Kaseya Updates K2 Platform With Improved Security, Business Continuity, Discovery

"When we launched K2, part of that promise was to provide solutions you need to do day-to-day operations. You need the depth and breadth of functionality to deal with day-to-day pain points like patching, auditing," said Gerald Beaulieu, director of product marketing for Kaseya.

The new platform also includes more extensibility allowing third-party developers to plug their customized monitoring, reporting and security solutions into Kaseya, according to the company. That last feature is the first step in what Beaulieu said Kaseya has around building its own apps marketplace for the K2 platform.

"That's definitely our intent. Some [apps] we will want to sell internally. In another case you may download and go pay that third party. We had a couple folks meet last week on the cloud side and we talked about moving toward and app store type concept," Beaulieu said.

"We're not there yet. At this point, we're marketing the solutions and making sure [MSPs] know the various options available. The beauty is when you plug into our architecture, you gain the same user interface and their product does whatever it does."

In that vein, Kaseya announced that it now offers Kaseya Antivirus powered by Kaspersky Lab, and Kaseya Antimalware powered by Malwarebytes. Kaseya previously offered antivirus security only from AVG.

"Our customers wanted more flexibility and more options in security. We may look at other [third-party vendors] down the road," Beaulieu said. "With the anti-malware, Malwarebytes is used by many customers today in stand-alone fashion. But they've wrapped their corporate edition, not the free one, into our edition. It's clear that one antivirus on a machine is not enough to ensure the end points are secure from any kind of attack. The unified K2 platform has reporting similar throughout the system. It gives us the look of one product."

In business continuity, Kaseya Backup 4.0 is powered by Acronis 10.0 and has improved reliability and performance, according to Beaulieu. In addition, Kaseya now offers online backup through a new partnership utilizing Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and it has a new backup solution specific to applications such as SQL, Exchange or SharePoint using AppAssure replay.

"It's a multi-pronged approach for dealing with backup across the network," Beaulieu said. "You might want to backup an entire image of a workstation or server, or use online backup with standard folder and file backup. You can pick and choose."

Finally, Kaseya's discovery now employs a multi-scan solution with more rich visual experience, according to the company.

"We have historically had a solution that does a ping-only type of scan. It wouldn't discover everything on a network and was not a more visual solution. It found something but what is this device? We've started a multi-scan solution that has ping-based scan, port-based scan, a whole slew of mechanisms to find what's on a network," Beaulieu said. "Is it a Windows device, a Linux device or printer? It's easier to find anything on the network and ultimately deploy on the network."