October 2025 Syncro Release: Cloud Backup, ThreatDown & Acronis Billing

Dee Zepf: Hey all, welcome to the release day webinar. We’re going to just wait two minutes while folks have a chance to come and enter the meeting. So we’ll get started in just a couple of minutes. Thanks for being here.

Dee Zepf: Hey, everyone, welcome, welcome. Thank you for taking some time with us. We are going to get started in just another minute or two.

Dee Zepf: Great. It’s just about two minutes after the hour I still see folks kind of entering the room. So another 30 seconds, and then we will kick off. Just want to give everyone an opportunity to settle in.

Dee Zepf: All right, let’s get things kicked off and started. Welcome everyone to the October edition of Syncro release webinar. I’m joined today by some familiar faces, both Kristen and Andy, as well as a new face for many of you, Krishna Tamburino. Krishna joined Syncro and is leading our backup product line, so he’ll be here to talk some about that. Today we have a lot to share with you, a lot of great content to get through — a couple live demos. As always, we will leave time for questions at the end. Please feel free to use that Q&A module, as opposed to the chat — makes it a whole lot easier for us to make sure we get your questions answered. So once again, the little Q&A is a great place to ask your questions. We’ll do our very best to answer as many as we can, and then, as always, we’ll continue the conversation in our community for anyone who does not have an opportunity to get their questions answered here.

Dee Zepf: So with that, let me kick it off and talk about a few things that got released over the past month since we last spoke. I want to start by talking about Syncro Cloud Backup. Pretty excited to have a new product line to announce — to back up your M365 data, your Entra ID infrastructure. As we were building this and walking down the path, I heard from a lot of folks that they really wanted a solution that we provided to do this. There’s a huge need out there, and to have something that was just really simple, really powerful, kind of set it and forget it with predictable pricing. So really excited to launch it. There are already actually thousands of end users being backed up on this solution, and it’s only been generally available for a short while. So I’m pretty much going to hand it over to Krishna, the new backup product leader, and he’s going to walk us through what this is, what folks have been asking for, and how it creates new opportunities. So with that, let me hand it over to Krishna.

Krishna Tamburino: Thank you, Dee, and hi everyone. Thanks for having me. Yeah, let me get started. So what is Syncro Cloud Backup? Well, it starts off with Microsoft 365 protection. So we’re covering your traditional workloads of mailboxes, OneDrives, contacts, calendars, Teams chat data, Teams Private Channel data and Teams files, as well as your SharePoint, your Planner, your notes, OneNote, and a variety of other different touch points — as well as your Entra ID data, which I think is really special for Syncro. So we normally think about just protecting user data, but what happens to your tenant? What happens to the structure and security of the tenant with your Entra data? In case there’s a data loss event, you don’t just want to get all your data back — you want to get the structure. You want to get your conditional access policies back, your user list, and we back all of that data up. So not only do you get it back, but you get it back very quickly, so you can get back to normal very fast.

Krishna Tamburino: Backups happen twice a day automatically, and we give you the option to just trigger an on-demand backup whenever you want. Let’s say there is an important email that just came in on a mailbox, or some files that just need to get backed up immediately — you have that option from the product. The granular restore allows you to restore at the file level, the folder level, the mailbox level. You can do a cross-mailbox restore and put a different folder in a different mailbox if you need to. We also provide point-in-time. So however you need to get the data back, we’re going to give you that option. And last but not least, it’s unlimited storage. We don’t nickel and dime you on how much data you’re backing up. We realize that you want clear pricing that allows you to just kind of throw everything onto backup and then just know that it’s going to be there.

Krishna Tamburino: We offer four locations right now — the US, Canada, UK, and Australia — and we will be releasing more EU options in the future. We do have a Fair Use policy which requires 80% of the users on the tenants be backed up. And I’ll talk a little bit about what those kinds of users are in a slide or two.

Krishna Tamburino: So why Syncro? There are a lot of other competitors out there who are offering cloud backup, and we are now coming to market. So why consider us? Why switch to us? Well, if you’re with Syncro already, you know that we are constantly listening to customer feedback, and we’re trying to basically build a one-stop shop for all of your MSP needs inside of our product, and Cloud Backup continues to deliver on that promise. We want to give you a unified platform that you just come to and handle all of your business for all of your customers in one spot. We want to provide broad coverage, so it’s a product that you trust and that you can bill for easily, because Cloud Backup is the pass-through cost — you’re going to end up billing your end users for it. So we’ve integrated into our universal billing. If you’re already using invoices to bill your customer, you can just add it as a simple line item that’s very clear and easy to understand for the customer. And again, with unlimited storage and transparent pricing, it’s a cost that’s not going to surprise you.

