Splashtop targets AI-driven security risks for IT teams

Splashtop has shared details from its first Splashtop Live events for IT professionals and managed service providers, held in the Bay Area and London.

The sessions focused on a central issue for IT teams: the pressure of responding to security risks as artificial intelligence helps attackers move faster. The events brought customers, partners, product staff and founders into direct discussions about endpoint risk, patching workloads and the time constraints facing support teams.

In his opening keynote, Mark Lee, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Splashtop, highlighted the growing volume of vulnerabilities and the operational strain this creates for IT departments. He noted that one recent Microsoft Patch Tuesday addressed more than 1,400 vulnerabilities, underlining the pace at which teams must assess and remediate issues.

"AI is making attackers faster on two fronts," said Lee. "On the machine side, holes in the OS and the apps are getting found and exploited faster than most teams can patch. On the human side, it's getting much easier to talk someone into opening the door, and if they do it with a real, signed tool, your security stack has nothing to catch. We've spent twenty years building remote access, so we know exactly how it gets abused. We feel a responsibility to help close both gaps."

Product discussions centred on how Splashtop is extending its software beyond remote support into device inventory, vulnerability management and patching. The same agent used for remote support now also delivers inventory data and real-time vulnerability and patch management, with plans to combine asset and vulnerability information into a single view for each computer.

Another focus was Shield for Business, which Splashtop introduced at the events. The product is designed to address the human side of security risk by blocking more than 80 unauthorised remote access tools while allowing approved use of Splashtop's own remote support software.

Splashtop also used the events to preview third-party application management for Microsoft Intune environments. The company said this area has become more important as auditors, cyber insurers and customer security reviews place greater scrutiny on software management and compliance processes.

AI and workload

Brandon Shopp, Vice President of Product and Alliances, said Splashtop is applying AI to specific operational tasks rather than treating it as a broad answer to IT problems. He described current uses including summarising Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures records in plainer language, translating them where localised vulnerability data may lag publication, and warning administrators when updates are known to have issues before deployment.

"I've never heard an IT person tell me they have free time in their day," said Shopp. "The project list just keeps getting longer. So, when we look at AI, the question is pretty practical. Where can it save someone fifteen minutes reading a CVE, or twenty minutes writing up a ticket? Those minutes add up across a team, and that's time people can put back into the projects they never get to."

The events also gave MSPs and IT leaders a forum to discuss changing customer demands. In comments shared by Splashtop, one executive at an MSP and MSSP serving regulated financial services clients said customers now ask about AI throughout assessments, training and operational performance, while rising hardware costs are pushing organisations to keep computers for longer and maintain them more actively.

Another MSP owner said client conversations have shifted significantly. "Two years ago, the conversation with customers was uptime, email problems, and cloud migration. Today it's AI. Customers can't lead themselves through AI, and the more I can help them with it, the more it benefits their day and their workflow."

A separate MSP executive highlighted the growing role of identity integration in access control. "Integrating identity providers like Entra and Okta into access control is a big thing now. Two years ago, nobody wanted that."

Customer feedback

Lee said the smaller format was intentional, allowing customers to speak more directly with engineers and founders. He added that those conversations remain an important source of product input, particularly for the company's management tools.

"We kept these events small on purpose. When the room is small, customers tell you how they actually use the product and where it still falls short, and our engineers and founders hear that directly instead of reading it in a report later. That's the most useful feedback we get," Lee said.

Some attendees framed the value of the events around access and trust. "One thing I took away from Splashtop Live this year was, A, we need to do this again, and B, how much desire and need there is for this kind of product in the world," said Ramin Keyvan, Chief Executive Officer of Rhino Network Solutions.

Another customer pointed to direct discussions with staff. "I got to have one-on-one conversations with multiple people within the group, and I truly learned that what they say, they stand behind," said Walt Maslanka, Founder and Owner of Garlic City Computer and Network.

Lee said much of the discussion returned to a simple constraint for IT teams: time. "A lot of what we heard was about time. Our customers are being asked to do more for the people they support, whether that's helping them adopt AI, patching faster, or meeting new security requirements, and they need to get hours back from the routine work to do it. That's a hard problem, and it's the one we're focused on helping them solve."