AvePoint adds AI governance tools for channel partners

AvePoint has updated its Confidence Platform with new tools for channel partners and customers, focused on AI governance and cyber recovery across cloud environments.

The release adds centralised policy management, cross-tenant licence visibility, drift detection and broader backup support. It also extends the company's recovery model around what it calls the Minimum Viable Company, or MVC. The aim is to help managed service providers turn governance work into a standardised service rather than a one-off consulting exercise.

Partner focus

A large part of the update is aimed at managed service providers that oversee multiple customer environments. In the company's Elements Edition, partners can now manage users, applications, data, devices, tenants and cloud infrastructure from a single system, reducing manual work and making governance policies easier to apply across clients.

It also adds cross-tenant licence visibility and automation across Microsoft estates, giving providers a consolidated view of usage across customer tenants. That should help partners manage renewals and optimise software use across those environments.

Workspace Management has also been extended so data owners can address issues such as oversharing, outdated access and configuration errors directly in Microsoft 365 through guided workflows. The change is intended to reduce reliance on central IT teams and speed up remediation.

Partners also get a central policy vault, baseline creation tools and similarity-based drift detection designed to identify meaningful configuration changes while reducing false positives. Intune app management has been added for centralised app creation and bulk deployment across tenants.

Azure Security Management and Cloud Security Posture Management have been expanded as well, giving providers a clearer view of vulnerabilities, identity risks, audit activity and cloud inventory across Microsoft Azure environments. The update also introduces a workload-based model for assigning and tracking cloud security coverage.

AvePoint linked those additions to recent Omdia research on partner demand, which found that 51% of partners cite governance as their main obstacle to delivering AI services.

"According to research from Omdia, governance and compliance are the top AI challenges that organisations face today," said Chris Shaw, Channel Director at AvePoint. "With these advancements to the AvePoint Confidence Platform, we're giving partners and customers greater access to the tools that they need to meet these challenges head-on. It's becoming more important to have an integrated, comprehensive approach to AI governance, cyber resilience, and data protection, and that's exactly what the Confidence Platform offers."

AvePoint framed the commercial opportunity more broadly through its partner strategy team.

"The $276 billion AI services opportunity is currently being bottlenecked by operational complexity," said Scott Sacket, SVP of Global Partner Strategy at AvePoint. "With 51% of partners citing governance as their primary hurdle, according to our latest research with Omdia, these updates allow them to stop treating governance as a bespoke project and start treating it as a standardized, scalable service that protects against shadow AI."

AI controls

The platform update also adds governance features for AI agents as businesses move from testing AI tools to deploying software that can take action across systems and data. The changes build on AvePoint's AgentPulse product for Microsoft and Google agents.

New functions include deeper visibility into agent access to sensitive files and knowledge sources, including cases where data does not carry appropriate security labels. The platform also adds enhanced role-based access controls for AI agents, intended to align agent permissions with the rights already held by individual users.

The focus is on moving from simple monitoring to active controls. That matters for companies trying to limit data exposure as AI tools begin to operate with greater autonomy inside enterprise systems.

Recovery model

Alongside governance, AvePoint has broadened its resilience offering beyond traditional backup. Its approach is now centred on restoring the smallest version of an organisation that can continue operating during disruption, rather than only recovering underlying data.

To support that, it introduced a Rapid Recovery System, described as an orchestration framework for prioritised business recovery. The system works with Express Recovery to restore selected Microsoft 365 workloads alongside critical identities and infrastructure, with the goal of restoring essential operations first.

That approach reflects a broader shift in cyber recovery planning, as businesses focus increasingly on how quickly they can resume core services after an incident, not simply how much data they can retrieve.

"As AI and cloud expansion increase the risk surface, disruption no longer affects a single workload; it cascades across services," said John Peluso, Chief Technology Officer at AvePoint. "By focusing on MVC recovery, we are moving organizations from reactive data restoration to proactive business resilience, ensuring they can restore what matters first when incidents happen."

Broader coverage

AvePoint has also extended the range of cloud and software services covered by its protection tools. Support now includes Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL and Cosmos DB for infrastructure backup.

Bitbucket protection is now generally available, while support has been expanded for Okta Workforce Identity Cloud, Atlassian Admin and Jira Admin. These additions widen the set of services partners can include in managed backup and recovery offerings as customers spread data and identity functions across multiple software providers.

AvePoint said more than 28,000 customers use its platform, and its partner ecosystem includes about 6,000 managed service providers, value-added resellers and systems integrators.