Escalating Attacks Mean MSPs Need Backup That Is Secure-By-Design: Slide Exec

While cyberattacks have gotten faster and more sophisticated, backup technology has not changed substantially in more than a decade, according to Slide’s Kelly Fyffe.

Even as cybercriminals have changed up their approach to make their attacks faster and more effective—including by increasingly targeting backups before deploying ransomware—backup technology itself has not changed substantially in more than a decade, an executive at business continuity and disaster recovery vendor Slide said Sunday.

Given the intensifying threat environment, however, it’s clear that MSPs need to be offered a more modern approach to business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) technology—with a particular focus on designing around security from the get-go, said Kelly Fyffe, community and channel Manager at Slide, during a session at XChange August 2026.

For MSPs in 2026, “it doesn’t matter what your business model is—you have to be security-first to survive,” Fyffe said Sunday during XChange August 2026, which is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company and being held this week in National Harbor, Md.

Slide is seeking to bring an updated approach to BCDR that is faster, secure-by-design and “MSP-first,” she said. Slide’s co-founder and chairman, Austin McChord, previously founded backup vendor Datto, while Slide co-founder and CEO Michael Fass was likewise formerly a top executive at Datto. Kaseya acquired Datto for $6.2 billion in 2022.

In terms of security for Slide’s product, “it wasn't an afterthought with us,” Fyffe said.

“What we've seen with a lot of legacy tools is, there are add-on features for security, for encryption. Some of those are hidden behind paywalls—versus ours, [which] is natively encrypted in transit and at rest. You can't turn it off,” she said. “That makes it a lot easier to scale with confidence.”

At Altek Business Systems, a Telford, Pa.-based provider of managed IT and security services, there’s no question that security is an increasing focus when it comes to deployment of backup technology, Altek CTO Wilhelm Rebmann told CRN.

In fact, security concerns have prompted Altek to evaluate newer options in the category, and the MSP recently began to evaluate Slide as one option, Rebmann said.

While many existing products in the segment were sufficient in the past, the security of some of those products has now become “questionable,” he said. “They’re not state of the art. And things are changing.”

Without a doubt, adopting BCDR technology that is secure-by-design is a top priority going forward, Rebmann said.

Ultimately, all MSPs right now should be re-considering whether backup tools created for a previous era can still protect their customers against the rising, AI-powered threats of today, Fyffe said.

“Are legacy tools cutting it?” she said. “Or does it make sense to work with a modern company who’s solving today’s problems, and problems for the next 15 years?”