AVG focuses partners with upgrade to managed platform

AVG security awareness director, Michael McKinnon

Security firm AVG has focused on making life easier for partners to offer managed services with the latest upgrade to its Managed Workplace platform.

The firm is encouraging more of its partners to step into the MSP space with the release.

Version 9.1 of the platform has a fully integrated, open ecosystem remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform that AVG claims will make life simpler for partners to manage a client’s infrastructure.

AVG security awareness director, Michael McKinnon, said partners are able to use agentless technology to get inside networks and easily manage infrastructure for clients.

“We have modules now that are reaching out to Office365, VMware and other plugins like secure sign on and backup disaster recovery.”

McKinnon said this Cloud integration was important because, from an operational point of view, Cloud services are an integral part of company workloads.

“There is no reason to be treating these separately anymore. When we talk about the Internet of Things we often have the idea that it is just about physical devices but it is more than that.”

“There is a whole other world opening up with the Cloud. We want to monitor these Cloud services to be ahead of the curve when it comes to malware and malicious actors.”

“it’s about having safeguards and systems in place to help manage that effectively.”

The upgrade was concurrently launched in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, and US. It was also localised for partners in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

The upgrade features a social media-style user interface that is said to streamline workflows to simplify the lives of IT providers, MSPs and their SMB customers.

“This is quite a significant step forward in terms of the feature set of the product,” McKinnon said.

“We have done a lot of work on the user interface. We are making it more appealing for MSPs to use as their daily critical systems dashboard.”

“We have built an interface that makes it very easy for partners to see at a glance if a client’s infrastructure is secure so that they will be able to recognise and respond to threats as quickly as possible.”

McKinnon said the new interface also allows for the identification of processes that can be automated or scripted.

“One of the big advantages is the ability to automate a lot of the standard jobs that an MSP would be taking.”

“We now have an umbrella of products that cater for the entire market. From resellers to Cloud enablers and Cloud partners right through to enterprise level MSPs.”