IT Services for Healthcare

The tension between Managed IT Services for Healthcare providers (MSPs) and internal IT organizations has been palpable for years. Internal IT teams are always concerned that MSPs will essentially replace them. In fact, MSPs often do go around the internal IT organization to sell their services. But as IT becomes increasingly complex and difficult to manage, a rapprochement may finally be in the offing between MSPs and internal IT teams. Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola says there are two key technology trends that are finally going to force the issue: security and the rise of the cloud. Voccola says that given the number of security breaches lately, existing approaches to password management are not working. As more organizations realize that they need to replace legacy approaches to managing passwords with multifactor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) technologies, the complexity associated with deployment and managing those technologies is often beyond their staff and resources. At the same time, as more workloads move into the cloud, the monitoring of multi-cloud environments is becoming more challenging. Because of those challenges, Voccola says there's more pressure than ever on the internal IT organization to rely on external expertise. That doesn't mean companies are going to replace their internal IT organization with MSPs any time soon, but it does mean that internal IT organizations and MSPs are more willing than ever to collaborate on projects that internal IT teams find too complex. In fact, Voccola notes that the Kaseya Auth-Anvil (a module within its managed services platform that makes it simpler for MSPs to deliver multifactor authentication and SSO capabilities) is now the fastest growing part of the Kaseya MSP portfolio. At the recent Kaseya Connect Europe conference, the company announced that it has now extended Auth-Anvil to add support for Microsoft Office 365. It also announced that version 9.4 of its Traverse monitoring tools can now support both public clouds and on-premise IT environments. It remains to be seen just how far a détente between internal IT teams and MSPs might proceed in this new era of IT. But it should be clear to all concerned that the average IT organization has more on its plate than it can be expected to handle. The challenge now is finding a way to make it simpler for them to ask for help without feeling like needing that help is an admission of failure.