Kaseya Acquires RapidFire Tools to Drive Compliance Services

Kaseya today acquired RapidFire Tools as part of an effort to provide more managed service providers (MSPs) with an opportunity to manage compliance opportunities.

RapidFire Tools provides Audit Guru, a compliance management software through which over 8,000 MSPs already provide a managed service. Other elements of the RapidFire Tools portfolio include Network Detective, employed by over 6,000 MSPs for network and security assessments, and Cyber Hawk, cybersecurity threat detection and alerting software. RapidFire Tools will continue to support those offerings as an independent unit of Kaseya.

Kaseya, meanwhile, is launching Kaseya Compliance Manager (KCM), a service based on the Audit Guru software developed by RapidFire Tools. That offering is fully integrated with the existing Kaseya IT Complete platform and Virtual Systems Administrator (VSA) software. The overlap among MSPs between the two companies right now is 25 percent, which leaves another 75 percent of the combined companies common MSP customer base to be serviced by RapidFire Tools, says Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola.

Voccola notes that while a recent Kaseya survey showed on 15 percent of MSPs are currently offering compliance services; a full 75 percent indicated a desire to add such capabilities.

Although Kaseya would naturally prefer MSPs used its core platform, Voccala says the RapidFire Tools portfolio will remain open to integration with rival remote management and monitoring (RMM) tools.

“We’re not going to be arrogant or unfriendly,” says Voccola.

At a time when compliance requirements continue to become more complex around, responsibility for managing compliance among small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) continues to be shifted on to the shoulders of IT organizations. As a result, it’s only natural more of those companies will look to MSPs to assume responsibility for those tasks, says RapidFire Tools CEO Michael Mittel.

“Customers are going to demand it,” says Mittel.

Longer term Voccola says both companies expect to see MSPs leverage that expertise into a broader range of data management practices that go well beyond data protection. In the meantime, as the ecosystem of companies that revolve around Kaseya continues to increase it’s apparent that managed services going forward will be well beyond basic RMM services.