2018 is bringing an exciting change for us here at Virtual Administrator. 2 Factor Authentication has been the most requested feature addition to our servers for months now. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to figure out how to make this work reliably for our partners.
We have finally set up a new 2FA system which we are sending live very soon. 2 Factor Authentication bring a new level of security to our servers that will help you (our partners) sleep well at night knowing your agents are safe from brute force attack and compromised passwords.
What you need to know
If you are on our Go!Manage and Hosted Kaseya platforms (Not Kaseya Saas) then this applies to you.
- We are going to turn 2FA on for every user on our system on February 15. We are already acclimating ourselves to 2FA on the master administrative level and are polishing up some simple documentation to help you get setup – this is coming along shortly.
- We are going to be applying a $1.50 / admin / month charge for all administrators starting at the end of this billing period. This is important since we had to license software in order to provide this functionality. For most of our users this will have little impact. For the few of you who have many administrative users, we will reach out to you with additional options. Otherwise, you can expect to see your invoice reflect a small fee for each administrator starting on our February 26th billing cycle.
- Please take a moment to review your admin accounts and reach out to us if you need anything removed. You can reach us at help@virtualadministrator.com or file a ticket here.
- If you have admin accounts for your clients, note that we are going to contact them direct with details on how to enable 2FA on their account. If this is an issue then you must reach out to us to let us know.
If you are using our Kaseya Saas servers.
- We are currently working with Kaseya to see if we can get this functionality enabled for you as well. If this is a critical feature then we can discuss migrating from the Kaseya Saas Servers to our Hosted Servers. We’ll have more information soon on availability and pricing.
How we’re providing 2FA
2FA is provided by AuthAnvil. AuthAnvil is a part of Kaseya and we’re happy to have them backing up our new 2FA efforts. They have made the whole process of setting up and utilizing 2 Factor Authentication very easy and simple.
AuthAnvil has an app available for Android, iPhone, Windows, and a few other platforms that gives you some options for logging in.
Documentation on how to set this up for yourself will be coming in the next few days. We’ll have more information on this ASAP.
Why we are providing 2FA
2017 will go down in history as one of the biggest years for security breaches in all of history. With the Massive Equifax leak, among other things, security is finally something that our end-users are taking seriously. Even still, we understand that this might be viewed as something of an extreme measure. But the question we keep asking ourselves isn’t “why are we doing this?” It is “why haven’t we done this yet?” Kaseya is a powerful gateway into many businesses and tens of thousands of computers. We need to be doing everything within our power to secure this access. This is probably one of the largest changes we’ve made to our hosted Kaseya environment to date but it is going to be so worth it.
From an administrative perspective it was an all-or-nothing thing. We could protect every account on our servers, or really none of them. Based on feedback we have been receiving and also because of the obvious security advantages we’ve already mentioned, it was kind of a no-brainer to enable this on our servers.
We hope that you are as excited about this change as we are. We are going to be reaching out direct to partners on our hosted servers this week with access to your new account at AuthAnvil and also instructions on how to configure and get setup.
Happy Monday and Happy New Year! We’re going to make this the best year yet at Virtual Administrator.