Krishna Tamburino: So it’s $1.90 per user per month. And what do we mean by ‘per user’? During our early access, we got a lot of feedback on which users customers expected to be billed for, and we actually made a change to align tightly with that. So following the Microsoft licensing structure, we only bill for users that have Microsoft licenses — whether they are internal, external, or shared mailboxes. If they have a license, those are the ones that we will be billing for. Your unlicensed shared mailboxes, internal/external users that don’t have a Microsoft license — we don’t charge for those. If you have a user that has been backed up for a year and had a license for that year, we charge you to back it up while they are licensed. And if they leave the company and you remove that license, we don’t charge you for it anymore. We preserve that data for you for free, and we don’t charge you for your SharePoint usage or any of those individual one-off things. It’s just the per-user per-month cost.

Krishna Tamburino: So with that, let me give you a quick live demo. Forgive me if we have any hiccups — I’ll do my best to be graceful. I have a lot to cover. I’m going to talk quickly, so if you have any questions, just pop them in the chat and I’ll try to get to that afterwards. So here we are in the product. I wanted to start by covering where the product lives and how you can access it, in case you’re not familiar with it. So I’m on my organization page, and I’m going to click on my Syncro tenant. Once that opens up, I will see the new Cloud Backup widget. Here’s where you can kick off the trial — we offer a 14-day free trial. Also something about the trial: at the end of the trial, we don’t start charging you. Backup just turns off, so you don’t have to worry that you’re going to start getting billed for something you’re not expecting. We just disable backup, and then if you don’t want to use it anymore, you can delete all of your data, or you can start a subscription. So it’s really a no-risk trial.

Krishna Tamburino: You can also go to the App Center and click on the Syncro Cloud Backup card. Here we give a little explanation about everything that we back up and what we do. And then you would just go ahead and click there to start your trial and begin those 14 days. So I’m going to jump over to a tenant where I’ve already started my trial, and I’m going to enable backup for it. Clicking on ‘enable’ — the first step is picking your storage region. Like I said, we offer four. Once you pick this region, it doesn’t change, because this is where we start putting your data. That data storage is immutable — we’re not going to delete it, you can’t delete it unless you disable backup for everything, so nobody can go and touch that data. That’s why it’s really important to get this right when you start.

Krishna Tamburino: Once you click on that, we take you over to Microsoft, because we need to install the Microsoft application to be able to grant ourselves access to the tenant to back up everything. We do have a lot of permissions, because we are backing up a lot of data. Once I accept, I’m brought back to the page where I get to choose what it is I want to back up. We give you two options right now — you can either back up all the users on the tenant, or you can choose to back up users by the different Entra ID groups that are available there. Today I’m just going to back up all of my Microsoft users. I’m also going to leave this checked so that every new user that gets added to the tenant automatically gets backed up — a real set-it-and-forget-it feature so that coverage is always there. And then I have a list of everything that I can back up, and you can choose to turn off certain things. But because of the per-user pricing, why wouldn’t you want to get all the coverage that you can? I’m going to review the terms, which mentions our Fair Use policy, and I’ll go ahead and enable backup.

Krishna Tamburino: Now, once I start the backup, I see that my items are not backed up and that the backup begins immediately on the back end. A lot of people ask how long the first backup is going to take, and the answer is: it depends on how much data we’re backing up. Because we try to scour the tenant and pull in everything that’s possible, it’s usually not more than a day — again, it depends case by case.

Krishna Tamburino: So since this is a tenant I’ve already backed up, my data is showing here. I’ll go ahead and jump into my email deletion and restore scenario. Let’s jump over to one of my users on the tenant. I have five emails that are very important to me. Let’s say this is February, and I deleted all these emails because I just rolled off this project and don’t need them anymore. I go into my deleted items and delete all of them. And then I delete all of them from there too — doing a full purge. Let’s say several months go by. It’s now October, and I realize I need all those emails back. If you’re familiar with Microsoft’s policy, after 31 days, those emails are gone — and we’ve just deleted them from both areas, so there literally is no way to get them back. How am I going to get those emails back?

Krishna Tamburino: Well, it’s really simple. I would go into the product, open up the tenant that I’m backing up for, click on the Restore button. While this is loading, let me show you a couple of items here. On the Manage button, you have a few different options. Under backup settings, you can change anything that you’re backing up — if you ever want to back up more data, less data, or change the groups you’re managing, you can do that here. These four items take you to different aspects of the portal: the user list, which is all the users that are being backed up; the audit log, which tracks everything that happens on the tenant; the task manager, which keeps track of any ongoing backups or restores you’ve triggered; and alerts related to your backup. And last but not least, if you ever want to disable backup, you just click this and we will schedule your data for permanent deletion.

