Why security and operations can no longer run apart

Because AI runs on context. And context doesn't live in silos. Context comes from connected systems. Operations. Security. Automation. Working together.

That is why SuperOps and Guardz partnered: to bring operations and cybersecurity together.

Dor Eisner, co-founder and CEO of Guardz, and Arvind Parthiban, co-founder and CEO of SuperOps, sat down with Ken Gonzalez of Pretty Simple Group to talk about what changes when the two sides of the stack stop working in isolation. This conversation is adapted from that discussion.

Arvind: I would divide the industry into pre-AI and post-AI. There has always been a product solving one big problem. A PSA product, an RMM product, security, governance. The stack could be siloed and still work. Today, AI needs data. It is all about data. It is as good as the data it can get. So the new question is how AI can be enabled to make better decisions, act independently, and be autonomous. For that, a holistic platform is the answer. That is why we understood the importance of both sides of the coin. One side is what we do at SuperOps: PSA, RMM, and the management of the IT infrastructure. The other side is security and governance, which is what Guardz does. It is important that these come together so AI can actually work. That is why the bundle we are launching is a modern tech stack. I would not even call it a platform. It is a modern tech stack compared to the legacy platforms out there.

Dor: Everything Arvind said, plus the bad guys are not siloing their attack methods. Cybersecurity and IT are fragmented across the legacy stack. At Guardz we have built a unified data fabric that connects the dots across every security vertical: identities, emails, devices, data, awareness, everything a small business and MSP needs to operate security around. The partnership with SuperOps brings that together, a convergence of security operations and IT operations in one package, one bundle, that streamlines the way MSPs and IT professionals work day to day.

Arvind: Everything boils down to margins now. Typically an MSP manages 100 to 150 endpoints, in our experience. In the AI world, most tasks can be automated. It is a game of efficiency, not just how many people I need to provide the service. It comes down to how I use AI, what the AI costs, and how many strategic technical people I need to run the business. I see a lot of PE firms buying MSPs, doing roll-ups, playing the game of efficiency. The numbers have been reset. The margins we used to see are completely different. What we see in the future is going to change how MSPs build their business. They went from the break-fix model to the retainer model. The future is outcome based. MSPs will evolve into a different kind of service provider. There will be new problems and newer solutions, and MSPs will grow into that.

Dor: The world has changed, and the role of an MSP and IT provider is moving from managed service provider to managed intelligence provider. Intelligence is becoming the new way of doing business. It is becoming the infrastructure for how we do things, from day-to-day operations to complex security and IT operations. MSPs and IT professionals that are leveling up their game will survive the revolution and capitalize on the demand coming from AI.

Arvind: I like that term. Managed intelligence provider.

Dor: It is about show the value, prove the value, and maintain the value. Those are the three pillars for MSPs in the next era. If an MSP can show the value across IT and security operations, prove it with the right reporting and infrastructure, and maintain it over time, those are the MSPs that will win the market. This is a great opportunity for all of us: vendors, providers, individuals.

Arvind: We all need to upskill and evolve. Not just MSPs. Vendors too. Even I am a marketer, and we all have to figure out how to stay relevant in this era. There will always be early adopters and late adopters. For MSPs there are two parts. Are you equipped as an individual for modern-day problems? And do you have the tools to solve them? You need a modern tech stack. You cannot use on-prem legacy software and expect to manage problems from the AI world. So it is both: your individual AI skill set and your tool set.

Arvind: It is coming as an ask, and we are already late. Look at cloud. It took more than a decade to move fully from on-prem to cloud. AI adoption is going to happen in weeks. The push is coming from the end users. For an enterprise IT director, it is coming from the board, the CXOs, the CIOs. We did a report with Omdia. Almost 70 percent of the people surveyed are already evaluating or window shopping for AI, but only 10 percent have adopted. That says they are curious. They want to know what is happening and get upskilled. If you do not catch up, you will be left behind.

