EChannelNews Podcast

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Manuj Aggarwal, Founder of TetraNoodle Technologies, examined the trajectory of major AI vendors toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) through automated code generation. He noted that while this shift is driving tech-sector restructuring and impacting global spending power, it presents a critical “crossroads” for MSPs. As technical tasks become increasingly commoditized and devalued, the true value of an MSP will shift toward human-centric capabilities: creativity, empathy, and a relentless focus on customer business outcomes.

To navigate this transition, MSPs must pivot toward “Managed Intelligence”—a productized service model that prioritizes strategic insights over mere maintenance. He identified Identity Management and Sales Readiness as the two primary hurdles preventing MSPs from securing these high-value, high-margin contracts.

Finally, he also addressed the macro-risks of the AI era, from rapid vendor volatility and SaaS model shifts to the emergence of a “Cybersecurity Poverty Line.” This concept highlights a growing tier of organizations unable to keep pace with AI-accelerated threats, necessitating a move toward defensive automation and more sophisticated risk classification.

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Antoine Jabari, Co-Founder, GM Channel & Alliances Business at JumpCloud, explored the high-stakes evolution of agentic AI adoption and its profound implications for the channel. He highlighted a widening gap between early adopters rearchitecting their operating models and a long tail of organizations still utilizing AI merely for surface-level productivity. Antoine positioned MSPs as the vital bridge for SMBs during this transformation, noting a distinct market shift over the last six months toward scalable, robust AI solutions that require more assertive leadership from service providers.

Antoine warned that security threats have reached a new velocity. To combat these risks, identity is the definitive new perimeter. In a world where human and non-human (agentic) workflows are distributed across vast cloud estates, treating these identities as core control points is the only viable path forward. He detailed JumpCloud’s strategy to eliminate the complexity of “stitching together” point products by consolidating access and device controls into a single pane of glass. By offering outcome-focused, single-click workflows—such as unified onboarding across devices, VPNs, and applications—JumpCloud provides MSPs with a roadmap for the auditability and guardrails necessary to govern the next generation of agentic identities.

See our last interview with Antoine: https://www.e-channelnews.com/update-discussion-with-jumpclouds-antoine-jebara/

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Denis Villeneuve, Cybersecurity and Resiliency Practice Lead at Kyndryl, examined the profound implications of frontier AI models—such as Mythos—for enterprise cybersecurity, framing the challenge as a strategic decision-making mandate rather than a cause for alarm. While core cybersecurity principles remain foundational, the acceleration of AI-driven vulnerability discovery and exploitation marks a pivotal shift from human-speed to machine-speed responses. This evolution is creating a widening “cyber poverty line,” separating resilient organizations from those unable to manage the exponential surge in patch throughput required for modern vendor and open-source ecosystems.

The transition toward agentic AI introduces a new layer of governance and deployment risk. To navigate this, Denis emphasized the necessity of robust agentic frameworks that incorporate human-in-the-loop guardrails and role-based agent deployment within SOC workflows. Achieving C-suite alignment is critical to curbing the proliferation of shadow AI and shadow IT, ensuring that innovation remains under centralized governance. While the tools are changing, the solution remains rooted in the synergy of people, processes, and products, with a renewed focus on the basics: rigorous patching, multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, and defense-in-depth.

Looking forward, organizations must evolve their existing compliance frameworks—such as PCI—and mobilize cross-functional “tiger teams” to manage high-stakes communication and response plans.

See previous podcast with Denis: https://www.e-channelnews.com/kyndryl-on-cyber-resilience-bridging-readiness-gaps-and-navigating-ai-threats/

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Ken Rayner and Kenrick Bagnall of RB Cyber, detailed a comprehensive security architecture designed to bridge the gap between human vulnerability and technical resilience. The strategy centers on two flagship solutions: Watchdog, which provides advanced human-risk monitoring, policy governance, and seamless integration with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and major EDR/MDM platforms; and NeuShield, featuring patented Mirror Shielding technology. This innovative approach allows for near-instant ransomware recovery, with current support for NTFS, OneDrive, and Windows environments, and macOS compatibility arriving shortly. Beyond software, the offering provides a high-touch “A-Team” incident response service via a 1-800 hotline, supplemented by specialized legal and PR support to manage the aftermath of a breach.

