Continuum will soon add cloud management to its RMM solution and cloud backup support to its BDR solution.
The managed services vendor unveiled those forthcoming updates at its Navigate 2018 partner event, which is currently underway at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, a short distance from Continuum’s home office.
Due to reach market in the fourth quarter of the year, the cloud management capabilities will enable RMM users to migrate workloads into the Microsoft Azure public cloud and to monitor both server instances and selected online services in Azure environments. Supported workloads will include Azure SQL Databases, Azure Active Directory deployments, and VPN gateways, among others.
The goal of the new functionality is to make offsite and on-premises administration roughly equivalent processes, according to Fielder Hiss (pictured), Continuum’s vice president of product.
“Ultimately my goal for us is to support you in a way that we don’t care where the workloads are,” said Hiss this morning in a keynote address.
Continuum’s NOC service will soon provide outsourced monitoring and management of Azure environments as well. “We’re going to have automated remediation, remediation through the portal and remediation through our network operations center,” Hiss says. The vendor will issue alerts and generate tickets within one minute of identifying a problem, he continued.
Continuum is also equipping its BDR solution to backup virtual servers in Azure. Users will be free both to save snapshots in and virtualize protected resources from either Continuum’s cloud or Azure itself.
According to Hiss, Continuum made Azure its initial focus for cloud management and backup because the SMBs its partners serve use it five times as often as the Amazon Web Services public cloud. The vendor will add support for AWS in the future just the same, but has no plans at present to support additional clouds, such as the Google Cloud Platform.
“We don’t see as much Google overall, frankly,” said Hiss yesterday in an interview with ChannelPro.
Coming next month is new integration between Continuum’s platform and Vancouver, B.C.-based IT Glue‘s managed services documentation solution. Based on custom-developed APIs that required a year’s worth of collaboration between the two vendors, the new functionality lets MSPs give Continuum’s help desk access to documentation on a customer-by-customer basis. Users will have access to a detailed activity log showing exactly when and how remote help desk employees utilize those privileges.
“It’s going to allow for faster resolution of client problems and ultimately eliminate any duplication that exists moving documentation back and forth between the two systems,” said Hiss of the new connectivity during today’s keynote.
Hiss also showcased a variety of usability and automation enhancements to Continuum’s software during his presentation.
“We’ve been working for the past nine months or so to completely modernize and revamp our user interface and user experience [to] make it much more simple, much more intuitive,” he said.
Advanced scripting functionality now lets technicians string management tasks together via a drag-and-drop interface and execute them automatically when preset conditions are met. “If something fails they run another activity, if it succeeds they run a third activity,” he says.
New desktop management capabilities in Continuum’s Intellimon alerting technology powered by artificial intelligence help MSPs “eliminate a lot of noise,” Hiss told ChannelPro yesterday, by more accurately separating real from apparent problems. Continuum’s software and NOC address legitimate issues automatically in many cases, he added.
Coming soon, Hiss told Navigate attendees this morning, is new data recovery functionality designed to spare technicians from the time-consuming hassle of manually tracking down specific files a customer wants restored.
“We’re going to introduce a new search-based approach to file recovery so that your technicians can go in and type a file name, type a file type, and essentially search the backups in order to very quickly find and restore exactly what they’re looking for,” Hiss said in his keynote.
Also at Navigate today, Continuum added protection for Microsoft Azure and Office 365 environments to its managed security portfolio.