Krishna Tamburino: So here’s our overall dashboard where we see everything that is being backed up — all of the data, all of the items. I’m going to go into Mail, because I want to restore some mail for Alex. Here are Alex’s five emails that I needed to restore. Let’s click these five emails and restore the selected messages. You can restore the entire mailbox if you want to, or just a specific folder. I could also trigger a backup on Alex’s mailbox if I wanted to. Let’s restore these selected emails. I want to restore them back to Alex directly — though I could restore them to a different mailbox if I wanted to. Let’s go ahead and hit Restore.

Krishna Tamburino: I’m going to jump back over — the restore is initiated successfully. I’m going to jump back over to the mailbox and start hitting refresh, because I like to watch the magic happen. Any moment now… there’s my first one, and there’s my second. I’m very impatient, so I hit refresh a lot. One, two, three, four — and there are all five of my emails. They’ve all come back. So it’s that quick, that simple. I get all of my email back just the way I wanted it.

Krishna Tamburino: I’ll jump over into policies just to highlight our Entra ID data. So here are conditional access policies — I’m sure you’re very familiar with them. They can take a lot of time to set up and to really dial in and make sure you have the right level of control at the tenant level. I’m going to open up this very important conditional access policy and look at the policy information. I have my policy ID, and this is when I created it and modified it — so we keep track of it over time. If you make many modifications, we back up each version, so you can restore to a specific version. Let’s go into the Entra ID data and check out what we can restore. Actually, before I do that, let’s go ahead and delete it. Cool — let’s hit Refresh to make sure it’s deleted. My policy is gone.

Krishna Tamburino: All right. I’m going to go into my Entra ID data. Here are all of the Entra ID items that I’m backing up — users, groups, roles, BitLocker recovery keys, devices. And here are my policies. It says there are 10, and there are — because I’ve been deleting a lot of policies and restoring them, so we’ve been tracking all of them here. Here’s my super important conditional access policy, with the ID I just deleted. It was most recently modified on 10/7. I’m going to hit this one to restore. I also have the option to pick its policy state — if I want it to be enabled immediately, disabled, or even sent to another tenant. All of your Entra ID data can be restored to a different tenant if you want to migrate some of those policies. Gonna hit Restore.

Krishna Tamburino: Let me jump in and show the Task Manager real quick. Here are the two restores I kicked off — the mail restore for Alex Wilber, and the Entra ID restore for that policy. You can look back at a month’s worth of data. We keep track of all the restore activities, and you can monitor longer restores here to make sure your customer knows the restore is working and the data is being put back. Let me go back to my policy, hit Refresh — and there it is. Awesome.

Krishna Tamburino: I like to do a little audience involvement here, so I’m going to try this out. I’m going to ask the audience for somebody to tell me what they had for dinner last night. Anybody want to put it in the chat right now? Because I want to prove that this is a completely real test we’re about to do. First one — sandwich. Oh, you got it? Yep. Okay. I’m going to put ‘chicken vegetable biryani.’

Kristen Costagliola: You might want to make sure it’s in the subject.

Krishna Tamburino: Yes, I forgot. Thank you. All right, and let’s send that. Let’s go over to Alex. There is my chicken vegetable biryani email. All right, so let’s go into the product, go back to Microsoft 365 data. What I want to show here is the on-demand backup. So for Alex Wilber, I’m going to hit ‘Back Up Now.’ I’m going to go over to the task manager — actually, I don’t even have to go there. It’s going to be in my mailbox directly. I just need to hit Refresh. Chicken vegetable biryani. So just like that — I had an important email come in, I hit Back Up Now, it triggered immediately, and it’s there in my record now to be restored if I need it. It works. It’s lightning fast. The on-demands happen exactly when you ask for it. We don’t delay. And the restore also happened very quickly, as you saw. We can get into OneDrive and cover all the different areas later, but I just wanted to cover the core aspects of the product today. I hope this has helped you understand what we’re offering and gets you as excited about the product as we are. Thank you.

Dee Zepf: Fantastic. Very brave to do a live demo with audience participation. So thank you very much. And thanks to everyone — I see a ton of questions in there. We’re going to give Krishna a couple minutes to go through that list, and we’ll do all our Q&A at the end of the webinar. So with that, I’m going to move on to some other things we released throughout the month, and we’ll talk about roadmap before we move into our Q&A section.

Dee Zepf: Next up, an update to Syncro Mobile — the mobile app. So we’ve added ticket worksheets to the mobile app. We improved some of the load times on ticket detail and the ticket comment UI. And so some new changes — as always, in most months, we try to get at least something out there in the mobile app. We’ve heard a lot of feedback on folks really wanting to take advantage of ticket worksheets, so now you can search, add a worksheet, fill it out — all those things right from Syncro Mobile.

