Shay Cohen of Optimize365

[00:00:00] edition of the MSP Initiative MSP Talk, May. It's my favorite month. It's also my birthday month, but I love May. May is great. Actually today, May 14th, 2026, the NFL schedule comes out. So for all you NFL fans, don't fool yourself. There's a lot of us out there. You're watching, you're refreshing, you're trying to figure out what your schedule is going to be like on the back end of the year, like everybody else. So I'm right there with you. The Eagles already put out some feelers,

[00:00:27] like we're going to be playing in London again this year, just back in like in 2018, it was Eagles Jags switching stadiums, 2026 Eagles Jags, but at Tottenham instead of Wembley. So you can circle that in your October schedule guys. But anyway, let me get some housekeeping out of the way and then we'll get with our guests of the day and we'll talk shop and see where we get MSP initiative.com. That's where you're going to find everything that we pretty much do in one place.

[00:00:52] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to, and I'm going to list them in, you know, in an order here. Two weeks ago, basically we were in Vegas. Thank you to the Connect Global team and the Kaseya team for, you know, their awesome hospitality. That was our first time doing a block party for the MSP community in Vegas, you know, for all the reasons that you would think, because Vegas is a hard place to do something of that size because Vegas is Vegas, but it worked out

[00:01:21] absolutely wonderfully. You know, we couldn't have done it without the help of that team. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, very much for your help. And I hope everybody enjoyed themselves. All of the photo booth and professional photographer photos and videos of that block party are online, as well as other parties I'm about to go backwards in time with. You can find them on our Facebook page. If you don't know our Facebook page, go to MSP initiative.com. It'll backlink you to it.

[00:01:46] So thank you to the Kaseya Connect Global team. Thank you to the Enable team. They had us at their event in Fort Lauderdale. We did a community party there. That was awesome. A little bit before then, we were in Orlando back in March with the Threat Locker team for Zero Trust World. Again, awesome hospitality. And thanks for working with all these various event teams. They've been absolutely wonderful to work with and putting on great experiences for the community. It's kind of

[00:02:15] our specialty. So we have two more coming up. We have one in Prague. Yes. You know, the place where the Pilsner beer is cheaper than water. So that's going to be in about a month from now in June in Prague. It is the European version of the Kaseya Global events that just happened in Vegas. And then right after that, looking forward to reconnecting with our good friends from Roost who run the Flow

[00:02:39] Conference last year in Tampa, this year in Nashville. So looking forward to get down to Broadway and having a good time with MSPs and the larger community down there. So both of those events are posted on MSPinitiative.com. And we're looking forward to seeing all of you in person if you make it out. Of course, we'll reset after both of those last two events. And we will talk about what happens on the back end of the year. If you remember last year, we did Channel Sports Tour, probably going to

[00:03:08] do it again. It was awesome. So now that the NFL schedule is coming out, we can figure out what that looks like and talk about what happens after the end of June. Okay. That's all my housekeeping, MSPinitiative.com. Yes, this session obviously is being recorded and you're probably listening to it after the fact. All good. So make sure to like, subscribe, download, forward, share. It's all there on MSPinitiative.com under sessions. And without further ado, good friend who happened to,

[00:03:36] you know, stop by and get the George Philadelphia tour, which I'm told is I should put myself on like TripAdvisor and start getting some recommendations. Shai from Optimize365. How are you doing, my friend? Amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much. How was the tour? Was it good? Did you like Philadelphia? Wow. Amazing. The best of the best. I can't ask better than that, my friend. It was like, you know,

[00:04:01] Philly, Philly in a nutshell. And it was a full day of experience, good food, history, great places. Cannot, you know, great beer, one of the oldest places down, right? Amazing. Amazing. So I'm the first voter on your TripAdvisor. So on me. Wow. Yes. The George Philadelphia tour, if you happen to

[00:04:26] be coming through town and you shoot me a note, it is very food driven with a lot of history in there. People forget the country started in Philadelphia, go back to fourth grade history. I promise, you know, it's in the textbook, but lots of cool places, but it's a very food driven town. So I like to make sure that we include all of that. And it's a very cool part of the, you know, in time, right? In the area. The NFL draft was just in Pittsburgh, five hours on the other side of the

[00:04:51] state. But later on this month, the PGA championship is outside in suburban Philadelphia. America 250, a lot of stuff happened in Philadelphia. FIFA World Cup happening eight games in Philadelphia. MLB All-Star Week in Philadelphia. It's just a lot of stuff happening in Philadelphia. It's a great time to be in town. So if you happen to be coming through for any of that, drop me a line and we'll try and make sure that you're taken care of. It's one of my favorite things to do. Anyway, thank you,

[00:05:19] Shay, for Shay was at Kaseya in Vegas. And he's like, hey, you know, let me just see if I can swing down as part of my U.S tour here and get the Philly experience. And I was like, absolutely. Let me clear my schedule. Let's do it. So it was a good time. So I'm glad you made it in. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. So Shai is actually based out of Israel. So I'm glad you made it safe back home, by the way, because I know like, you know, we're at a part of the world where, you know, crazy things are