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Snehal Antani, CEO and Co-Founder of Horizon3.ai, addressed the tactical reality of AI-driven adversary behavior. AI has drastically accelerated the attacker’s “OODA loop” (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), citing a documented case of an autonomous compromise occurring in just 77 seconds. Beyond the technical speed, the discussion touched on geopolitical shifts, including Iranian targeting of dual-use infrastructure and a projected surge in unpatched vulnerabilities (CISA KEVs) for late 2026.

To counter these hyper-automated threats, Horizon3.ai is leveraging its channel partners and MSSPs to deploy advanced defensive tactics, such as deception technology and data poisoning. By empowering partners to move beyond traditional scanning and into active, autonomous defense, Horizon3.ai aims to neutralize AI-driven exploits before they can be weaponized against civilian and corporate infrastructure.

See our past interview with Horizon3: https://www.e-channelnews.com/horizon3-ai-grows-its-global-partner-program/

Horizon3.ai recently released new research on how organizations measure security—and whether those metrics reflect real resilience against attackers. The findings reveal a clear gap between tracking completed work and actually stopping real-world threats.

Key findings include:

• Only 11% of practitioners validate or patch within 24 hours of a CISA or ENISA known exploited vulnerability alert, many take a week or more to confirm if they’re even exposed
• 93% of CISOs say they could prove their organization took reasonable, validated steps to prevent a breach, yet only 30% patch and then test to confirm the risk was actually removed
• 97% of CISOs are confident their endpoint protection would detect lateral movement or privilege escalation, yet only 12% have validated EDR effectiveness in the last three months

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Jeff Collins, CEO of WanAware, explored the shift toward Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS), a model designed to help MSPs manage the increasing complexity of AI-accelerated infrastructure. He defined their core value proposition as “actionable observability”—a method that moves beyond simple data collection to map the complex relationships and “blast radius” of dependencies across cloud, on-premises, IoT, and OT environments. By establishing a real-time knowledge graph, the platform can auto-discover ephemeral or developer-deployed resources that traditional scanners often miss, effectively reducing the noise of false positives that plague modern security operations.

He also addressed the telemetry trap, where organizations collect massive amounts of data in silos but fail to derive automated context. WanAware’s solution uses a lightweight, no-code integrator to ingest disparate APIs and correlate them into a unified view. This architectural approach allows MSPs to capture tribal knowledge from their senior engineers and convert it into automated playbooks. These playbooks are then executed with strict AI grounding and per-action verification, ensuring that incident responses are consistent, documented, and free from the risks of manual, spreadsheet-driven workflows.

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Presenters: Julian Lee, Publisher, Community Builder, Speaker, Channel Ecosystem Developer with a focus on cybersecurity, AI and Digital Transformation
Evgeniy Kharam, Publisher, Community Builder, Speaker, Channel Ecosystem Developer with a focus on cybersecurity, AI and Digital Transformation Cybersecurity Architect | Evangelist | Consultant | Advisor | Podcaster | Visionary | Speaker |
Adam Bennett, Co-Founder & CEO at SureStack CEO at Crosshair Cyber
Randal Wark, Owner, MTech Cyber (MSP & Cybersecurity) ★ Conference Host ★ Mastermind Facilitator ★ Podcast Host ★ Journalist

The Cybersecurity Defense Ecosystem aims to assist Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in becoming more cybersecurity-oriented amidst industry disruptions caused by AI and regulatory changes.

This strategic debrief from RSAC 2026 shifted the conversation from speculative AI threats to the immediate reality of autonomous vulnerability discovery. The team analyzed the emergence of specialized AI models, such as MITOS, which have demonstrated the ability to autonomously identify long-standing zero-day vulnerabilities in minutes. This shift from human-led research to industrialized, machine-speed exploitation necessitates a radical reassessment of traditional patching cycles and defensive postures. Central to this new reality is the evolution of security health checks, which must now account for AI-driven discovery tools that bypass standard fuzzing. The consensus was that fully scanned code is no longer a valid static assumption, and architecture must instead be adapted for continuous, active vulnerability discovery.