Dee Zepf: We’ve also done a lot of quality of life updates this month. We’ve heard loud and clear that even fixing seemingly small things and updating small things have a huge impact on your day to day. So: the ability to edit your ticket subject inline right in the ticket details page; changes to make the additional CC field on tickets require fewer clicks and be a smoother experience; new filter options on the ticket page so you can filter by organization and end user; ticket tags added to the CSV export; a back navigation link so you can go from ticket details right back to your view without needing to click around; and an update to ticket worksheets that makes it really obvious in the UI that you can rename a worksheet. We’ve also done some things behind the scenes on reliability, making sure that recurring tickets are generating well, and we updated the start time on the labor log so it now defaults to the page load time.

Dee Zepf: And then we also did a few cool enhancements in and around Microsoft 365 management. Number one — and I think this might be the only thing we’re talking about today that is Team plan — when you’re resetting a password and using our Entra ID sync, you can now set a custom password when resetting, instead of just having to live with the default password. We also now include Microsoft attributes in your CSV export — your Microsoft licenses, MFA status, MFA methods, last activity date — those will all get included. And we updated the Get Contact API, so it also includes those Microsoft attributes. We also made updates to the reports so that driver updates are on vulnerable systems, and updated some of the downloads and the way we handle security groups. There’s a lot more in the release notes — feel free to have a look. And with that, I’m going to hand it over to Kristen to talk a little bit about some early access projects we have in beta.

Kristen Costagliola: Thank you, Dee. Yeah, really exciting. We have a number of really good projects in early access. The first project is co-managed support permissions. This is a big one — we’ve heard from a lot of you with co-managed clients that you want to be able to expand the number of permissions you can give those co-managed users. What we have in Early Access today — you can sign up on the roadmap — is that you can give your co-managed users access to assets reports (and you can choose the specific reports you want to limit them to), as well as a number of additional scripting capabilities. There’s a lot more permissions we’ve included in this, but those are some of the big areas. We’re so excited with the feedback we’ve gotten so far, and we have a number of pieces we are continuing to do in this co-managed support. So this is a big improvement for any of you who have co-managed users.

Kristen Costagliola: Directly alongside that, we also have — entering early access later this month, not today but in a couple of weeks — script access by category. You’re now going to be able to control permissions around scripts by the specific category. So if you only want your technicians to run scripts of a specific category, you can set it by user groups. This will also work in the co-managed permissions. We are really excited about this. We know how much you want to lock down scripting, and the absolute power that you have to give your technicians today to give them access to all scripts. So we’re working on enhancing the security around that and streamlining your workflows. Please feel free to sign up for early access on that as well.

Kristen Costagliola: And then the last one in Early Access is our application updates. We’ve updated the apps in your third-party app management to have a more comprehensive default app catalog. This is going to give you more items that you use — we looked across the install base to pick the most common items. And also, if you add any custom applications, you’ll now be able to use ‘update if present,’ which I know has been a really big ask from the community. This means Syncro can actually manage any of those applications and you don’t have to install them from scratch. This is hopefully going to be a really big deal when you take on a new client, or just as you have people that install applications on their local machines. So please sign up for early access for that.

Andy Cormier: This is gonna be a banger month for early access. That’s some serious stuff right there. All right, over to you for marketplace.

Andy Cormier: Gonna talk a little bit about what’s going on in our marketplace. First up, we recently released our phase one integration with ThreatDown, which we talked about a little bit last month. It’s an endpoint security product. It’s been live for a few weeks now, and interest has remained extremely high. The name of the game with ThreatDown is just simplicity. Their portal is extremely easy to use and configure, everything’s easy to understand — and that translates right down into the way they separate their product SKUs. For instance, there’s just one SKU that includes their core agent and EDR in full for one very low price, without locking you into any minimums or time-based commitments. They also have MDR as an add-on, which is managed detection and response — it effectively gives you 24/7/365 human-led monitoring and remediation of all your environments. From a security perspective, it’s effectively beefing up your security game into a 24/7 operation. Pricing for ThreatDown can be found right on the app card in the App Center of your Syncro instance.

Andy Cormier: For phase one of the integration, it includes provisioning for net new customers, migration support if you’re purchasing your licensing through another reseller and want to move that over to us, and of course support for our new universal billing model, which allows ThreatDown license counts to automatically flow into your recurring invoices and automatically adjust your customers’ license counts all on its own. That one is very, very cool. And as Kristen mentioned, we also recently added support for that with our 365 backups as well.

Andy Cormier: Last piece on ThreatDown — because I know this is going to show up in the Q&A, it always does — ThreatDown is handling all levels of support for Syncro, and that includes tier one. In fact, you can even open and respond to tickets right inside of the ThreatDown portal directly.