[00:05:47] happening. So hopefully still all good on that front, safe and all that stuff. Shai, for people who have never heard your name or don't know what you do, let's just start off with a little bit of background so that we can set the table for everybody. Sure. So my name is Shai. Yeah. I'm out of Israel. It was a long trip, you know, to the state and back home. My background, it's around

[00:06:13] channel and telcos. I used to develop a lot of tools around that area. In the last few years, spending all of my time in the U.S channel market, try to do the best as we can to change the world and make it better place for everyone. So in our current company, Optimize 365, what we are doing is

[00:06:36] helping MSPs to turn Microsoft security revenue, security into recurring revenue. So we build a multi-tenant platform that focusing about security configuration and posture management, help them covering and identify business opportunities around all the Microsoft configuration

[00:07:02] and posture management. Okay, cool. Well, Microsoft is the big elephant in the room. Let's totally be clear about that. I think everybody who's running an IT services help desk or an MSP, a lot of Microsoft conversation. I guess they could also be doing Google, but mostly Microsoft in my experience. I digress. Um, so we will definitely get into that. Uh, one thing is for sure. Nothing that anybody on this call

[00:07:28] controls is both of these guys, Microsoft and Google sure love to change the price on you all the time. And that price never comes down. It seems to always go up. Yeah. I think it's a huge problem because even in the next month, they're going to release Microsoft, the new, uh, package. They call it E7, uh, changing, uh, it will cost around a hundred bucks. Uh, a user.

[00:07:51] If I pay user per month and some of, uh, you know, feature will be moved from one, uh, package to another lab to another package. So I think it's going to be a bit of a mess, but they're going to add the great stuff too. But I think it's something that, you know, uh, MSP should get ready, uh, and see, do you know, um, actually I was will affect their current, you know, configuration and their current,

[00:08:17] uh, offering. Um, yeah, it's going to be a thing. Interesting. Like, I think, I don't know what your experience is. I'm sure you'll tell me in a second, but I, in my experience, most of the MSPs that I talked to are largely doing like business basic or business premium. And like, I know that it caps out at something like 250 users per account

[00:08:43] maximum. And like most of the companies are dealing with aren't bigger than 250. And so when I talk to a lot of the MSPs, they're not on E1, E3, E5, and now E7. So I would be curious from your perspective, if you see the same thing in number two, why would somebody consider going off of basic or premium to the higher tiers? So I think it's more about, and first of all, and you're right, it's first, it's dependent on the end client size because there's limitation around that. Um,

[00:09:12] there are some people that do mixed licenses, you know, even buying the plan one for some, from some mailboxes, standard, basic, do all of those combinations. But it's depend actually on your security stack. I mean, you can get E5 or E3 and you get more security coverage. But you can be with premium and you can buy an extra add-on tools, right? For example, mail protection, maybe adding some backups, maybe do depend, of course, don't get me on specific work,

[00:09:41] but depend on the licenses. So what Microsoft trying to do here is like, uh, based on our experience, they want to sell as, as grow as you buy as, as higher level of the licenses. This is where you have more security posture, uh, security coverage. So what we are actually trying to identify is when we first log into a tenant, it's, we map to all of the compliance frameworks, all the security controls, and we're telling you, okay, now we are premium. This is the subset of controls that you can do.

[00:10:10] So if you want to have more security coverage, you maybe need to get a lot of bigger, an higher license, or you can need to buy at security add-ons that working alongside. And then as an MSP, the big question is margins, time of implementation, a lot of tools. So depends on, you know, how do you work and how big is your mature? I'm, you know, it's not the right way to today to say big or small. It's how mature is your MSPs because you're working with one man show that

[00:10:39] doing amazing job, amazing job on security. Right. So yeah. No, that's fair. I mean, at the end of the day, I think part of the reality is everybody's very cost conscious. Right. And like, as I mentioned, I think I just read, it could be wrong. Double check me. I think I just read like Google just up, uh, bumped up their cost by like 30%. They just announced a big price increase. Microsoft has another one coming in a couple of months, uh, that they announced at the end of last year.

[00:11:07] That's like, you know, they keep bumping me and moving the, the, you know, the double digit percentage up every time they announced the price increase. And like people are, of course, from an MSP standpoint, who's in the middle of Microsoft and their end customer, right? Like they're in the middle of that sandwich. Oh, I just got to notify them, right? Hey, Microsoft changed their pricing again. Google's changed their pricing again. This is just what it is. You feel free to go read here. It's on their website. And like, of course there's the age old,

[00:11:32] well, what am I getting? You know, like, should I be, can I downgrade? Am I using all of this stuff? And I think a lot of MSPs tend to say, well, we can offset some of the things that Microsoft charges you in the higher tiers by using third party products to check some boxes less expensive than if I went to the higher Microsoft plan. How often do you see that?

