Today’s enterprise network requires multiple layers to defend against zero-day attacks, advanced persistent threats, targeted attacks, phishing, worms, and a never-ending stream of viruses. Security, therefore, has to be a core function of any IT systems management platform, and that is precisely what enterprises get with The Kaseya© platform.
In the Beginning
The Kaseya Virtual System Administrator is an integrated, modular platform that leverages existing systems to enable visibility, management, orchestration, and reporting across an organization’s entire IT environment. When Kaseya’s founders developed the platform they knew that without built-in security it would be like running on tires without tread, so they made sure that didn’t happen.
To understand Kaseya’s security roots you need to turn the clock back to pre-Kaseya days, when the platform’s creators Mark Sutherland and Paul Wong worked on a project for the U.S. Department of Defense’s NSA (National Security Agency).
In the mid 1990s the DOD wanted employees to use email, but – for obvious reasons – it had to be secure. NSA approved encryption and digital signatures would be necessary to protect sensitive information from prying eyes.
The solution was the Fortezza Crypto Card, a PIN-based security token for email access and user authentication. The security company that employed Sutherland and Wong at the time won a bid to develop Fortezza cards for 500,000 employees. While the technology was a great success, the NSA’s deployment of it was glacially slow. Three years after delivering the cards, Sutherland and Wong were surprised to learn that only 36,000 cards had been deployed.
“To onboard an employee the government took the card, went into a guy’s office, had him fill out some papers, trained him on how to use it, gave him a PIN and digital signature to operate it, shook his hand, and went on to the next one,” Sutherland, the now President of Kaseya recalls. “It was going to take longer than I was going live to get all those cards in the hands of users.”
A light bulb went off: Why not automate the process of deploying IT solutions through a centralized IT command and control center, a concept familiar to the DOD? The cards would be shipped to users and the rest would be done electronically.
Sutherland and Wong’s company wasn’t interested, so in 2000 they left to join forces with a few industry colleagues and Kaseya was born.
Drawing on their NSA experience, Sutherland and Wong started developing an IT services delivery framework for automated provisioning, remote monitoring, patch management, and software deployment and updating. The platform would have to work with an organization’s existing infrastructure to avoid reconfiguring firewalls and modifying architecture – the types of integration issues that typically derail implementations.
It was a given that the Kaseya framework, at its core, would be highly secure. “The fact is that the platform’s high security is more of a feature than a product,” says Sutherland. As Wong puts it, “Think of security as an adjective rather than a noun.”
Certifiably Secure
Over the years, Kaseya has matured into a complete service management platform with security at its core. Today Enterprises have both SaaS and on premise options they can choose from Kaseya depending on which matches their needs better.
From a security perspective, Kaseya offers many distinct advantages including being the first RMM vendor to earn two key security certifications – the U.S. government’s FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) and the international Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation.
Anyone responsible for enterprise IT security knows how stringent these standards are. FIPS and Common Criteria certifications are extremely valuable at a time when attempts to steal private data and trade secrets occur almost daily. Over the years, network breaches have exposed the private data of millions of users, and in some cases they have put companies out of business.
The bottom line: From the beginning, Kaseya has offered enterprises highly repeatable, quality services to various endpoints, internal and external, remote and co-located – in a highly secure way.
image: gettyimages
