Cloud management vendor Augmentt has added bulk configuration of multifactor authentication settings and automated MFA alerting to Augmentt Secure, its security policy administration solution for Microsoft 365.
The new features are designed to simplify use and enforcement of a defense against unauthorized logins that Microsoft itself says can prevent 99.9% of automated attacks, according to Derek Belair, Augmentt’s CEO.
“Nothing is more in the crosshairs of most MSPs than really trying to address this whole MFA problem that exists within the world of Microsoft,” he says.
The source of that problem, he continues, is that the standard Microsoft 365 administration console only supports single tenants. “Now you can do it from our solution to all your customers at once,” Belair says.
In addition to establishing MFA policies, channel pros can use the new functionality to receive an alert any time a user modifies those MFA settings. “They can be notified if any of that changes, and then they can use our product to just go right back in and remediate it,” Belair says.
Alerting is critical functionality for MSPs, many of whom put carefully designed MFA controls in place during the customer onboarding process only to discover later that they’ve been disabled. “Once they leave and the customer is sort of left on their own, a lot of times that MFA starts to degrade as people opt out,” Belair explains.
Augmentt plans to add more alerts to Secure in the future to detect use of legacy authentication techniques, logins from blacklisted geographies, and IP addresses outside a white-listed range, among other things.
“Microsoft has a lot of policies. If you go into the bowels of the Microsoft portal, you can build policies forever. The reality is most MSPs are concerned with five or six,” Belair says. “Our goal is to basically make our way down that list.”
Secure’s new MFA functionality enhances its use as a sales tool, he adds. In addition to security policy enrollment and enforcement functionality, the system includes auditing and reporting features that spotlight weaknesses like outdated passwords, and now accounts unprotected by MFA as well. “It’ll give you a set of best practices and recommendations to improve the security posture,” Belair says. Channel pros can then use those recommendations as the basis for remediation plans and justification for recurring revenue security management services.
Secure is one of four products in Augmentt’s portfolio. Others help MSPs inventory SaaS applications in a client environment, manage cloud applications, and backup data in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. According to Belair, such capabilities are increasingly more important than the device-oriented functionality in traditional RMM solutions.
“Most MSPs aren’t selling a whole lot of servers these days,” he says. “Most of the spend is going towards SaaS and cloud, and MSPs notoriously have not done a whole lot when it comes to SaaS.”
That’s especially true of SaaS security, Belair adds. “They all have a stack of security products that they use,” he says of MSPs, “but the reality is most of those tools don’t do a whole lot when it comes to cloud.”
Businesses ran 110 SaaS applications on average last year, according to research from cloud management vendor BetterCloud. That’s up 38% versus 2020, nearly 600% versus 2017, and almost 1,300% versus 2015.
Augmentt added desktop app discovery to its platform in March.
