The Buzz: Slide names McChord interim CEO, Arctic Wolf expands AI security, N-able finds MSP alert overload

Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Thursday, October 15, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today.

There’s a significant leadership change at Slide, the business continuity and disaster recovery vendor built specifically for MSPs.

Co-founder Austin McChord has taken over as interim CEO, replacing fellow co-founder Michael Fass, who has stepped down.

For anyone who’s been around the MSP business for a while, McChord is a familiar name.

He founded Datto and built it into one of the most prominent technology vendors serving managed service providers.

After Datto was acquired by Kaseya, McChord eventually returned to the market with Slide, co-founding the company with Fass, another Datto veteran.

The idea was to build a modern BCDR platform specifically for MSPs.

Slide says it now serves more than a thousand MSP partners worldwide, and has expanded internationally, including an investment in Canadian data-centre infrastructure.

Fass played a central role in developing Slide’s initial product and establishing its partner relationships.

The company hasn’t said why he’s leaving, or whether it plans to search for a permanent CEO.

McChord’s appointment is effective immediately.

CRN spoke with several MSP partners about the transition, and the reactions were generally positive.

Partners interviewed by CRN expressed confidence in McChord’s ability to lead the company, while recognizing the work Fass had done to get Slide to this point.

For MSPs, the bigger question is what happens next.

McChord has a history of building technology companies around the needs of service providers, and his more direct involvement could be significant as Slide grows.

But there’s no announced change in strategy or product direction yet.

So this is one to watch, particularly for partners evaluating alternatives in the backup and disaster recovery market.

Arctic Wolf, meanwhile, has introduced a series of security innovations designed for an environment where both attackers and defenders are increasingly using AI.

The company made three significant announcements Wednesday at its Security Operations Summit.

The first is Aurora Adaptive Threat Protection.

It’s a new endpoint security capability designed to identify malicious intent by looking at how activity develops across a sequence of events.

That’s an important distinction.

An attacker may use legitimate tools, valid credentials and ordinary administrative commands.

Individually, those actions may not appear suspicious.

But when examined together, they can reveal a developing attack.

Arctic Wolf says the technology is designed to identify those patterns, interrupt malicious activity and reverse the attack chain before significant damage occurs.

It’s intended to work alongside existing endpoint protection and EDR tools, rather than requiring customers to replace them.

The capability is currently in beta.

The second announcement is SwarmView.

Arctic Wolf already uses AI agents alongside human analysts in its security operations.

SwarmView is designed to show customers more of what happens during those investigations.

That includes which agents contributed, what evidence they considered, and where human experts became involved.

The idea is to make automated security decisions more understandable and accountable.

Initial beta availability is planned for this fall.

And the third announcement is Shadow AI Discovery.

That will help customers identify both approved and unknown AI applications operating across their environments, using information from network, identity and endpoint systems.

Initial availability is planned for November.

Put the three together, and there’s a clear direction.

Arctic Wolf wants to use more automation to prevent and investigate threats, while giving customers greater visibility into both their own AI usage and the security decisions being made on their behalf.

For MSPs, that balance between automation and accountability is becoming increasingly important.

And new research from N-able suggests security providers have good reason to be cautious about handing too much control to AI.

The company’s new AI Fog Report examines how organizations are using AI-powered security tools, and whether those tools are making security operations easier or more complicated.

The research surveyed five hundred and ninety-five cybersecurity decision-makers and practitioners in the United States and United Kingdom.

That included one hundred and eighty-two verified MSP respondents.

And the MSP findings are particularly interesting.

Nearly eighty-seven percent of MSPs reported an increase in security alert volumes over the past year.

Sixty-one percent said alert noise interferes with their ability to respond to incidents either daily or several times a week.

So there’s already a significant operational burden.

At the same time, more than eighty-two percent of MSP respondents said they’d increased their use of AI-powered security tools.

And eighty-eight and a half percent said they’d made security-policy exceptions to accommodate AI.

But here’s the disconnect.

Just twenty-three-point-six percent of MSP respondents said they fully trust autonomous AI remediation.

In other words, MSPs are adopting AI to help manage security, but most aren’t yet comfortable letting it make and execute decisions without human oversight.

Across the full survey, two of the leading sources of low-quality security signals were duplicate alerts from overlapping tools and AI-generated alerts that lacked sufficient context.

That’s an important finding.

The problem isn’t necessarily that security teams can’t detect enough threats.

It’s that they’re receiving more information than they can efficiently interpret and act upon.

For MSPs managing multiple customer environments, that challenge can multiply quickly.

The opportunity for security vendors is to improve prioritization, context and explainability.

And the opportunity for MSPs is to build operating models that use automation without surrendering accountability.

The research didn’t include Canadian respondents, but the underlying challenges are certainly familiar to the Canadian MSP market.

In Brief – LogicMonitor has introduced new capabilities for governed autonomous IT, connecting infrastructure and digital-experience monitoring with AI-assisted investigation and controlled operational workflows.

Zoho Canada has gained new government procurement qualifications covering Ontario CRM purchasing, Canoe’s ERP program and all three bands of the federal Artificial Intelligence Source List.

Optro has expanded its partner program with new technology and distributor tracks, along with funding opportunities for qualifying partners building governance, risk and compliance practices.

And NordLayer has launched AI Scout, providing visibility into organizational AI use, prompt-level data-loss prevention and monitoring of the systems that AI coding agents can access.

Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post.

Later today on In The Channel, WatchGuard CEO Joe Smolarski joins us to discuss the changing security challenges facing MSPs in the age of AI, and how WatchGuard is responding to those challenges.

And if you haven’t heard it yet, yesterday’s In The Channel features Checkmarx channel chief Jon Kozimor.

We discuss how AI-assisted coding is accelerating software development, why traditional application security practices are struggling to keep up, and what that means for MSPs who may increasingly find themselves responsible for securing customer applications and AI-generated code.

That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.