Slide Adds CTO, CISO As MSP Growth Accelerates: Exclusive

‘Once you get to a certain size, the ability to have a seasoned lion tamer making sure that all of these different priorities that we have to manage in our tech landscape are getting time allocated to them efficiently, that’s really important,’ says Michael Fass, Slide CEO.

Slide is adding new leadership as the MSP-focused backup vendor scales its business, naming Joshua Dion as CTO and Chris Henderson as CISO.

The appointments come as Slide crosses 100 full-time employees and surpasses 1,000 MSP partners since launching less than two years ago.

For CEO Michael Fass and COO Carlson Choi, the hires give Slide more expertise needed to keep growing. And as Slide has evolved, Fass said the company’s challenges have changed. With more people, products and priorities, the vendor needed additional leadership to coordinate its engineering organization and keep innovation moving at an efficient rate.

“Once you get to a certain size, the ability to have a seasoned lion tamer making sure that all of these different priorities that we have to manage in our tech landscape are getting time allocated to them efficiently, that’s really important,” Fass told CRN in an exclusive interview.

Dion brings more than 25 years of software and hardware engineering leadership experience. He most recently served as CTO at TrustCommerce and previously was vice president of engineering at RightHand Robotics, leading teams of up to 600 people and managing budgets reaching $100 million.

That experience is important as Slide moves into “hypergrowth mode,” Choi said.

“One of my mentors taught me that a certain executive can take you from one edge of one stair step to the bottom of the next,” Choi told CRN. “You want to hire up and bring in somebody who can help you grow. He’s the guy sitting on top of that next step, and he’s going to help us pull ourselves up to the next step,” Choi said.

Dion, he said, brings experience from the next stage of that journey.

“What attracted me to Slide was the opportunity to build for a market that’s evolving incredibly quickly,” Dion said in a statement. “MSPs need technology partners that can innovate at pace without compromising stability or quality. I’m excited to help scale the engineering organization, invest in the team and build the platform that supports the company’s next phase of growth.”

Henderson held positions at Datto and most recently at threat hunting firm Huntress, where he served as CISO. He said MSPs are being asked to defend against a much tougher threat landscape, but many of the backup and disaster recovery tools they depend on were not built for today’s level of risk.

“That creates a real gap between what MSPs are expected to protect and what their tools are actually built to withstand,” Henderson said in a statement.

What drew him to Slide, he said, was that security is built into the platform from the start rather than added later. As Slide pushes into new workloads and markets, his focus is making sure the platform can scale securely alongside the company and its MSP partners.

“Our partners can always trust the recovery path is as secure as the data it is protecting,” Henderson said.

Fass said hiring a CISO was particularly important because of the role backup plays in protecting MSP customers’ data.

“MSPs’ No. 1 job is to protect their clients’ data. Everything else is secondary. Nothing matters if that goes wrong,” he said. “We also believe that the products and services that we focus on, the backup suite, is the last line of defense and probably the most secure and best line of defense to protect clients’ data.”

The new hires also come after a 2025 lawsuit filed by rival vendor Kaseya accusing Slide of stealing intellectual property and alleging that Slide co-founder and Chairman Austin McChord was rebuilding Datto, his backup business Kaseya acquired for $6.2 billion in 2022. In the lawsuit, Kaseya sought to block Slide from selling its backup product and is also pursuing unspecified monetary damages.

In April 2026, the parties agreed to drop Datto’s trade-secret claim and a deceptive-trade-practices claim, according to a story reported by IT Channel Oxygen. The lawsuit now centers on whether former Datto employees, including McChord, Fass and others who later joined Slide, violated confidentiality and noncompete agreements. A hearing is scheduled for June 2027.

Slide partner Devaughn Bittle praised the vendor’s “smart move” to add leaders focused on security and compliance, especially as MSP customers face more requirements around certifications.

Compliance is increasingly more important with new requirements around certifications for customers around IT, like CMMC in particular,” Bittle, president of Frederick, Md.-based CommPutercations, told CRN. “I feel that Slide is making a smart move to have someone lead the charge in regard to compliance.”

He added that Slide is a “true strategic partner for MSPs and MSSPs,” saying the company works closely with partners to understand how they operate and use its product.

“They genuinely care about the MSP community and want what is best for the community as a whole,” Bittle said. “Doing business with them reminds me of what it was like in the early days of MSPs.”

Over the next year, Fass expects Dion to help speed up product development, while Henderson focuses on strengthening Slide’s security and compliance work.

“We are going to speed up our product development,” the CEO said. “And I think you’ll see our compliance suite of products evolve very rapidly. You’ll also see our MSPs have a leader in the space, a thought leader in the space, to solicit, to learn and to get better in their own camps. That can only help Slide grow, and that can only help the MSP community develop as we grow within the MSP community.”