Despite a growing customer base and unique technology under the bonnet, N-able's Cove backup and recovery service remains a well-kept secret among many of its own partners. That’s something the vendor aims to change as it leans into cyber resilience and technician efficiency to make Cove a cornerstone of its SaaS strategy.
Speaking to ITEuropa at its Empower partner conference in Berlin, Stefan Voss, VP of Product Management at N-able, acknowledged the visibility challenge head-on: “The biggest issue we have is people don’t even know Cove exists. But once we talk to them, we have a pretty good win rate.”
Originally launched as a cloud-first, fully managed Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering, Cove has quietly built momentum with over 15,000 managed service providers (MSPs) now using the platform to support more than 200,000 customer organisations globally. It is designed for the "fortune 5 million," Voss says, with a focus on technician efficiency, scalability, and seamless integration into broader security strategies.
Voss says one of the things that differentiates Cove in an increasingly competitive market is its efficient architecture. Using proprietary data reduction techniques, N-able claims Cove moves “up to 60 times less data” than traditional image-based backups, making it especially effective in bandwidth-constrained environments — such as remote offices, retail sites, or edge locations with limited connectivity.
“That unique efficiency unlocks use cases others can’t handle,” Voss explains. “From golf courses with smart irrigation systems to hotels in remote areas, Cove gets in where others can’t.”
This lean data movement also enables faster and more frequent backups, along with advanced features like “continuous restore” — enabling near-instant recovery for virtual machines and reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Cyber-Resilient by Design
While data protection is often treated as a standalone IT function, N-able is positioning Cove within a broader cybersecurity strategy that spans prevention, detection, and recovery. This includes recent investments in vulnerability management and the integration of capabilities from N-able’s acquisition of security vendor Adlumin.
“Backup is no longer just an infrastructure problem — it’s a cyber resilience requirement,” says Voss. “MSPs need tools that work together across the entire incident response lifecycle.”
The SaaS nature of Cove also enables native support for Microsoft 365 workloads, with Google Workspace protection on the roadmap. And while the service is cloud-first, customers can configure local targets to complement off-site backups — a hybrid model Voss refers to as “local speedball.”
N-able’s product strategy reflects the reality of today’s MSP stack: some want an integrated suite, others still value best-of-breed tools. While competitors like ConnectWise and Kaseya are pursuing aggressive platform consolidation, N-able is taking a more open, API-driven approach.
“We’re not chasing a monolithic platform,” Voss says. “We’re focused on interoperability, offering published APIs and developer tools, so MSPs can plug Cove into their existing workflows — whether they’re using N-able RMM or not.”
Nonetheless, a more unified user experience is on the horizon, with plans for shared UIs and deeper integration between products such as Cove and vulnerability scanning tools, allowing technicians to prioritise patching, backup, and remediation from a single view.
Quiet success, growing ambitions
Though Cove still trails more established players in name recognition, N-able is bullish about its potential to disrupt legacy approaches to data protection. Rather than bundling Cove aggressively as a loss leader, the company prefers a more considered go-to-market strategy, exploring thematic packaging around “breach prevention and recovery” to resonate with security-minded MSPs.
“We want to free up MSPs to focus on higher-value services,” says Voss. “If you have three people on your team managing backups, why not let one handle it part-time and have the others work on AI, SOC capabilities, or security strategy?”
For N-able, Cove is more than just a backup product — it’s a foundational layer in the shift towards efficient, cyber-aware service delivery. The challenge now is making sure more MSPs know it’s there.