Andy Cormier: And just this morning, we officially released universal billing support for Acronis as well. Ever since we first announced this universal billing project, going all the way back to Proofpoint, Acronis has become far and away the most requested vendor we add support for next. So for everyone out there that struggles with accurately billing for backups — or people who went as far as moving over to subpar backup products just to work with a simpler billing model — I want to show you all how easy this has become with Syncro’s universal billing.

Andy Cormier: So give me just a second and I’m going to try to do a live demo here. All right, so this is the Acronis app card. I’ve already had my account provisioned, and to enable universal billing, it’s pretty simple. On any supported app card, you just click this little toggle. It’s going to pop up a window where you’ll add API credentials out of your Acronis instance. Once you’ve got that set, if you head over to our admin settings, we’ve got a customer mapper specific to the different vendors we support. I’ve got my customers in Acronis, cleverly named ‘Customer One’ and ‘Customer Two,’ and over on the right, you map them to existing Syncro customers. So I’ve got Customer One in Acronis mapped to the customer ‘Apex Beat’ in Syncro.

Andy Cormier: Once you have that, we’ve got a vendor usage report — a new report in our list of reports. This is going to show you every single mapped customer who has at least one product mapped for universal billing. And if you look at Apex Beat, we’ve got a few — a little bit of usage with Acronis, some with Proofpoint, some with ThreatDown. This report is very customizable, so if you want to get super granular, you can. If you just want to know what Apex Beat is using this month for Acronis, it’s super easy to filter down to that level.

Andy Cormier: This is a recurring invoice template, and this is effectively how you would add this storage in a dynamic fashion to your recurring invoices. We’ve got a new type called ‘Vendor Usage Counter.’ We’re going to say we want to do it with Acronis. This lists all of the products that Acronis sells. For the workstation, you can see we’ve got a count of one. And then within Syncro, you should have all of your products mapped to your accounting buckets like QuickBooks Online, Xero, QuickBooks Desktop. I’ve got my workstation license there. We’re going to tell it that we’re going to back up for all of our units, with a cost of $3 and a billing rate of $10 a piece — completely customizable within the contract section of Syncro, by the way. If you want special pricing for one single customer, you don’t have to mess around with your invoicing here — it’ll just handle it at the contract level.

Andy Cormier: Once we add that to the template, you’ll see it show up as a line item — type ‘Vendor Usage Counter,’ workstation license description, a current quantity of one, billed out at $10. But I want to add their storage as well, so we’re going to repeat the same process. We pick a different product — our hosted storage — mapped to our per-workload cloud storage product in Syncro. In this case, I can bill for all units, but maybe with this customer’s contract, I’m going to include 25 gigabytes of storage and only bill them for anything after that. We’re currently paying three cents a gigabyte and we’re going to charge the customer 10 cents a gigabyte. So when we add that, we’ll now have a second line item. We counted 44 gigabytes, but we said we’re going to give this customer 25 for free, so they’re just going to get billed for 19 of those.

Andy Cormier: So again, if we billed today, it would be $11.90. If this recurring invoice fires a week from now, this invoice will update every single day with new counts, and when it fires, it will always use the most recent count. The idea here is that for all of your marketplace vendors — set it once and forget it. The only time you’ll really ever need to adjust this is if you onboard a new customer and need to map them, or if you decide to start using new SKUs within an existing vendor. Very, very powerful feature. We’re really excited to start having this roll out to the bulk of our marketplace vendors.

Andy Cormier: Next up in development — since we just launched Acronis with universal billing, we’ve officially kicked off work on our next integration, which is going to be IRONSCALES. For folks not familiar, IRONSCALES is an email security vendor quite similar to Proofpoint, but they use Microsoft APIs exclusively. Because of that, one of their claims to fame is the ability to onboard and protect a new customer within minutes. It’s a pretty slick product, and they’ve been gaining some major traction in the market because of that ease of adoption.

Andy Cormier: When we release IRONSCALES later this year, it will support net new accounts being provisioned through Syncro, and for existing IRONSCALES customers that are buying licenses elsewhere and want to migrate to Syncro for the universal billing functionality. And of course, we’re not going to be releasing any more marketplace vendors without support for universal billing — so IRONSCALES is no different. And just like with ThreatDown, there are no minimums or time-based commitments, and all support including tier one will be handled by IRONSCALES. We’ll be releasing pricing in about four to six weeks — we don’t have that finalized yet, but it’ll probably be available by the next release webinar.

