Augmentt has introduced a “free forever” software program that will make a variety of cloud security and management tools available to its partners at no extra cost.
The first two such tools—called the Augmentt Email & Notification Console and the Augmentt Security Auditing Tool for Salesforce—debuted today alongside a new partner benefit that grants users of the company’s Discover cloud asset inventory solution 100 free licenses.
The email and notification system helps channel pros more easily spot important messages within an endless stream of vendor notifications, and take automated rule-based action on them. Partners can tell the tool to forward billing-related emails to their finance department, for example, or notify their technicians about messages concerning critical vulnerabilities, suspicious user activity, and failed backups. In addition to email addresses, the system can direct notifications to Slack and Microsoft Teams channels or to a PSA solution.
The system relies on dedicated inboxes hosted and managed by Augmentt. Users must instruct SaaS vendors to begin sending notifications to those addresses, which can correspond to specific clients, specific SaaS applications, or a combination of both. The tool comes with unlimited inboxes, as well as unlimited rules for processing messages.
Partner input inspired the solution, according to Derik Belair, Augmentt’s CEO. “IT guys are just drowning in all these emails,” he says. “95% of them you can probably ignore. There’s a couple of them in there that you should pay attention to.”
Augmentt has longer term plans to further streamline vendor notifications by eliminating incoming emails altogether. Future editions of Engage, the company’s SaaS monitoring and management solution, will import notifications directly into the system’s interface via backend API connections.
The second free tool, which is also available immediately, is designed to help channel pros who administer Salesforce for their customers automatically collect critical details on users, privileges, policy compliance, health status and risk, licensing, system and API usage, and other matters. It too is a direct response to partner feedback.
“Salesforce security is just a beast to tackle, and it’s very hard to get data,” Belair says. “We’ve been hearing that a lot.”
At present, Augmentt solutions support Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Future releases now on the company’s roadmap will add support for Salesforce, enabling technicians to configure policies, remediate policy violations automatically, and more. The free tool introduced today offers more limited, read-only help with Salesforce right away.
Though most Augmentt partners serve only a handful of Salesforce users currently, Belair notes, those customers tend to be among their biggest. “They’re usually in their top five accounts,” he says.
The two free solutions rolled out today, Belair adds, are the first in what will be an ongoing stream going forward, with roughly one new system arriving every quarter.
The new licensing benefit announced today gives newcomers to Augmentt Discover 100 free starter licenses to deploy with an initial crop of customers. Those seats are a supplement to the also free not-for-resale licenses Discover users already received. Partners also continue to receive free “prospecting licenses” for use with potential new accounts. Unlike the 100 starter licenses, prospecting licenses can be reassigned to new sales targets after previous ones have signed on as customers.
The prospecting licenses and additional free licenses are both designed to lower the barriers that prevent some channel pros from adding cloud management to their service offerings. The free Salesforce tool similarly aims to make entering a potentially profitable new market less intimidating.
“That tends to be a little bit of a risky or scary venture for a lot of MSPs,” Belair observes.
Like fellow cloud management vendor Nerdio, Augmentt views apprehensions like that, rather than competitors, as its greatest impediment to growth and adoption. “What is most important to us is raising the profile of SaaS security and management. Why do it? Where do you get started?” Belair says. “There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty about how much is this going to cost.”
Augmentt added bulk configuration of multifactor authentication settings and automated MFA alerting to its Augmentt Secure security policy solution for Microsoft 365 in May, and added desktop app discovery to Augmentt Discover in March.