[00:11:57] So a lot, because what we are, one of our assessment, it's about enterprise application. So what we're seeing is not only the configuration and so all the third party tools that connected to those accounts, right? And we saw a lot people and it's not very, you know, often, but we seeing a lot of people that having E3, but they buying another tool that E3 already covering and they don't even know

[00:12:23] about it. Right. And the big question is, let's assume that I want to have the third party. Right. So does it overlap or it's giving me an actually extra security layer? So it's quite depends. So and depend on the configuration and the offering and the maturity of the third party. So, but we saw it. I can tell you that. We're running right now a lot of tenants, a few dozen,

[00:12:52] thousands. And we saw so many variation of tenants, of course, from the end clients and the MSPs. But you can find anything, but the most of them didn't even realize that they, you know, they don't even realize, sorry, that they double paying or even that they are, you know, for a simple example, you can have mail protection and you can have, you know, configure your Microsoft

[00:13:18] and you even don't know where the email is blocked. Right. If something, if some, you know, configuration make a problem to other the third party. So it's a thing. Right. So that's interesting. I am sure the end customer has most of the time, no clue what's what they're buying. Right. They just know their email works or their teams works. Right. Or Microsoft word opens up. But for the MSP,

[00:13:45] the fact that they don't know what the customer's available services are in the SKU. And if they're buying a third party tool that overlaps basically an on off button on the customer, like that's where, you know, I know that it's, you know, unless all your costs, like I know every MSP likes to have a standard, right. So that it's not, you know, you can manage your customers more efficiently as a whole.

[00:14:11] But if they're using a third party product that A is double overlap in terms of cost, but B, could it be conflicting with the function of the overlap? Right. And I think that's probably what's happening in a lot of cases. Yeah. So, and we saw that. So I can tell you that, for example, even, even, you know, things that's happening, people look themselves out of the Microsoft account. We saw those things, right? Because of not understanding the configuration, they believe

[00:14:40] that they did it in other tool, but for example, multi-factor authentication, right? They believe that they use third party tool, but they disable something on Microsoft because they don't know how to do it in the right way. They find themselves locked out and we help to solve those kinds of problems when they appear because, and it's happens a lot. I can tell you that even here in Israel,

[00:15:02] we, we, a few of our clients, I can tell that locked, we see around once or three times a month, tenants that locked out themselves because of don't understanding what they do, right? And you need to wait for Microsoft and it's taking, I mean, it's taking some time. And now let's say it's even take you five hours. And I was very, do you know, uh, and I was very generous with you. So your business

[00:15:30] not operate for six, five, five, six hours, how much it's cost you. Right. So I think again, you and I had a lot of conversation about it and you know, it's not only about paying for the tools, it's about paying for the hours as an MSP trader sales, what it's all around it. Right. So. No, that's a hundred percent true. I mean, this isn't a new thing, but it's still out there. And I hope a lot of MSPs are now paying attention to it. It's the Microsoft security score, right? Like

[00:15:59] where they basically say, Hey, your goal is to get this as high as possible and you don't want scores below a certain amount, but let's be honest. The, if you turn on a brand new 365 account for someone, the security score is pretty low by default. Like they don't turn anything on for you in a lot of cases, Microsoft. So, um, I feel like, you know, and depending on how long that customer has been

[00:16:23] with you, they're left in different places. Right. And like that whole standardization thing is all over the place. It's not really standard other than yes, they have Microsoft and yes, they could have the license that you want, but it doesn't mean that all of the buttons are turned on the correct way across all your customers. And I feel like the problem is, is that most of the time they don't realize that something is wrong until a major problem occurs. Right? Like maybe they did something by

[00:16:52] mistake and they go and look, but largely in my experience, an event happened, something broke, somebody complained about something. And then they went backwards and said, Oh, well, this was, this wasn't set up right. Or this wasn't turned on right. Or it was turned on in the beginning, but somewhere along the line, something got changed and we don't know exactly when, and then a problem occurred. So this is what I think is happening day to day.

[00:17:16] Yeah. I can tell you from today's story that we are on board one of our MSP with one of this client. It was, I can't say funny, right? But it was, you know, uh, it was very, you know, hard to see that because he, it was believed that he buy premium to his client and he, and he was sure that, you know, I have a premium, so I'm secure. So during the onboarding process, so what we teaching by the way, our, our partners, it's like when you're buying Microsoft,

[00:17:46] don't help you to secure that your environment, not secure your environment. When you buy the license, you need to do it by yourself. Right? And what was funny, again, funny to say, to see, it's like, he believed that you have premium account and we try and we identify during that onboarding process, few attacks that were running because they forget to disable the sign in account of people that are left and they don't have an MFA on the account and they didn't even know about it.

[00:18:12] Right? But it's, it could be solved easily with the right configuration. For example, conditional access, do some processes, you know, all this, all of those stuff, but people don't realize, not, I can't say all of them, but some people don't realize that they, they're really sure, oh, I checked the box because I bought the premium, but you didn't enable none of that. So how do you secure? You have the capability, but it didn't, it's not configured yet. So... Okay. So let me ask you this, like MSP comes to you, hypothetical. They say,

[00:18:42] I'm managing 50 customers, almost all of them Microsoft. I would love to understand the health of all of my customers. I can sign into your platform. Can you give me a report? Mm-hmm . And like, what's the average score? How, maybe you can explain to us what it is, but what's the average position that you're finding these MSPs and their accounts are in when they get to you?