Andy Cormier: And then in terms of what’s in the queue: we’ve got phase two of ThreatDown, which adds deployments through Syncro’s asset policies as well as ingesting alerts into Syncro’s automated remediation system. Prior to phase two going live, there is a deployment script for ThreatDown in our community script library that you can use in your asset policies today. Beyond that, we’ll be adding universal billing support for the rest of our marketplace vendors not yet supported, including Bitdefender, Webroot, and AutoElevate. Okay, that’s everything on the marketplace front. I’m going to kick it over to Dee to talk about our roadmap.

Dee Zepf: Excellent. Thanks, Andy. Good stuff. All right, so I’ll go through this relatively quickly because we do have a lot of questions. Public roadmap — we have three sections now: things in development (with engineering actively working on them), things in design (finalizing designs and working through product and screens), and early planning. So some of you will hear from us as we’re doing discovery on these things.

Dee Zepf: Things we are working on right now: quality of life updates (a standing item — we are doing them every day, every week, every month); co-managed permissions; updating installed applications; Andy just talked about IRONSCALES; from a Syncro Mobile perspective, we’re adding the ability to access time clocks — you can clock in or out, record your breaks; and we’re in flight on our Linux agent. Phase one of Linux will deliver just a simple agent install, basic system information, and online status, and we’ll move from there.

Dee Zepf: In the ‘in design’ part of the roadmap: Microsoft 365 license billing, which I expect to move into development soon; expanding our baselines to cover additional rules and policies; designing the system to more easily filter tickets in Syncro Mobile so you have the same flexibility you have in our web app; we’re adding an ACH option to Stripe; and we’re designing a lot of enhancements around parent and child tickets — the ability to create templates as well as to visualize them more fully. Also in design: phase two of the Linux agent.

Dee Zepf: And things we’re in early planning on — these are conversations we’re having, things we are absolutely intending to do: some level of project management support, to at least be able to easily track your progress against deadlines and exclude projects from your other ticket metrics; the ability to easily and silently uninstall applications from systems; streamlining the process and user experience for product bundles; scripting and change logs — you’re going to be able to see exactly who’s doing what, when: who ran a script, whether it was run automated or by a human, when it ran, when things were updated; major work on reporting, likely broken into a few different projects — some quick hits to give you data you’re looking for, enhancements to existing reports, adding templates, and then a longer-term reporting platform refresh; chat enhancements around usability and reliability; and enhancements to our Mac agent. So that is the roadmap in a lightning round. Oh — actually I’m sorry, I forgot a whole other section. Super quick, Kristen to talk about community.

Kristen Costagliola: Yeah, very quick. Just a note on that — we have been having Power Hours every other week. Come join the conversation. Our next Power Hour is on October 17th with Jasper. Jasper did an awesome Power Hour a couple ago about using GitHub to store your scripts and versioning — it was fantastic, highly recommend you listen to it. And I know this one is going to be no different. So please come hang out. And our last Power Hour recording — ‘The Efficient Help Desk’ with Lindsay Giusto and Mike Perinich — check that out. It was fantastic. There was tons of good conversation and a lot to learn around ticketing, ticket views, ticket workflows, and automations. Would love to hear your feedback on things that you’d like to see from us in the future in these sessions. And now over to Jess for a new segment.

Jess Jiang: Hi! It’s nice to see everyone. It’s Jess — you might know me as the community manager. It’s really lovely to see some of your names popping up in this chat. I’m super glad you’re here. I wanted to take a quick moment to give a huge shout out to our top Community Contributor for Q3 — Dez, I think I saw your name in here. Thank you for your consistent engagement, your thoughtful insights, and your willingness to help others. It has made such a positive impact on our community. You’ve set the bar really high for what it means to be a collaborative and supportive member, and from all of us, we are very grateful for everything that you share with the group. So let’s give Dez a quick round of applause.

Jess Jiang: And also, while we’re here celebrating great community moments, I’m excited to highlight our first-ever Community Member Spotlight. It’s now live in this month’s newsletter — it’s a great little read that dives into one of our partners’ journeys, how they got started in the MSP space, and you might get a good laugh out of it as well. This month’s member we’re spotlighting is Bill. We’re super proud of all the amazing discussions and peer support happening every day in our community. If you haven’t joined yet, we’d love for you to be part of it — come learn, connect, and grow alongside other partners in Team Syncro. But yeah, that’s all for me. I’ll pass it back to Dee and team for the Q&A.

Andy Cormier: Thanks, Jess. And I just want to say — Bill, I just saw that picture of you with one of the new Syncro mugs, and I’m not jealous at all. That’s the first one I’ve seen in person. Super cool.

Dee Zepf: Very fun. Yes, thanks to both of you for being great community members. Really appreciate it. So let’s move into Q&A. I’ll kick us off with a couple of high-level questions that came in on backup, and then the four of us will just round-robin through the questions in the order they came in and get through as many as we can.

