Dan Zaniewski Podcast Transcript
Dan Zaniewski joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Dan Zaniewski. Dan Zaniewski is the chief technology officer leading Auvik technology teams with over 20 years of experience, 10 of them working with MSPs.
He has played a pivotal role in driving a product innovation and improving engineering processes. Prior to Auvik, Dan served as CTO at Cork, where he developed an industry first security monitoring platform backed by a cyber warranty at Datto he grew the engineering team from 35 to 200 plus. As VP Engineering for Datto’s Flagship BCDR Product Family, Zaniewski has played a pivotal role in driving product innovation in improving engineering processes at Auvik.
Joining in 2024 as senior vice president of engineering, he was named Chief Technology Officer at Auvik in October of 2025, appointed to advance the company’s technical leadership in the growing network management and IT operations sectors. Well, good afternoon, Dan. Welcome to the show.
Dan Zaniewski: Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to the conversation. I think it’s an exciting time in technology and I’m glad we get to dig into what’s changing and what leaders should be thinking about next.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you so much and I appreciate you making the time. we’re only traversing one time zone. I’m in Kansas City. You’re in Connecticut. So, it’s not a big deal. Typically. Sometimes I traverse the globe, but I love jumping out of bed and doing this every single day. So, Dan, without further ado, let’s jump into your first question. You’ve spent over 20 years in technology leadership, including a decade deeply embedded in the MSP ecosystem.
What fundamental changes do MSP still struggle with today, and how are those challenges evolving?
Dan Zaniewski: I think MSPs are still struggling with, fragmented tooling. On average, an MSP uses 10 plus different tools, for every environment they manage. So, there’s way too many dashboards, not enough context.
And, uh, when you think about an MSP, they’re managing tens to hundreds of, networks for SMBs that they control. And they’re not only managing networks, they’re managing SaaS, they’re managing endpoints, continuity, security, now, even AI tools across, separate systems. So, I, I think there’s a bunch of risk and performance issues that hide in the gaps, between those tools.
So, uh, I, I think as they evolve, it’s no longer about device monitoring, it’s about the visibility of the full digital footprint. And, in terms of how those continue to evolve, I think we’re seeing more shadow AI and tool sprawl, popping up over the last year or so. I think a significant portion of, organizations still lack formal AI policy.
You’ll see employees adapt SaaS and AI tools faster than IT governance can possibly keep up. And I don’t think that’s malicious, I think it’s productivity driven, but it definitely creates a security and compliance exposure for the businesses and, they expect MSPs to be responsible for securing that.
So, I think the MSP job has expanded from managing infrastructure to really managing all of the digital behavior.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Highlighting that risk. and you talked about MSPs having this fragmented tooling, which I’ve seen as well. There are dozens of tools to report. Lots of dashboards, but just to not, not enough context, which again, comes with a higher risk.
And I liked how you mentioned, AI governance. You know, I’ve been involved in a lot of that. Chair it governance myself. But it seems like technology always leapfrogs, right? It’s the hardware doesn’t keep up with the software. Vice versa. Same thing with AI. we’re seeing a lot of, just the proliferation of AI and there’s really no governance or AI governance anyway for, uh, the technology that’s being rolled out.
So, I appreciate you highlighting that and Dan. A manages over a million network devices and millions of SaaS applications across a hundred thousand networks. What technical or architectural decisions are essential to delivering reliability and simplicity at that scale?
Dan Zaniewski: Yeah. At that scale, the architectural decisions made early on really matter.
we went, into the MSP channel and true multi-tenancy and. Like it was key to, uh, the operational efficiency and scalability. a lot of companies try to move into the MSP space and build multi-tenancy on later. That never really works out. It ends up clunky. So, uh, building, um. Your system with multi-tenancy upfront actually matters a lot.
beyond that, observability is incredibly important. Being cloud native and, being able to scale your services to handle, traffic spikes, and adoption, matter. And then. I, I like to keep it, take things back to, we wanna keep things simple for our users and we wanna make sure our technology decisions and keep our technology simple until we need to make it more complex.
beyond that, automated discovery and device consolidation, we need those as a first principle. Manual configuration doesn’t really scale. The system needs to continuously relearn the environment. if you were to manually do that, it’s outdated the second you deploy it. So, continuous automated discovery and mapping ensure that our platform always reflects realities because networks do change constantly.