The group advocated for “assumed breach” tabletop exercises and aggressive red-teaming to interpret AI risks that legacy monitoring often overlooks. A significant portion of the session was dedicated to a warning regarding the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and delegated AI agents. While these agents reduce operational complexity, they introduce a “lethal trifecta” of data leakage, over-privilege, and the risk of being coaxed into calling over-scoped tools. To counter this, the team recommended a shift toward Outcome-as-a-Service, leveraging trusted MSP/MSSP partners to provide a human sanity check on machine-to-machine interactions.

Finally, the team addressed the immediate dangers of Shadow AI and unauthorized data exposure to public LLMs. The recommended defense-in-depth strategy focuses on achieving basic hygiene at scale, including a move toward sub-72-hour patching windows for critical flaws. By utilizing AI for defensive purposes—specifically for Active Attack Path Management—organizations can begin to match the speed of modern adversaries.

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In this episode, we sit down with Tom Boggs, VP of Service Delivery at BCN, to explore why the modern MSP battleground has shifted from basic connectivity to high-level service execution. With over 30 years in the game, BCN is positioning itself as a leader in managed technology solutions—ranging from SD-WAN and SASE to full-lifecycle managed services.

Tom breaks down how BCN moves beyond traditional technical metrics by utilizing Experience-Level Agreements (XLAs). By blending real-time customer feedback with process data, BCN ensures that uptime actually translates to a positive user experience. We also discuss the ideal BCN customer—multi-site enterprises requiring robust connectivity overlays—and how BCN is cautiously but effectively integrating AI. From self-healing SD-WAN networks to internal project onboarding tools, Tom highlights a pragmatic approach to innovation that prioritizes data privacy over open AI risks.

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Binny Gill, Founder & CEO of Kognitos, introduced its neuro-symbolic platform, a cognitive operating system designed to bridge the trust gap in enterprise AI. Unlike traditional generative models that rely on probabilistic “guesses,” Kognitos utilizes a neuro-symbolic architecture that executes business processes deterministically. By separating AI-driven reasoning from a symbolic execution layer, the platform ensures that mission-critical workflows—particularly in audit-sensitive areas like finance and revenue—run exactly as documented, effectively eliminating hallucinations and “logic rot.”

Binny also highlighted a shift in adoption strategy: rather than leading with code, organizations are encouraged to document tribal knowledge in plain English, which the platform then converts into auditable, executable logic. This approach allows partners and Global Systems Integrators (GSIs) to transition into AI-native practices, moving away from fragile RPA bots toward self-healing, automated factories. With internal examples showing engineering and marketing pipelines shifting to AI-generated code under human-set governance, Kognitos positions itself as the essential layer for translating market noise into reliable, high-ROI enterprise operations.

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Frank Vitagliano, CEO of the Global Technology Distributor Council (GTDC), redefined the modern distributor’s role as a sophisticated go-to-market orchestrator that has evolved far beyond traditional logistics and financing. Today’s distributors act as critical growth engines, investing in massive digital platforms that accelerate quote-to-cash cycles and provide multi-vendor marketplaces that offer a distinct service advantage over hyperscalers. By leveraging decades of proprietary data, these organizations are now pioneering AI-driven demand generation to identify precise upgrade opportunities and providing the compatibility testing necessary for MSPs and VARs to deploy emerging technologies with confidence.

As the industry shifts from hardware fulfillment to platform-led aggregation and advisory services, the GTDC is addressing the “AI gap” for smaller MSPs who find the 12–18 month investment in specialized hiring and training to be prohibitive. Distributors are stepping in to bridge this divide with extensive training resources and regional advisory councils, ensuring the channel remains resilient despite external headwinds like global memory shortages and geopolitical conflicts. Through its new knowledge hubs and industry reports, the GTDC is empowering partners to navigate these complexities, positioning distribution as the essential layer for achieving mid-to-high single-digit growth in an increasingly AI-centric landscape.