Augmentt has introduced an advanced edition of its security management solution for Microsoft 365.
Augmentt Secure Premium adds templated, automated policy setting and configuration features, among others, to the base monitoring, alerting, and remediation functionality in the original version of Secure, which is now known as Secure Essentials.
“I like to think of it as the easy button that I can hit that turns on all 15 things that I care about in a customer’s environment,” says Ali Mahmoud, vice president of product management at Augmentt. MSPs regularly call enforcing a minimum security baseline across all of their accounts one of the biggest wishes and worst pain points, he adds.
Granular permissions functionality in the new product lets users assign least privilege access rights to specific users and user categories, inside their own company or in co-managed accounts with an IT staff.
Enhanced threat alert and remediation capabilities provide greater visibility into suspicious activity like simultaneous logins from multiple locations, as well as the ability to block that activity or lock compromised accounts immediately from directly within an alert.
Users can also create alert thresholds defining which issues they do or don’t want flagged for immediate attention, and view tenant-specific context for otherwise generic vendor notifications. Expanded configuration settings in the product cover topics like password reset notifications, external mail forwarding, and safe attachments.
Automated, customizable remediation measures currently on the roadmap will eventually allow users to create standard procedures for responding to incidents based on their type, their severity, and a particular client’s compliance obligations, among other variables. An MSP could use that feature to re-enable MFA on managed endpoints immediately and automatically whenever the systems sees that safeguard disabled, for example.
Automation across its portfolio is a key part of Augmentt’s strategy for helping MSPs raise productivity from an average of 200 seats per technician to 2,000. “That’s our vision is really to help the MSP sell new cloud services and scale their teams so that they can manage massive numbers of seats in a very effective way,” says Gavin Garbutt, Augmentt’s chairman and co-founder.
Augmentt Secure, which reached market last November, is one of three core Augmentt solutions, along with Discover, a SaaS application inventory solution, and Engage, a cloud management tool. Originally sold separately, all three systems have been part of an Essentials bundle offering up to 2,000 seats of each for $300 a month since early this year.
Augmentt offers 100 licenses of its Essentials solutions for free as well. “Our goal is mass proliferation. We want to get this in every MSP’s hands,” Garbutt says.
Standard functionality in Secure Essentials lets users configure and monitor security settings in Microsoft 365 accounts, receive basic alerts, remediate vulnerabilities, and generate customer-ready reports. Secure Premium adds more robust features for what Garbutt calls an average of 50 cents per seat per month.
Premium editions of Discover and Engage with similar pricing schemes and features not found in their Essentials counterparts are set to arrive next year. Like all of Augmentt’s solutions, those products will be sold without long-term contracts.
“It’s all month to month,” Garbutt says.
Augmentt Secure was recently certified as SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. “That’s a big thing for a young company to accomplish,” Garbutt says.
Already climbing before the coronavirus pandemic, cloud adoption has skyrocketed in recent years as work from anywhere arrangements have reached mainstream status. Global outlays by SMBs on SaaS-based business applications and collaboration tools will grow at a 17% CAGR to $291 billion by 2026, according to Analysys Mason. Augmentt’s recent growth arc reflects that trend.
“If you looked at our customer base in December, we had 100,000 licenses sold in market, and today we’re over 1.2 million,” Garbutt says, adding that the company’s seat count grew 55% just between the second and third quarters of this year.
Augmentt and other cloud management vendors, such as Nerdio, JumpCloud, and SkyKick, are likely to experience similar or even faster growth in the future as overseeing SaaS and IaaS environments increasingly defines what MSPs do, Garbutt predicts.
“The floodgates are just going to open,” he says.
Augmentt added near real-time alerting for Microsoft 365 to Secure in August.