Dee Zepf: So the first two — one is really just on what are we backing up. Are we backing up Chromebooks, are we thinking about Google? So today we are backing up Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. We do not have plans right now to move beyond that on our near-term roadmap. The focus of backup today is Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. And then the other set of questions — I got a few of these — asking who we OEM’d and is this our product. So I did want to confirm with all of you that this is our tech. We own the tech. It’s not an OEM. We have a dedicated team that’s working on and building it, and we have some great people — especially people that have experience in the space, like Krishna, who you just met. So I wanted to confirm that this is our product that we are busy working on behind the scenes.

Kristen Costagliola: I had a couple on backup, on the security side of things — some concerns around the fact that we are keeping the data in Azure, and the ‘all your eggs in one basket’ question. I want to quickly comment on that: these are separate infrastructure pieces from our Syncro infrastructure in Azure. We spun these up specifically so that the storage would be separate. Yes, they are technically under the same major cloud provider, but that does not mean it’s in the same data center as your actual mail or any of the information there, and it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in the same availability zone, even if it is in the same region. In general, there are a ton of ways that major cloud providers segment their data. Because it is a separate tenant in a completely separate, segmented Microsoft environment, it still meets all the areas of compliance and security concern. And the reason we picked Azure — one, to keep your data really secure, and two, if Microsoft is going to have a major outage, there’s not a ton you would be able to do even if you had your backup in a different cloud. So we specifically chose Azure. We looked at the security, we have the infrastructure set up so that it is very secure and reliable, and it meets all compliance needs.

Kristen Costagliola: There was also a question around HIPAA — yes, we do support that today. Signing a BAA is available in the App Center if you wanted to check it out. We’re happy to answer any questions on any of those. And this will have a specific section in future compliance reports that we do.

Krishna Tamburino: Yeah, I have a few questions basically on the retention policy. We mentioned unlimited storage, no data limit — but what about the retention policy? Yes, our retention policy is unlimited as well. So if a user is removed from a tenant or the license is removed, we still hold on to their data indefinitely. We do not purge that data once the license is lost and we’re not backing it up anymore.

Krishna Tamburino: There were also some questions about the audit log. Let me actually share my screen real quick, because I didn’t touch on it too well. Actually two things I’ll touch on: first, someone asked about seeing point-in-time and whether you can see the versions, because people don’t always know when they deleted something. So in OneDrive, if I click on a file, it shows me the latest revision, and if that file had multiple revisions, I would see all the different revisions here. So you don’t have to go hunting for them. And then for folders, you have the option of doing a calendar search to pick a date you want to restore the folder to — since it has so many different files that could have different revision dates, you can just pick the overall date that you want to restore the folder from and you get it back on that date.

Krishna Tamburino: And for the audit log — it does show the actor or the person who made all of the changes. Here is my Syncro account, and it shows everything that I did today during the demo, even just accessing things and what I clicked into. So you can see what someone is looking at. Someone also asked about eDiscovery — we do not support that at this time. And the converse of not supporting it is that it’s also a security feature right now: all you can see is the folder name and subject. You cannot actually read email. So know that some people are concerned about someone looking at and reading the CEO’s email — you cannot do that. You can’t access it. But you can see whoever is going into mailboxes and what they’re clicking on, and this cannot be changed.

Krishna Tamburino: I believe there was also a question about the task manager — just highlighting again that it tracks restore events and allows you to see if they are in progress. If it’s a larger restore, there will be a progress bar showing how the restore is working.

Dee Zepf: I can pick one up. Question about Microsoft licenses and the ability to invoice for Microsoft licenses. That is in design right now, and I expect that to move into development. It is a project on our horizon. More updates on timing as we go — as you all know, I hate to over-commit and give you a time when I’m not confident. So more to come next month, and hopefully I’ll have more details to share then. But it is absolutely moving up the stack and finalizing its design phase.

Kristen Costagliola: There were a couple of questions around co-managed. One — do co-managed contacts need to be paid Syncro users? Yes, if you want to give them access as a user in that co-managed setup, you can give them access to doing scripting, all of their assets, anything within that organization that you want to limit them to. So yes, they are a paid Syncro user. And then around the category — will co-managed users be able to be set to only see their category? Yes, that is the way we have built it today. You can limit co-managed users specifically to see certain things, and it follows the current scripting permission model. They can see, run, you can limit that permission pretty granularly, which I think will help. And so now, instead of just giving access to scripting in general, you’ll be able to give the specific access just on the category.

