RapidFire Tools also sees the new offering’s platform as being one that can handle multiple compliance regimes. It already supports GDPR, and they intend to roll out additional regulatory support this year.
Michael Mittel, RapidFire Tools’ president
RapidFire Tools, which has built up a flourishing business making network assessment tools, and which was acquired last fall by Kaseya, has broadened its offerings with a new solution that lets MSPs automate the delivery of HIPAA compliance services. This enables them to offer their customers an ongoing service that will identify and fix health care compliance issues, to provide the MSP with a recurrent revenue model rather than just a one-time assessment service.
“This takes our initial product to another level,” said Michael Mittel, RapidFire Tools’ president. “We got our feet wet with our Network Detective product, but it was only designed as a network assessment tool to produce reports. Audit Guru for HIPAA elevates that, with a product that isn’t just something that we sell to MSPs. Instead, it provides compliance automation that lets the MSP sell an ongoing compliance service to their customers. As such it is a sell-through product, rather than a sell-to product for MSPs. It acts like a compliance administrator-in-a-box, to take the whole idea of compliance to another level.”
Mittel said that Audit Guru for HIPAA’s being built on a Compliance Process Automation platform makes it a completely different kind of solution from Network Detective.
“A parallel would be the kind of software that the banks use today to process mortgages,” he indicated. “Everything is all automated through a portal in the same way. It also provides a way to more efficiently provide a service offering to the customer, by giving them a log-in to the portal and allowing them to interact in a more automated way. That level of collaboration is something that is completely new.” It also can significantly reduce the MSP’s workload, by having customers manually enter their own HIPAA-related information into the portal.
Mittel said that Audit Guru works on multiple levels.
“Compliance is about two things,” he stated. “First, is the required reporting under the standard, in order to avoid penalties. Second is an ongoing process to identify risk-based issues which impact compliance and fix them. In both cases, we have tried to automate this process so the MSP provides a service that’s not just a box. Before, the Network Detective Product was just a tool used by the MSP. This separates the two parts of the equation from a business perspective.”
Mittel said that while Audit Guru is not intended to replace Network Detective, it will open up new market opportunities for MSPs.
“I don’t think this is a replacement for the Network Detective module,” he indicated. “It was never meant to be that. The two things really do go hand in hand. Network Detective still shows the customer where he is at risk. It is also a stepping stone for a compliance service for those who don’t already have that.”
RapidFire Tools envisions MSPs using this platform to get into other areas of compliance beyond HIPAA. This solution already supports the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulations [GDPR].
“The way we envision this is that a lot of the compliance standards are very similar,” Mittel noted. “It is our goal throughout 2019 to develop several other compliance standards, like NIST and PCI. We look on these like skins, which you can add very effectively. Audit Guru becomes a platform for compliance and we think this will help MSPs get into other areas of compliance as well.”
MSPs are able to purchase a license for the product that supports up to 150 endpoints on the network. If they want more capacity than that, they need to buy an enterprise license which RapidFire Tools also sells to healthcare companies for their own IT staff,
“We have enterprise licenses that cover 500, 1000 and more endpoints,” Mittel said. “They require more work on our part, and more interaction with the MSP. They also have the option of an install based on Hyper-V or VMware as well as Windows. In larger installations, we only do virtual installs.”
RapidFire Tools is supporting the new offering with an enablement program.
“It includes training and onboarding, and we provide marketing brochures and spec sheets,” Mittel said.