[00:19:07] And this is the funny story that what we realize, right? So we, when we ran the scan, we ran it against again, some benchmarks, right? So most of them, even they have secure score. I can tell you based on our, you know, mappings, only 55 control out of 200 from that, from the, from the benchmarks are mapped to secure score. So what does it mean? That if you are 100% secure

[00:19:37] coverage, you still have around 30 to 40% out of the real benchmark of security. So we... Hold on, time now. So Microsoft secure score is just a minimum is what you're saying. I'm saying that they giving a lot of great opportunities, a lot of great controls. It's a lot more than, but not all of them really map based on what we tested and checked. And we have those maps on our

[00:20:04] platform to the real benchmark, to the real security and compliance benchmark. Oops. So I say that if you're a hundred percent secure score, again, based on what our mappings, it could be wrong. I don't know, but for, you know, so far, it seems to be accurate. It seems that you need to have a lot of other things

[00:20:26] to do. So for your answer, we saw 20 to 40% coverage of security, even if you're a good one. So we have MSPs that they do, that we run an assessment. Oh, we are a hundred percent on Microsoft. I mean, we're do all the things and they, they get into the platform, we're running the assessment and they see a 40, 50% coverage. If you're amazing. And it's not, it's all of that. It's not because

[00:20:53] they're not following the right, you know, what tell them to do. It's because, ah, we don't believe that they're following the right stuff and what is on the real time, what is, sorry, on the real, what the real client needs. Because even if you follow the benchmarks and so forth, it's not what happens in life, right? Even for, let's take an example, NIPA, or let's say, take an example, NIST, right? You're following one of the controls for one tenant. It's maybe not the

[00:21:20] same result or not the same way that you handle another client because of the way of the end client is operate, right? Right. So we, of course we learned during our development and everything, working a lot with our, with our MSPs, do those changes and adaptions, not because we are smart, because we just listen and we develop based on what we learn during this. But yeah, it was long, long answer to your, to a short question. No, no, it's good. It's good. I mean, this is good context.

[00:21:49] So, so MSPs come to you, you're, you're like, Hey, let's understand what your baseline is across all your customers. And then you need to tell us, is this a doctor and they have HIPAA? Is this a financial company? And maybe they have, you know, you know, socks and other, other ones, right? Are you a CMMC because you're in the government supply chain? Like all of these different compliances are different, you know, across individual customers. So like there's the baseline and then there's industry specific ones. But all that being said, you're saying you're finding

[00:22:18] a lot of MSPs have a really low, you know, percentage in terms of, Hey, this is where you really should be. And this is what we're finding you when you walk in the door. And so that means that no matter what Microsoft's putting out, it's either not being followed. And even if it was a hundred percent, I don't find many people with a hundred percent security score. I'm just gonna be honest. It's very rare in my experience. That's really not a hundred percent of what needs to be

[00:22:46] done. Yeah. Based on our research and working with our MSPs, right? Maybe someone can say other thing. I don't know. But based on we're working with more than 150 MSPs and all of them, I believe, align with those statements and mappings. But you know, that's interesting. So what about, so how many people are coming to you after a problem has occurred?

[00:23:15] Oh, this is a good one. So it's depends actually, you know, it works. It's depend when, when we are getting them. So, I mean, when we are actually, you know, talk to them. Again, there are some clients, MSPs, sorry, there are some MSPs that their clients add the security, they compromise in security. For example, breach because of an, you know, unsconfigured MFA and those kind of things

[00:23:41] that they say, oh, I wish I had that tool before, you know, a week ago. I could prevent that. But some of them right now start to realize because of all Microsoft changes, you know, that they need to do that and they're not following because they are asked, may ask by their clients, does my, does my environment is secure? Does my 365 is configured correctly? So what's going on there?

[00:24:06] Not all of the end clients, right? But the mature ones and the bigger ones, we see that a lot. But we have a few, not a lot for those that were compromised and, you know, because of misconfiguration and we just get them, you know, get them right on that point that was after that effect. And we try to help them and we show them how we can prevent, how we can prevent that and, or how we

[00:24:33] can try to identify and alert you during that problem, the problem has happened or during this, you know, occur to try to, try to sign into one of the accounts. I can tell you that one of our MSPs, it's a funny, again, funny story. He connected our platform to one of his prospects and during the set, a day after, the end client started to get alert because he enabled that about someone to try

[00:25:00] to sign into his account and even didn't know about it. So this is how we close the deal by the way. So it was, don't, right? So it's dependent on the situation, but yeah. Wow. That's interesting. I mean, time is everything, right? I mean, Everything. Usually like everything, you know, I use the analogy of, hey, you're, you're, you're very happy you had car insurance other than you legally should have car insurance in a lot of places. You're very happy I had car insurance after the accident, right? Yeah.

[00:25:29] If you didn't have insurance and you get into an accident, it's not a good day. So, um, you know, kind of applies here, right? Like when did you crash your car? But I digress, that's George trying to, you know, put something common to it. Um, so maybe zoom out a little bit for us. So we've, we've heard bits and pieces so far, we're 30 minutes in. Um, your platform is about

[00:25:54] Microsoft and Microsoft security around the three, six, five suite of products. Is there anything that your platform does separate of three, six, five? Yeah. So, uh, we like to split it into four pillars actually, and that we helping with security configuration and hardening, uh, then monitoring that. Then we have the security posture, which

[00:26:21] is human identity, non-human identity. The third pillar will be threat detection. And the fourth one, it's how do you utilize the licenses to make more money out of that. So under use, over utilize based on our agent that they learned the environment and then suggest that you, oh, this user can do this and that, or maybe you can upgrade it. Maybe storage is close to limit and stuff. Uh, and all of those, I explain to you all of that because all of those four pillars in the next few months going to be work

