N-able ready to shake the MSP segment

N-able, reference in data protection and RMM solutions for MSPs, was a new participant to the recent IT Press Tour. And the session was very good with a very interesting content and interaction dedicated to data protection.

First, some readers may not be familiar with N-able so it's necessary to refresh our mind. The company was founded in 2000 and pretty early identified a partner for backup and recovery needs. It was at that time the Dutch company IASO, founded in 2004 under the name NOX operating as a backup service provider, who designed, developed and built IASO Backup. IASO got acquired by GFI Software in 2013 and then changed into LOGICnow in 2014. SolarWinds also decided the same destiny for N-able in 2013, swallow LOGICnow in 2016 and established a MSP entity by coupling N-able and LOGICnow in 2016. This activity grew pretty well, some events happened and a decision was made to spin-off that activity around the summer 2021. Since that, exactly the July 19, 2021, the new company is traded on the NYSE market under the symbol NABL.

As said, this session driven by Chris Groot, the GM of the data protection activity and Stefan Voss, VP of product management, was about data protection and its strategy to protect users' data assets. The first key element to consider in this strategy is that it relies on a cloud-first approach. This idea came from several market observations understanding the shift from on-premises devices to cloud-based services, limited human resources to deploy, operate and manage configurations and services and finally obviously cyber-attacks in an even more connected way of life.

Presenters took time to illustrate the wave they play in with the image below that translates a clear shift. In fact, this image is good but the reality is a bit different, it's not really aligned every 5 years, each era doesn't last 5 years, it would too easy, there is no clear boundary between eras and era 4 overlaps era 3, 2 and 1 as all of them continue to exist and are of course the majority of market deployments.

The product is very intuitive, comprehensive, efficient and adopted by more than 12,000 MSPs today. It is very easy to deploy and run in just a few minutes. The product supports Windows, Linux and Mac and machines like servers and workstations and covers also SaaS applications like Microsoft 365. There is no on-premises footprint both in terms of devices or backup images. Just a small backup agent is necessary on target systems. Also storing backup images is an option for faster recovery in some circumstances, the product offers this capability. Thus it is a pure cloud-model, N-able insists to be a cloud-first model, operating as a cloud service and billed as a subscription.

The first data copy is obviously a full copy and sub-sequent ones rely on IASO TrueDelta technology developed years ago and improved and optimized since that of course. All data transfers are encrypted with 128 bits SSL or 256 bits NGINX WebDAV protocol and stored with 448 bits Blowfish algorithm.

The backup works at the file level and it is not an image backup mode. N-able qualifies this as image recovery. Of course, each chunk receives a global unique signature to facilitate comparison during incremental process. But there is no global deduplication across systems, only system per system. This global approach would have potentially generated an even more efficient hardware ratio but this effort is probably too big for a small gain. The product implements a 15 minutes minimum backup interval, I can't consider this as a CDP feature, which is good for a cloud-first approach.

By externalizing all data, corporates are immune to loss of integrity by cyber attacks or even from internals errors and disasters. In the background and transparently for users, virtual full images at each schedule are regenerated helping users to restore from only one data sets. This is an extra effort on the backup catalog but still processing only in N-able data centers, without any impact of user's resources. N-able uses 30 data centers from 22 countries to store data.

Definitely N-able is on the radar and 2022 should be an interesting year for the company. But it's a hot market segment under pressure by Acronis, Atempo, Axcient, Carbonite, Datto, Druva, HYCU, Unitrends and Veeam.