Kaseya CEO: MSPs Are ‘Playing With Fire’ If They Can’t Get Their Customers To Pay For Security

Bringing MSP Security Into The Light

While MSPs have typically done their work quietly behind the scenes, the idea of managed services achieved widespread publicity with the July ransomware attack against MSP platform provider Kaseya. In that attack, hackers from the REvil group went through the Kaseya‘s Virtual System Administrator (VSA) to attack 56 of Kaseya’s 37,000 MSP customers and about 1,500 of those MSPs’ end-user clients.

That attack, coming on the heels of earlier cyberattacks against MSP platform providers SolarWinds and ConnectWise, as well as via other solution providers including Accenture, brought attention to the question of how secure such platforms are against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Fred Voccola, CEO of Miami-based Kaseya, is a champion of security in the MSP space. In a wide-ranging conversation with CRN, Voccola talked about the heavy emphasis on security Kaseya has made both before and after the July cyberattack and about key moves the company has made, including hiring a former FBI official, Jason Manar, as its new chief information security officer. “Jason’s one of the worldwide experts on fighting cybercrime and cyber best practices and all the data and infiltration kind of stuff,” he said.

Voccola also talked with CRN about his company‘s recently concluded Connect IT 2021 conference, which saw about 3,700 attendees, or about double the attendance of the last live conference in 2019. During Connect IT, the company rolled out its Kaseya One unified management platform. “Kaseya One is the first and only—how’s that for marketing, ‘first and only’—universal interface into IT Complete,” he said.

Voccola is known for his no-holds-barred style and his conversation with CRN is no exception. Here is what he had to say.