[00:26:48] to another, to an extra actually, uh, environments like Azure, Google, and another one, because our big dream is showing to MSPs actually, this is our vision, a single dashboard that you can see security coverage against margins. This is why actually our company, it's called Optimize Security. Uh, and this specific tool, we call it Optimize 365. We're going to have a lot of another optimize along the way, but this is

[00:27:17] our big dream because I believe based on a lot of costs, you know, we have a lot of mutual friends, a lot of, uh, calls that we had. And I believe this is again, my dream to build, you know, I like to build platforms. So I think this is, uh, where we are going to. Um, so in the next one, you will see Azure, Google, and a few others right now focusing on Microsoft because 365, because man, it's a lot

[00:27:45] to do there. It's a lot. They have tons of things there, but amazing job. Don't get me wrong. Right. Just steering the wheel correctly. No, a hundred percent. I mean, I would almost go to, uh, it sounds like you may already have this in your platform, but it's like the utilization of the plan that you have. Right. And I would say if you have it and it sounds like you do, but I'll let you answer in a second. The end customer's utilization of a business premium subscription, for example,

[00:28:15] is probably low. Like they may only be using 15% of what it is that Microsoft's bundling. And I don't even think they realize that because I don't think, you know, nobody goes to look and see, well, every month Microsoft adds this or that, and they keep adding, adding, adding. They just know that the, I call it the plumbing, right? They have their teams, their outlook, their office productivity suite, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, et cetera, and their email. And that's it. Like

[00:28:44] as long as those things are running, that's what they think Microsoft is for 365. Yeah. And it's only because they're releasing a lot of features all the time. People can't follow, right? They don't know actually what they're covering it. People keep buying tools that maybe it's covered already by Microsoft. Right. And, you know, and go for the other side of, so, you know, the opposite. Yeah. So like if I'm an MSP that you heard the, you know, the trick earlier, it's like,

[00:29:11] if your customer's in the middle of being, you know, potentially compromised, like somebody's trying to get into the front door, being able to tell them, Hey, you're having a problem right now. Just wanted to let you know, here you go. You know, it's a pretty good way to get a client, but also another good way to get a client is, Hey, we scanned your environment, just trying to get an idea of what you guys are doing. And like, you're using 9% of your subscription right now. Like, what does that mean? I was like, well, you know, here are all your users and like, you're only using three things and here are all the other things that you have that

[00:29:41] you didn't even know you had. So, you know, bottom line is maybe we could, what else do you have outside of Microsoft? Maybe you can consolidate, like, instead of using a third-party booking tool, there's Microsoft bookings instead of using, you know, all these like, well, Dropbox, you have OneDrive, right? Like all of these consolidating points, right? Like maybe there's cost savings there or maybe it's, Hey, when your renewal comes up for Microsoft, maybe you can downgrade because you don't need most of this stuff. You're right.

[00:30:10] Right. Like that's awesome when it comes to being viewed as somebody who's being helpful rather than somebody who's just a cost. You're right. And I believe in that way, when MSP tried, you know, have that explanation and doing a QBR, have all of this AMO during this, you know, this one of those meetings, it's a different discussion. I believe it's a different way they know how the end client look at it as an MSP because it's not new or not professional. I believe, again, this is another

[00:30:39] philosophy that I have in mind based on all of my research is like, you know, it's all, even for us, right, when we're developing tools and all of, you know, doing as a technical guys, it's not all the time that easy to explain the value that we are, you know, providing from a business perspective, because from our eyes, of course, I'm saving you time. I do for you that. I fixed you that in between without me, your business will not work tomorrow. Right. But all that,

[00:31:05] you know, and the different, the hardest thing is I can't say, again, it's try to explain it to the client and from the business eyes. And I believe this is, again, comes to the, our big dream is how to translate all of those into valuable business, you know, discussion and not only, you know, not only technical and one single dashboard that we show you everything. Okay. I like that. So do you just work with MSPs or do you work with end customers as well?

[00:31:35] Only MSPs. Okay. Awesome. And you built a multi-tenant platform because you only work with MSPs because that's the way they need it anyway. Awesome. And you said, I think I heard you say earlier, something like 150 MSPs you're working with right now. Yeah. The company's still newish. Yeah. Okay. It's not a fit. It's not a bad thing. It's good. So, how do people like, is there a trial? Is there a commitment? Where do they find,

[00:32:05] you know, like, how do they interact with you from a business standpoint? So what they need to do, it's only to log in to this website, optimize 365.io and no credit card, nothing, just logged into the register and you have NFR three scans for free to a client. You don't need to pay when you win a deal. You can put a credit card and start using the ping for the rest

[00:32:32] of the platform. Everything is included. Everything is open, you know, which again, I told you, I learned a lot in the last few years in the channel. You must be channel committed, I mean, to make it really successful, right? It's about, it's not about getting the first dollar. It's about showing the first value fast as you can do it easy. And this is again, the way we will build all of that based on just listening to people test it before you pay for it.