Dor: It is about being proactive. If you are not proactive with your clients, someone else will be, and they will take your business or your job as an IT professional. So make sure you are on top of the game, leveraging the best technology, taking the right training, and staying exposed to the technology that is already there. The internet took about 20 years from when it started to when you could do everything on it. AI took two years to become a commoditized tool. It is 10 times faster, and we are just getting started. We are in the best time of technology we have ever seen, and as founders we are grateful to be alive for it.

Dor: The fragmentation of tools has been building for a decade. The average MSP uses around 10 tools across cybersecurity and five across IT, infrastructure, and ticketing. That fragmentation creates noise. We are in a new era where that noise can be consolidated into value and outcomes. This is where SuperOps and Guardz provide value, through the convergence of IT and security. It is not about the number of tools you have or the volume of alerts. It is about the outcome from your stack and the value you can show your clients.

Arvind: There used to be real pain in migrating from the old fragmented tools, and the value people got often did not justify six or eight months of migration. Today I would say it openly to MSPs: you need data to be AI enabled, and for that you need a modern solution. You cannot sit on an old on-prem stack where tools do not talk to each other. The migration pain is nothing compared to being modern. That is the need of the hour, and MSPs are realizing it. The capability of these AI tools, I would not even call it SaaS anymore, is only going to grow. It is going to happen one way or another.

Dor: If you converge security into a single data fabric, converge IT and the ticketing system into a single data fabric, and then converge those into one console, one subscription, one deployment, you get back the context you lose when you manage fragmented tools from different vendors. That is the power of the partnership: a unified data fabric and the context to streamline IT and security together.

Arvind: I have a mental map. There is a system of record and a layer of data, like endpoint management. Then there is an agentic layer that automates the repeated work, autonomous endpoint management. That is a new category we just announced, AEM. On top of that sits security and governance. That is the holistic tech stack, and it is what every company needs. This used to be a ServiceNow-level problem, only for large MSPs or enterprises. Today it is a problem for every company, including small and mid-sized ones. Every company needs to move through a platform thesis, away from the siloed approach.

Arvind: We did a CIO meetup last week. I spoke to about 50 CIOs, and every one of them was worried about AI data leaving their company. There is no control over what agents are being built. It is a security risk. If the IT director, InfoSec, or CISO does not know what individuals are building or what tools are being connected, there is no visibility. Forget audit and compliance, those are secondary. Today there is no visibility or observability of governance. Large enterprises have tools and consultants for this. What does a mid-sized company do? If someone came to me and said, I will give you visibility into what your teams are building, I would not hesitate to pay for it. There is no tool that gives me that today.

Dor: The era of AI is creating a perfect storm where cybersecurity and IT operations have to work together to provide visibility, governance, and security as one view. If you do not control your agent implementation, and you do not control how your employees use AI tools day to day, you lose everything. You lose your data, your governance, and your compliance. This era is about making sure you have visibility, governance, and control over your data.

Dor: It comes back to the data and the infrastructure that owns the data. With fragmented operations across many security controls and IT tools, you cannot connect the dots. AI infrastructure is about connecting the dots in a fully automated way, and the fabric is the foundation for that in the agentic era. Together we bring security orchestration and IT orchestration into one data fabric. That fabric is the foundation for AI agents to work. With a traditional stack you cannot do it. Even with the best agents and the best LLMs in the world, if the data fabric is broken, your LLMs are lost.

Arvind: The funny thing about full autonomy is, who do you fire when something goes wrong? So it is tricky: what to automate, what to make autonomous, what control and what access an agent should have, and where a human should stay in the loop. These are things we learn on the go. You can turn 30 to 50 repeated MSP activities into run books or standard operating procedures. But are we ready to hand them fully to agents? At SuperOps we have a quadrant approach: fully autonomous, human assisted, human directed, and human in the loop. Something like patch management can be made fully agentic. But for all of this to work, they need data.

Arvind: This is more about education than product. As a community we need to educate ourselves and change how we operate. There is a learning curve, and it is moving fast. This is not just a vendor problem or an MSP problem. Even your pricing model and how you charge clients is going to change. It is a collective learning process. I am not saying we know all the answers. We need to learn from customers and build the right products. We built this bundle to take to customers, help them use it, and onboard them. If we have to improvise, we will. Nobody knows the answer yet.