Krishna Tamburino: Got a few questions on how users are counted and billed, and how much it costs for backup. So I’m going to go ahead and put a link in the chat to an article that displays it much more clearly, but I’ll answer it anyway. It is $1.90 per user per month, and the users we count are licensed users. If they are internal, external, or shared mailboxes with a license, we consider those billable users. The converse is also true — if they don’t have a license, if the shared mailbox doesn’t have a license (which most people don’t license their shared mailboxes up to 50 GB), we do not charge for that. And if a user was licensed and gets that license removed, we stop charging for it after that month.

Krishna Tamburino: As far as counting users — I believe somebody asked about how it counts users or whether it’s turned on customer by customer. When you turn on the trial or the subscription, we’re not charging you for anything yet. When you go and enable backup for a tenant and select all the users you want backed up for that tenant, that’s when it begins charging for the backed-up users on that tenant. And we track using high watermark — whatever the maximum number of users that were being backed up during the one-month period we’re looking at, we charge for that high watermark number. Then every month it resets, and we look at the highest number of users being backed up during that period. For more information on the Fair Use policy, pricing, or how we’re counting users, please take a look at the article that’s been linked in the chat.

Andy Cormier: Got a couple of marketplace questions. One’s about universal billing — does it bill based on usage as of the next run date, or based on usage from the close of the last month? Basically, it’s always going to bill within 24 hours of when the recurring invoice fires. We do that because every marketplace vendor tends to have a different snapshot date — Proofpoint is like the 19th of the month, Acronis is the last day of the month, they all handle it differently. So normally most folks are going to be billing on the first, so it would effectively be the max usage from the previous month. Will the M365 billing support annual billing? I would say TBD — you could do it by creating an annual invoice, having a recurring invoice that fires every 12 months instead of every month. But then you’d probably have to handle the ones that you add in between there.

Dee Zepf: I think that’s right. The intention would be to have it bill out monthly, and then if you really felt strongly on annual, you’d need to figure out how you deal with the coterminous aspects of having users peeling off or on throughout the year. In my opinion, it’s always most beneficial to do everything monthly — then you don’t have to deal with reallocating licenses every time an employee comes or goes.

Andy Cormier: Miles is asking if we have pricing per mailbox for IRONSCALES yet. We don’t have that to announce yet — we’ll be able to announce it in about a month. I will say it will be either right in line or slightly below what you see at your reseller today. We don’t really mark anything up above what you’re going to see in this space.

Dee Zepf: All right, I’ll grab one. Is there going to be an expansion on merchant services, especially for ACH? And so the answer is yes. On our roadmap, we have Stripe ACH as a project we intend to pick up to give you some choices.

Kristen Costagliola: There’s a question around — can we have the password change set so it doesn’t force the user to change? I don’t know that one off the top of my head, and whether that’s something we can do through the Graph API the way we integrate it today. Craig, thanks for the question — I’m going to do some digging and see if that’s something that Microsoft allows, and we will think about if there’s a good way to build that in. Especially if you’re setting the password, I think from a security perspective, it is a much safer way to force them to change the password. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what Microsoft requires. But I’ll do some research and see what we can learn there.

Andy Cormier: Kristen — or Kristen — I kind of want to know the answer to this too: does your backup cover OneDrive even if the user doesn’t have a mailbox? Some other products have that requirement.

Krishna Tamburino: To my knowledge, yes. I don’t believe we check for that specifically — we look at licensing to determine whether it’s eligible/billable, and then we back up everything that’s associated with the user.

Kristen Costagliola: That’s my understanding as well. We’ll test that use case to confirm, but it should work correctly.

Krishna Tamburino: Stuart asked — he has another M365 backup service, and has found that the restore volumes only go back to the date it was installed, not the entire mailbox. He wants to ensure that all items in mailboxes will be seeded on initial backup. I’m going to answer this question honestly. The emails I had in that demo mailbox were from August and June — because it’s a Microsoft demo tenant that I created a while ago, and it pre-populates emails from the past. All of that data was included in the backup even though I started the backup sometime in September.

Krishna Tamburino: The point of contention there might be the point-in-time restore — the ability to go back and restore a folder from a particular date. I believe that keys off from the date you initiated backup, because we don’t know what the point-in-time looked like prior to you starting the backup. So to clarify: do we collect all the emails in the mailbox regardless of what date they were sent or received? Yes. Does the point-in-time go prior to the start date? No — the point-in-time begins the day we start. That’s when we start doing differential backups and can go back to a specific point in time. But that starts the day you start backing up. I hope that answered your question.

Dee Zepf: Great. Hey, I just want to say thank you to everyone for taking time with us today. We are just about at the top of the hour. We will record this, post the recording in community, and make it available. If you have questions still, feel free to go to community and ask them, and we will do our very best to answer them. Really appreciate your time, and more to come. Hopefully we see you all again next month. Thank you.