[00:33:01] If it's worked for you, win the first deal with the client, then you pay for it easy as that. Right. So, okay. I like it. Let's zoom out to the greater industry talk, because that was all cool. And I think a lot of people will take a look and, Hey, if you don't know what's out there, it can't help you. But I love things that make it easier for MSPs. Number one, number two, companies that get the IT MSP channel, right? Like I say that, and so many people think they know, but I'm not sure that they

[00:33:28] do. And then three, I love the ability to go in and surprise someone in a good way. Right. And so that always helps getting customers. And I think MSPs can always, you know, use a bunch of tricks or tools in order to do that, deliver a really good experience in your perspective phase. I digress.

[00:33:49] Zooming out, what do you have to say about the Claude Mythos platform? What have you heard? Is it, like a unicorn, like imaginary, or is it real? Should we be worried about it? What do you know? The $1 billion question, my friend. Look, we're playing around with it. I'm not going to lie.

[00:34:13] I believe that we are still far away from making, you know, 100% work because again, all of that need to understand the context, right? It's not only about the one configuration. It's the context takes time to learn based on what we are seeing, of course. And even we try to use it and asking some questions and do some things and configurations and all of the things. It's still, again, based on our

[00:34:42] experience, it's still a bit, it's good, right? But I think it's, you need to get more better. But if we get it to be the way, it's like other people developing mature, mature tools, it's gonna be mind blowing, right? It's crazy. It's crazy. Well, I'm definitely concerned with the people using it

[00:35:07] to be, you know, like find vulnerabilities and now using it as an effectively a bad guy getting access to the same technology that everybody else does in order to speed up bad guy things. Yeah, you're right. This is crazy. This is crazy. And I think it comes to all of those, you know, new startups that we're seeing that will right now on stealth and we are seeing, you know,

[00:35:34] in Israel, we have any other, any other person in a security startup. So most of them are on stealth, but people trying to, you know, solve this problem that you just mentioned, right? So imagine you can be a hacker and you can get the meters and try to, you know, hack to all the world, right? So they're theoretically, again, of course, there are some limitations and stuff, right? But

[00:36:00] um, yeah, we're gonna see a lot of people that try to prove a lot of companies, sorry, that will try to prevent those things, based on what I believe again. Um, but it's yeah, yeah, it's, it's going to be wild. Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely concerned that, you know, we had before AI was the hot topic. Cyber security was all, you know, you saw it every other, every other conversation,

[00:36:29] every other booth at a trade show. And, but I feel like even the things that were done post COVID until now, right? Like the accepted, here's the tools that you need in place. Here's what you should do baseline as an MSP. I feel like this next wave of things just blows by that in a bad way. Meaning like, if the bad guys are warp speeding to a vulnerability, warp speeding through a back door you didn't know

[00:36:58] about it's a public thing. It's an every, you know, version of XYZ product. The MSP is going to have a hard time keeping up with that. I mean, and then of course, what naturally happens is something bad occurs. And then the end customer points the finger at the MSP saying, Hey, you said you were protecting me. You weren't. And now I had an event and the MSP is like, hold on a second. The manufacturer of XYZ

[00:37:22] solution was responsible for protecting their tool. And if they had something that left this door open, you know, like you gotta be reasonable. That's not my fault. Right? Unfortunately, when this conversation is, but it was Microsoft 365 and you were responsible for protecting Microsoft 365 and the door was left wide open, you get this chicken and egg problem. Was this a vulnerability that Microsoft

[00:37:48] missed? Or was this a configuration item that the MSP missed? You're right. I agree. How do you like, it's a hot in the moment information is really important timely there because if you can't defend yourself with your customer, that customer at work at least is going to leave probably. At worst, may sue you, may come after you, you know, civilly. Yeah. And I can tell you again, what we are seeing,

[00:38:16] it's like in some cases, you know, MSPs need to sell it to the end client because a client thing, when we see that a lot, when they, when an MSP sell Microsoft licenses, the end client 100% sure that they're going to configure the entire security about license, this specific license, right? They just assume that you're doing that. They assume, right? But man, it's out of the budget. You know what it's meant to configure security when you're buying a premium account, man. I don't think it's

[00:38:46] part of the, a part of the license agreement, right? Part of our agreement or the MSP agreement, master agreement, doesn't matter which agreement that you have, right? It's unless you pay an extra for that. And in most cases, and this is what we see a lot, it's like MSPs selling a premium license, standard, doesn't matter. And they still have a gap of this, of those misconfiguration and the end client tell them, you need to, I don't want to pay for that. You need to do that. And I think it's

[00:39:15] about, again, it's about more about business side of things and education, or I don't care, tell if even if it's education, just, you know, sign the right contract. And we saw those things a lot. And then comes to the question, if there is a breach according to the misconfiguration, right? So whose fault is, does it the MSP or the end client that didn't want to pay for that? Or he didn't, or he told, or he assumed that he's already covered because he bought the premium account,

[00:39:42] right? So it's a question. Yeah. I mean, I definitely like, and again, I always try and take things and bring it to the real world, right? If you go to the supermarket, you buy something off the shelf and then you get sick. Is it the supermarket's fault or is it the manufacturer of that can of whatever food you bought? I'm sure if you're a litigious, you know, you know, pesky lawyer, you're going to sue everybody and see who, what sticks. But

