see, you can't secure what you can't see. And we've really, really done an amazing job at application discovery application inventory. And, and, and as we continue to evolve, you'll see more and more of these management capabilities that'll start to come up. I dunno, John, if you have anything else to add to that?

John Harden:

I, I mean, I think the key, another key management area for me was always in the apps stack alignment, you know, from my perspective, we have a functionality in our tool that allows you to set up action items when you onboard a client, for instance. So from a manageability perspective, when I go scan an entire environment, I can build an action item on McAfee web advisor, for instance, that tells my techs to go offboard, McAfee web advisor. I can add that same action item against Dropbox to come in and say, Hey, like, let's dig into this and make sure it's sanctioned. And so we're building operational practices for client onboarding. Again, to switch it from that, what journey, you know, I, everybody has to deal with this survey and I'm actually building this survey to show how annoying it is. but what software do you use? Okay, get it back to me. Now I'm gonna go sift through it and comb through it, and then it's a matter of, okay, I document it and it goes in my IT documentation tool and I'm done. This is evergreen documentation from a management perspective. So instead of asking your customer what, again, we wanna displace it with the what question and turn it to the why question, and the management from there on becomes part of IT hygiene and your Q QBs and IT hygiene on your onboard offboard cycles.

Eric Anthony:

Well, and that's a big part of it, right? Is first finding what they're using, and then if it's something that conflicts with a tool that the M S P is now deploying as part of their standard practice, you need to know that so that you can offboard those applications. And, and that's, you know, that's a lot of work. And so especially if you can automate some of that, that's, that's really, you know, to me that's a big cost savings measure as an M S P

John Harden:

Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and that. So

Justin Esgar:

What if I may ask what's, what, what kind of pricing we looking at here for is, are we, are we doing per endpoint? Are we doing it per site, per customer? How can people get involved? And, and, and how do, how do the MSPs get started with, with using this new product?

Steve Petryschuk:

good question. So I'll start off with the first one. basically when we think about SaaS applications and SASS e usage probably the, the number one key point that I wanna get across is that this is all user-based, user-driven, right? Me as a user, I use SaaS, my device doesn't, right? And so as we started to approach how we license it, how we bring it to market, it's all oriented around that user. and so that's where the licensing sort of is structured. It's, you know, per user, it is a licensing. We have scale up plans for, for MSPs to whether they wanna start small and grow or a lot of, a lot of our partners have operationalized as part of their standard process, whether it's part of their security offering or if they have a, you know, good better, best kind of package and that better best. and so that would be the, the more common approach. but if there is anyone interest in getting started, if you go to Auvik.com there is a a get started button right in the top right corner, obviously now is a, you know, avik having more than one products, that there's a network management trial and a SaaS management trial. You can find the SaaS management management trial right there and kick it off there to get started.

Eric Anthony:

Awesome. That's awesome. And I think what we should probably do here is if people are interested, you know, if they're listening to the podcast or watching this on YouTube and they're interested let us know. Because what we'll do is we'll have Auvik on for office hours where we can actually demo some of this stuff.

Steve Petryschuk:

That'd be great. We'd be happy to do that.

John Harden:

Yeah. And, and I would add one thing to Steve's point, if if you're one, if you're like me, I like to try the exotic, I mean, you get it for free for 14 days, just go scan your own environment, see what you find, but then let us do it office hours and we'll show you how to poke through the tool and get the, the value out of it.

Eric Anthony:

There you go.

Justin Esgar:

Well, Steve, John, thanks so much for being here. And thank you for explaining what this new product is. I think a lot of MSPs can take full advantage of the new sas management. 'cause it's not creepy as we've determined. It's actually a pretty cool product. And you know, I'm, every now and then if, if you do watch this on YouTube and you watch my, like, my eyes shift downwards and look to the side, it's 'cause I'm, I'm always learning also, right? I'm always taking notes from the people we have on the show because like, I'm thinking to myself, okay, we just moved to Halo. Can we integrate this in with Halo? And look, I'm googling it. Here it is, it works. And like, I'm like, oh, maybe we should be investing in this. So like, I'm always learning too, which is a great thing because I'm just like, you the, the listener, right?

I'm an M S P just like you. I'm trying to grow my business, you know, just like you are. And, and using tools like this, like I'm thinking about all of my clients as we're talking. Think about all of my clients who have stuff that they've signed up for that they have no idea about. And the only reason I know about it's 'cause like once in a while it shows up on like a dark web hit. And I'm like, when did Jimmy sign up for that bullshit? Like, this seems like a really, a really, really solid product. So Steve, John, thanks so much for being here. And I can't wait to see the demo during the the office hours real quick. where can people reach out to you guys online other than your website?

Steve Petryschuk:

So, so you, you can find Auvik@Auvik.com, A U V I k.com. If you're looking for me, you can look me up on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to connect and follow, follow John for all the management stuff like avic and just thought leadership content. He's the guy that you'll want to, to connect with, not me.

Justin Esgar:

Awesome. Well, all right, cool. Thanks so much you guys for being here. And as always, follow us on all of your favorite podcasts and tools, youtube.com/at all things msp facebook.com/group/all things mssp. Leave a comment, lea review, subscribe and like find out when the new episodes are coming. By the way, it's always on Tuesdays. And that's it for us at the All Things MSP podcast. Bye.

Eric Anthony:

And now that you've watched that mess of a podcast, don't forget to watch one of these and go ahead and click that subscribe button so you get to watch more. Yeah, just go ahead and do it. Click the button and then watch one of the other videos I'm watching. <silence>.