Dor: We are all learning this transformation. We have built the technology that enables it, but the transformation is still in the middle of the process. The legacy technology out there is not ready for it. So as an MSP or IT professional, start with technology that is AI native by design. With that, you can evolve and ride the wave of agentic transformation. Otherwise you will not be able to execute on your journey.

Arvind: It is tricky. One CIO told me, I am 53, my kid is in college, I do not think I will work more than five more years, and I have done this workflow-first approach for 30 years, and you are asking me to change completely. There are different age groups. Change is easier for some than others, and some jobs can be fully automated by AI. There is resistance. But once people see the real value, it comes down to how much money and time it saves. It will be tough, and we are mindful of it. After 20 years in this industry I will say that most of what I knew is now reset. I have to learn from scratch, no matter who I am. Culturally it is a complete reset. But you are not alone. Whether you are a CIO, IT director, VP, or MSP, the whole world is going through this. Some industries are moving faster. Developers had no time; they had to learn vibe coding overnight. Our industry has a little more time, because it is critical infrastructure and a growing market. We will stay relevant, but we need to upskill. Everybody needs help, and we will do it together.

Dor: Culture is something you build, and it takes time. If you do it right, it becomes your moat. I can give an example from our own operations. We moved to a fully agentic SDLC. Our whole software development life cycle became agentic in the last few months. We celebrated that we could write code without humans, and then realized the code was generating a lot of issues at that scale and velocity. So you learn where to put the guardrails to protect the transformation. We are not mature yet as an industry around agentic transformation. But we are entering an era where small teams execute much faster. It is all about execution, and if you learn fast and move fast, you have a chance to win the market.

Dor: To become an AI native organization, you have to spend more time thinking about the future than the past or present. As a leader, think about the future 80 percent of the time, and the present and past the other 20. This is happening so fast that you have to stay connected to it. The community we are building in the MSP and IT space is the power that lets you learn, adopt, and change your mindset. It comes down to mindset. If you are thinking about the future, you move faster.

Arvind: We had this exact discussion in our board meetings and came up with a two-pronged approach. You cannot remove the old way immediately. So you infuse AI wherever possible, starting with the low-hanging automations using agents, and you keep building what the old workflows do. There will be a Nokia moment. Everyone loved Nokia and no one complained about it, but when Apple came it was an avalanche and everyone abandoned Nokia. The same thing will happen with AI. Your users will keep using the old workflow until one moment when they all move to an AI native product. So our approach is: keep running the Nokia and build the smartphone at the same time, so when the shift happens you are ready. Build the agentic platform and keep transforming to it as much as possible.

Dor: I say it loud and clear: we are entering the era where aircraft carriers lose to speedboats. If you are a speedboat with a small, sharp team, you can beat an aircraft carrier. That is what I tell my team, my board, my peers, and the market. Small teams execute faster, and you need to move fast to stay relevant. AI will do most of the work, and the humans in the loop are the ones who can control it, understand it, and build the infrastructure. We are changing how we do business and how we work, and the opportunity is unlimited.

Arvind: The common misconception I hear is that AI is coming for your job. Definitely not. As an MSP or IT director, you are at the heart of the problem. AI is creating more opportunities than it takes away. If someone tells an IT professional or MSP that AI will take their job, I say no. You are the most important team that will help the world manage AI. You can become a better version of yourself with AI.

Arvind: We are in uncharted waters. Nobody knows how the future will look. There are a lot of possibilities. The one thing I will say is that in times like these you need the right tools to navigate. You cannot be limited in your powers. If you have the modern tools, you will be as good as your tools are. That is my parting thought.

Dor: On top of what Arvind said, this is the era where services built on agentic infrastructure win the market, move faster, and deliver better outcomes for their clients and for themselves. Think about the one thing you can do tomorrow, next week, next month that is agentic first. Take one process, one team, one piece of infrastructure, and make it agentic first. You will see the magic happen in a short time. It is like learning to drive. You take the first step.