[00:40:06] at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if the MSP could say, hey, I configured everything properly. Here's the report that shows everything was set at this time. And, you know, here's, here's, you know, here we can prove that you were secure. This goes back to a hypothetical here, a Microsoft bug or vulnerability that affects everybody has nothing to do with the, you know, the configuration of your account. There is a known problem with their software

[00:40:34] that they needed to fix. And it was a zero day thing that, you know, everybody, you know, found at the same time. That's a, that's a lot, you know, I would look if every MSP could defend that in the moment, they'd be in a much different position than, hey, I don't know. Because I don't know is never a good answer in that case. Yeah. I agree. So I think part of the problem and, and, you know, I probably should ask this earlier. I'm

[00:41:02] gonna ask it now is, hey, how do you know, maybe this is the detection part you were mentioning earlier. It was good at this point. And then something changed, right? Like the setting was enabled when we, when we turned it on, but a month later it was disabled when and by who, like that type of information is really important because it's the first question that's asked when there's a problem. Well, who did that? And when did it break? Or when was it turned off? Or why did

[00:41:30] it happen? And it's like, well, I don't know. Susie went in and turned that off. And I don't know why Susie did that. Let's go ask her. Like, that's the type of thing that usually, if you can't get to that point quickly, it usually doesn't go well. Susie. Yeah. And you're right. We have that and we call it on our platform drifts. So, and we alert of those things just to be prevent, to try to prevent those things before they happen. Because

[00:41:56] if a misconfiguration happened and again, you don't want to wait until it will be compromised, right? You want to figure it out in the minute that it was misconfigured again. So definitely. Yeah. I believe. And let me tell you that. What happens if you don't, right? That you, that you configure something correctly, but Microsoft decided to move this configuration to E5. So under your

[00:42:22] premium account, you're... Oh, wow. I didn't even think about this. And now if you had a premium and you may, and you sure 100% that you could, you cover some, some security control, but it's moved to be on E3 or E5. You're not secure anymore in this particular one. How do you know that? Right? So... That's, that's really important because at the end of the day, I'm like any software SaaS company, whatever, right? They could, this Microsoft could just

[00:42:52] single-handedly decide we have now made this a secondary, a separate skew, right? Or, hey, this feature is available, but you have to upgrade. And they are constantly, like if you file the Microsoft, you know, admin center, it's like a thousand alerts a month, man. Like it's really, really hard to keep up with all of their changes because there's so many, right? But imagine you didn't find out until after the fact that something that was there

[00:43:19] has now been moved, you know, in the net, you know, like we said, the next Microsoft changes comes up in June, I think it's only a month and change from now. All of a sudden it's like, hey, guess what? This, this, and this are no longer available in business premium. Oops. Right? Like that's a problem. And so how does your platform, how does your platform alert people that that changes out? So what we developed behind the sense, it's like a genti KI that what it,

[00:43:49] is it's actually one of the most knowledgeable professional, you know, guy around Microsoft 365, that we scan all the time Microsoft changes. And we have more than few hundreds of tenants with a different combination of licenses. And if something changed, we know that and we update and we alert to all of our clients immediately. And we update our controls, update all the configuration stack and

[00:44:18] all of that. So immediately. So we are aware of that because, you know, before all the AI came out, you could do those kinds of things. I mean, you know, building script and scrapping and do some stuff before it was nuts. And using the API right now, when you have all the MCP stuff and all of those things, and you run it on tests environment, it's, you know, it's, I can't say it's easy, it's hard, but

[00:44:45] you need to know how to do it on the right way. So yeah, we are learning all of our clients around that all the time when comes change. And also about the security that happens to them. It's not only all Microsoft did the change, it's also always affect them and their clients. And yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. It'll be interesting to see as we move forward. Because I did, you know, I did hear some people who are like, man, Microsoft's getting really

[00:45:14] expensive. Gotta look for alternatives. And some people jump to Google. So yeah, you know, Blue Moon event, they're like, oh, I'm gonna try Zoho one. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Good luck. But I think I hear a lot of MSPs trying to figure out how to downgrade their licenses and use third party products to offset the increase. Right. And I feel like that's common. Because in order, let's say Microsoft, to your point, move something from business premium to E5 or E7 now, or E3, right? Like this is an expensive jump.

[00:45:44] They're like, hey, I can get the same thing if I downgrade to business premium or downgrade the business standard and then add these third party products to offset what I'm losing from Microsoft. So it's, and then the other problem is Microsoft has also become the identity platform to sign into all these other platforms, right? So like using your Azure credentials, your 365 username, this, you know, do your single sign on into, you know, could be a thousand different places.

[00:46:11] So now all of a sudden we have this, you know, kind of, you know, you know, sprawl of things, right? It's like, hey, I'm trying to save money. I'm using third party tools. But I also understand that this is the gateway into a lot of things. How do I make sure my third party products and Microsoft are, are fitting my control gap. And this is where it gets very, you know, hard to follow because, you know, where Microsoft can have a single skew that covers all these controls, like you're saying,

[00:46:39] they could be displacing those Microsoft features with like three, five, eight, 10 different products. Yeah. Like, I don't know how they keep track of it all because it's a lot of even parts. You're right. It's hard. It's very hard to do that because it's not all about, it's not only about, it's not only about the pricing and licensing. It's also about the security coverage, right?

