N-able Exec On Disaster Recovery As A Service: We Are On The Front Line

‘Resilience isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. It’s not a box that you can check. It’s a continuous, never-ending process of confronting what you don’t know, what you can’t see and what you aren’t yet prepared for,’ says Mike Adler, executive vice president, chief technical and chief product officer at N-able.

Resilience, not prevention, is emerging as the central challenge for MSPs. In response, N-able has expanded its Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering to help MSPs deliver fast, reliable recovery without the expense and operational burden of building and maintaining their own infrastructure.

Speaking in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the Burlington, Mass.-based vendor’s Empower conference this week, Mike Adler pointed to the state’s hurricane preparedness model as a blueprint for how MSPs should think about resilience. The lesson: Don’t stop the storm, design systems that survive it and recover quickly.

“We are, as a community, the front line,” said Adler, executive vice president, chief technical and chief product officer at N-able. “We are paid to help organizations, small and medium-sized businesses, be resilient. It’s in our hands and that really shouldn’t be a burden. It should be an opportunity for all of us, because the businesses that will thrive over the next five years are the ones who are building resilience today.”

That opportunity is driving demand for services like DRaaS, which uses a proactive model, keeping pre-staged systems in the cloud ready for failover, reducing downtime and maintaining business continuity.

The offering also reflects growing demand for simpler, vendor-managed recovery solutions as cyberattacks rise. Additionally, it gives businesses flexibility in what they protect, lowers complexity and improves recovery speed.

“Resilience isn’t a destination. It’s a journey,” Adler said. “It’s not a box that you can check. It’s a continuous, never-ending process of confronting what you don’t know, what you can’t see and what you aren’t yet prepared for.”

That uncertainty is where many MSPs struggle, he added, but where new technologies are starting to take shape.

“The amount of time you spend between not knowing and knowing is the hard part,” he said. “But this is also the place where we can help. AI doesn’t eliminate that learning space, it compresses it. It turns months of discovery into days, days into minutes and helps you move faster than any human team ever could.”

N-able’s DRaaS expansion reflects that philosophy. By offering a co-managed model, the company is targeting MSPs that want to deliver enterprise-grade recovery without maintaining their own disaster recovery environments. The approach addresses common pain points such as unpredictable cloud costs and limited in-house expertise.

Instead, MSPs can offer recovery as a service with failover, isolated remediation and continuity while relying on N-able’s cloud infrastructure behind the scenes.

“Resilience isn’t a feature. It’s not a single tool or practice,” he said. “It’s a comprehensive, integrated approach to how you run your business before the storm, during the storm and after the storm. It’s the difference between hoping nothing goes wrong and knowing that when something does, you’ll be ready.”

John Krikke, vice president of Canadian MSP Onward Computer Systems, said DRaaS was a solution that was missing, especially for smaller clients who don’t have their own hosted environment.

“It’s been overdue,” he told CRN. “We’re glad to see it, it’s great to have a backup solution we can lean on.”