And, and lastly, you want automation of like configuration, backups, and documentations to remove operational drag for MSPs.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Just to highlight a few things you talked about, really the key to, to scale that architectural design has to be foundational from the get-go. You talked about observability being cloud native, being able to scale quickly.
but automated discovery and mapping, device consolidation, those are key to, really managing these large environments. So, I appreciate that.
Dan Zaniewski: Absolutely.
Brian Thomas: Dan Automation is a core promise of modern IT operations. Where does automation deliver the most immediate value for IT teams and where do you still see friction or over height?
Dan Zaniewski: So, there’s really like two areas where I see immediate value, for IT teams. The first one is when it comes to those boring, repetitive, mundane operational tasks. If you think like firmware updates, routine patching workflows, triaging alerts, policy enforcement across distributed sites and documentation, I think automation can really, really help streamline those.
And they’re not strategic, activities, but they’re absolutely necessary and they need to be done. So automation helps re reduce the burnout and freeze, IT techs to focus their time on more high impact work. The second one, I think automation could really start to help with root cause isolation, across hybrid environments.
especially when you have data from multiple sources you could tie together, and try to start to root. Cause like I, I keep having Zoom drop. Is that a network issue? Okay, where’s the device having the problem? So like, I think there’s a ton of, value there. And then to the second part of your question, where is it overhyped?
you hear a lot of, like, AI is gonna replace all of your engineers. That’s probably unrealistic. AI is great and it offers a bunch of really fantastic uhfor, uh, like productivity enhancements if you use it properly. But in [00:08:00] reality, it’s probably not gonna replace everything your engineers are doing.
I think it’s also. risky to have AI without governance. you could run into, uh, hallucinations where you might automate something and it might do the wrong thing. So, I think you have to be very careful with AI and automation and make sure you have deterministic checkpoints, in place as you roll that out.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. AI does come with a lot of height and can be invaluable for automated tasks. Obviously scanning a lot of data points, endpoints, that sort of thing. but it does come with risk. And as we talked about earlier, you know, AI governance is key in this area if we’re gonna leverage the, the AI technology.
but talk, talking about the value for IT teams, you talked about those mundane tasks, updates, policy enforcements, et cetera. Automation is definitely key to streamlining. And definitely automate, key for root cause isolation, as you mentioned. So, I appreciate your insights there. And Dan, last question of the day.
As we look ahead, how do you see the future of network management and IT operations changing over the next five years? And what skills will IT leaders and engineers need to stay ahead?
Dan Zaniewski: I think a big one for network management. It’s, the rise of the IT generalist and AI driven outcomes. we’re moving into an era where companies have leaner teams managing broader environments, and, I think the IT generalist becomes much more normal than having a bunch of certified, specialists.
Leaders must build platforms that increase the leverage of those generalists. And, rather than requiring deep specialization to operate the platform. And, I think we’ll see a shift from AI everywhere, random tools layered on top of workflows to, ai, centered around actual outcomes with measurable, metrics.
So that means, you’ll see AI deployed in areas where you want to [00:10:00] see measurable improvements in uptime, ticket resolution, time, risk detection, and user experience, not just AI for AI’s sake. beyond that, like continuing what we were just talking about, AI governance is gonna be become core infrastructure.
the conversation has to shift from which AI tools are we using to how do we govern AI safety at scale? I think shadow AI detection. SaaS visibility and anomaly monitoring are gonna become foundational. And then I think governance won’t be a compliance side project. It’s gonna have to be embedded into network and IT operations.
So, and at the end of the day, the next five years won’t reward the teams with the most tools. They’ll reward the teams that create the visibility, and approach governance proactively.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, we definitely see a lot of changes here in the near future, especially as the newer technology comes out, with AI, people leveraging AI.
But we’ll definitely need some more automation. As you mentioned. it journalists will be more prominent, obviously, as we implement more automation and AI workflows with measurable outputs and reporting, which is really key. And Dan, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Dan Zaniewski: Pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Dan Zaniewski Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
