HYCU looks to MSPs to build managed services around AI agent risk

The data protection vendor says partners can use its new aiR platform to discover customers’ AI agents, map their permissions and identify the business applications they could put at risk

HYCU is looking to MSPs to build managed services around AI-agent discovery and risk assessment as businesses struggle to establish which agents are operating across their environments and what data and applications they can access.

The data protection vendor is currently piloting its HYCU aiR platform with a cohort of 100 partners, customers and MSPs.

Participants are providing feedback on its natural-language search capabilities and Agent Garden, which contains agents designed to analyse customers’ protected data.

HYCU hasn’t revealed how many of the 100 participants are MSPs.

However, CEO Simon Taylor says the company expected partners to play an important role in helping customers understand their exposure as the use of autonomous agents grows.

“Most organisations can’t answer a basic question today: which AI agents are running inside their environment, who can set each one in motion, and what each one can reach,” Taylor says.

“That gap makes agent discovery and visibility a natural managed service, and it’s one HYCU partners can deliver in a single session using aiR Graph.”

Taylor was talking to CRN UK at a recent IT Press Tour in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Partners could deliver agentic posture assessments

HYCU aiR Graph is designed to give organisations a view of the AI agents and services operating across their environments, including the systems they can access.

Research from the Cloud Security Alliance found that 68 per cent of organisations couldn’t clearly distinguish between human and AI-agent activity.

Nearly three-quarters said agents often received more access than necessary, while 79 per cent believed agents created new access routes that were difficult to monitor.

Taylor says partners could use the tool to identify agents that combined broad access with write permissions and connections to important business applications.

They could then establish whether the applications touched by those agents were protected and produce an assessment for the customer.

“Partners can help customers flag those agents, show which of the applications they touch are sitting unprotected, and hand the organisation a report on its agentic posture that leadership and the board can actually read,” he says.

Multitenancy supports MSP delivery

HYCU said aiR would offer built-in multitenancy, allowing MSPs to monitor and manage multiple customer environments through a single console rather than deploying a separate instance for every client.

That creates scope for partners to offer recurring services covering agent discovery, access visibility and the protection of applications and data touched by AI agents.

Taylor says moving into AI resilience did not represent a departure from HYCU’s existing data protection business.

Instead, the company is seeking to use the application and backup information already available through its platform to help customers understand agent activity and establish whether affected data can be recovered.

“We are still a data protection company, but with the advent of HYCU aiR, we start to expand what data protection means,” he says.

HYCU said aiR Graph would be available to partners and customers at no additional cost.

The wider aiR product, including Agent Garden and natural-language capabilities, is expected to carry an additional premium, with final pricing due to be announced in November.

The company hasn’t yet disclosed the commercial terms for MSPs or the margins and recurring revenue partners could expect to generate.

Channel model still taking shape

HYCU currently works with 455 partners worldwide, including resellers, distributors and MSPs. Taylor said the company was concentrating initially on feedback from its first pilot cohort before setting out its broader partner-led model.

“Our focus right now is getting that input right from the first cohort,” he says.

“We’ll have more to share on broader partner-led models as the programme matures.”

The company was founded in 2018 by Taylor and Goran Garevski and has its headquarters in Boston, with its main engineering operation in Slovenia.

It currently employs 300 people and serves 4,800 customers.