[00:47:03] So you still don't know all of that. And it's very difficult. And we see, you know, MSPs do that. They buy me the basic and the standard and have a lot of third party. But again, they need to be, you need, they need to configure all of that eventually. And they need to manage all of that and maintain all of that. And in some place, in some cases, do the configuration and the integration between all the tools to understand the full picture. And then you need to go, if security

[00:47:31] alerts come, you need to make sure that you, that you have a SIM so-called stuff like that. So, you know, it's, it's a question. It's how much your reserve MSPs, how many employees do you have? How much, you know, how much money your end clients will pay you for all of those management things if you want to have best of breed or do you want just check the box, right? It's depends. It's a very big depends for sure. And I think one of the big challenges zooming out, you know,

[00:48:01] kind of to the whole topic is, I think a lot of MSPs, when they read the marketing of a particular product or a particular service, maybe not fully understand what the coverage is of that particular product or tool, right? They just assume that the marketing is a hundred percent and then they go put it in thinking, all right, I'm good. Check box all set. And they find out, yeah, that's not really

[00:48:26] what you thought it was. And that's, you know, you really left yourself wide open. Yeah, you're right. And I feel like, and I'm not trying to blame or target anyone, but a lot of marketing out there, how many times did you say, oh, this is so good. And then you get into it, you're like, where's all the stuff that you said you had? Like, it's not here. Or, oh, that is our highest plan where all that stuff is. And you bought the basic one on this third party tool. You don't have access

[00:48:55] to this, this and this you saw in this app. You're right. I can tell you when all the AI buzz things went out. So I paid most of them, right? So many. And because I thought, oh, this is good for this. This is good for that. This is good. Without mentioning any names, I can tell you that after one month of playing with many of them, I left with only one or two, because as I mentioned, the marketing were amazing. But you know, when you start playing, playing with them, oh man,

[00:49:25] it was not that good. Let's say it in that way. And so I think this is the challenge, not just about security coverage, just generally in the MSP space. Like, hey, you know, we've all bought stuff that didn't work. And yeah, I feel like every six months, you know, like January, June, December, people look at their credit card bill and they figure out, all right, what am I using? What am I not? That kind of thing. But at the end of the day, it's just hard to keep up with all of these vendors and what they're supposed to be doing and all of their

[00:49:54] updates. And so I think that unless you can scale it well, it's probably the best way to say it. You know, it's not just the initial part of it, it's the ongoing part of it, knowing if it's all doing what it's supposed to be doing before a problem occurs, call it a check engine light for lack of a better description. If you don't have that visibility, probably not good. Yeah. 100%. Shai, where are

[00:50:24] we going to see you? You plan to go to any other industry events? Or did you get your US tour out of the way for the year? No, no, yeah, it will be, I think in July or and in September, and maybe on October 2. We still figured out where to go. And in the next few days, I believe I will have a better understanding which event we will go. We're working with our marketing about it, just

[00:50:52] see, you know, because in one trip, it's not only going to event, it's also visiting some client, visiting some MSPs, visiting some partners. And we just try to figure it out. But you know, You got to maximize your trip. Totally get it. Yeah. You know, as much people as we can to meet, to see, to say hi, to hang out. You know me, I love to make fun and having fun. So yeah. 100%. Awesome. Well, looking forward to hearing when you're coming back. You know,

[00:51:19] of course, you're always welcome here to Philadelphia. We always love to have you if you have time. Guys, check out optimize365.io. It sounds like there's going to be other optimized links at some point, but that's the one for 365. And I think everybody's dealing with it if you're in IT or managed services space, mostly. So check that out. Sounds like you could run the product for free before you haven't been to buy anything, which I'm sure is what everybody thinks is going to happen

[00:51:47] anyway. But like the guy's giving it away, you know, let me prove it to you, right? So that I can earn your business. I love that. So check out optimize365.io. You can find, and by the way, if you're listening to the audio version of this, Shai, you can find him online. His name is spelled S-H-A-Y. I know that it's hard to capture that in the pronunciation. S-H-A-Y, last name, C-O-H-E-N. Hit him online. You'll find him. I talk to him all the time, especially on LinkedIn. You can find him there.

[00:52:18] Looking forward to running into you again in person, my friend. I know like it's crazy that we're already in May and like the year is just absolutely going by on warp speed. For everyone else, this session was absolutely recorded. Shai is really, he's been around the industry for a long time, even though he's in Israel, right? It's a global market now. And he works with a lot of the people in the sandbox all over the place, including most, most, you know, in North America where I'm at,

[00:52:43] but definitely drop him a line. He's a smart guy. He's been around the space for a long time. He's really good at security. Even if it has nothing to do with his solution, this guy will talk to you about anything. That's the best part I love about him. So check him out and hit him online. For everyone else, I can't wait to see you hopefully on the European side, guys. We're going to be there in Prague and, you know, you know, in about a month and on the U S side, looking forward to getting

[00:53:09] to Nashville. I know it's summertime. Hopefully it's not too hot, but Nashville is always a good time. So check us out on mspinitiative.com. Shai, good luck to you, my friend. Catch you on the flip side. Appreciate you. Thank you. All right. See ya.