Kaseya Launches New Compliance Business Unit Based On RapidFire Tools Acquisition
The investment, and the hiring of a new executive to run the business unit, is aimed at providing compliance-as-a-service capability to a wide swath of the managed service provider community.
Kaseya Tuesday unveiled a $10-million investment to form a new compliance-focused business unit under the direction of a longtime MSP-focused executive.
With the investment, which Kaseya made from its own resources, the company will be better able to help its MSP partners bring compliance-as-a-service to their clients, said Max Pruger, senior vice president and general manager of compliance for the Dublin, Ireland-based company.
The underlying technology is from Kaseya's September 2018 acquisition of RapidFire Tools, Pruger told CRN.
"RapidFire Tools is well-known and has a big share of the MSP security market, but it didn't really have a solid focus on compliance," he said. "Now we're focused on compliance. The new business unit makes it possible for us to provide compliance-as-a-service along with the necessary training, coaching, and collateral to MSPs."
The investment and opening up of a separate business unit is a big deal to MSPs, said Brett Johnson, president of Simpleroute, a South Burlington, Vermont-based MSP and Kaseya partner.
"It's exciting to see Kaseya investing in this," Johnson told CRN. "I've talked with Kaseya in the past about making it easier to offer compliance capabilities. Kaseya's opening the new business unit and expanding its compliance offerings is a big deal for the channel."
Most MSPs don't have the expertise in-house to address compliance on their own, Johnson said.
"It's expensive for MSPs to do this on their own," he said. "Using RapidFire Tools technology to do things like check for HIPAA compliance is much faster than doing it on our own."
Johnson said his company has been using RapidFire Tools' Cyber Hawk security tools to help with PCI and HIPAA compliance. Cyber Hawk is an-on-premises monitoring service that can generate actionable alerts based on the client's own criteria, he said.
Among the priority technologies required by MSPs, security and compliance are at the top hands-down, Johnson said.
"$10 million is a significant amount of development time for Kaseya," he said.
MSPs are seeing a lot of companies buying cyber insurance, but most of them don't realize that, without the right amount of work upfront to secure data, cyber insurance payouts will not happen, Johnson said.
"You need tools to prepare for cyber insurance, and you need to show you have the right technology in place," he said. "And Kaseya in May released many of those tools in its Audit Guru offering, now known as Compliance Manager."
The tools from the compliance business unit are integrated with Kaseya's PSA, or professional services automation, platform, Pruger said. The Kaseya PSA platform is not integrated with any competing compliance offerings, he said.
With the new compliance business unit, Kaseya now has at least six business units, nearly all of which are based on acquisitions the company has made.
The others include the Unitrends and Unitrends MSP business unit which focuses on enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery; Spanning Cloud Apps for SaaS data protection for Office 365, Salesforce, and G Suite; IT Glue for IT documentation and network discovery and diagraming; ID Agent for IT security management and dark web monitoring; and Powered Services which concentrates on helping MSPs increase monthly recurring revenue through service readiness, sales, marketing readiness, and service delivery.
Pruger is no stranger to Kaseya. He was an early employee of Kaseya when it was founded, and stayed with the company for about 10 years followed by a one-year stint as chief sales officer an nGenx and a three-year gig as chief revenue officer virtual desktop infrastructure services company CloudJumper.