3 emerging operational shifts post Kaseya Connect Europe

Kaseya Connect Europe brought together more than 1,500 MSPs and IT professionals in Prague to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping today's IT landscape.

While every organisation is different, three themes consistently emerged from conversations with our attendees. These aren't future predictions — they're operational shifts already changing how IT teams and MSPs work.

1. Tool sprawl is fueling demand for unified platforms

It's a familiar story. A new business requirement emerges, so you deploy a new tool. Then another. And another. Before long, you have tool sprawl.

It’s a problem for MSPs trying to wear many hats for their customers, but the trend is equally prevalent within organizations as IT teams are required to do more — often with the same or fewer resources.

The more balls to juggle, the more hands you need

The problems quickly become apparent. Customers tell us it causes:

1. Reduced efficiency: Resolving a single issue often requires engineers to move between multiple systems, gather information from different sources and manage numerous logins. Even small inefficiencies add up quickly when multiplied across a team.
2. More systems to administer: Managing multiple platforms carries costs beyond licensing. Teams must maintain expertise across different tools, handle ongoing administration, manage users and permissions, and ensure security remains consistent across environments.
3. More relationships to manage: Every additional solution introduces another vendor relationship. Beyond the administrative burden, organisations risk underutilising investments if they lack the time to stay current on new features and capabilities.

The need for a unified experience

To combat tool sprawl, businesses are embracing unified solutions that consolidate endpoint, user and ops management.

The immediate benefit is consolidation. You get a system that’s tailored to your business, all behind one login.

This unified approach also makes it easier to connect data and workflows. You can see the patch status of your devices, how you’re running against recovery point objectives (RPO) and see training uptake from users — all in one place.

Our solution to this need was Kaseya 365, which provides a unified way for businesses to manage their IT infrastructure. The benefits speak for themselves: consolidation with Kaseya 365 Ops alone can save 16+ hours per tech per month.

Tool sprawl risks security gaps

With more systems comes the increased risk of missing information. It could be due to the sheer number of tools or alert fatigue, but engineers may fail to spot something.

Separate systems also make it difficult to correlate events. Activity that appears harmless in isolation may indicate a serious threat when viewed alongside other data.

To tackle this blind spot, tools like SIEM aggregate data from many sources, including your endpoints, firewalls and cloud services. You can track potential intrusions and identify signs that could indicate your systems have been compromised.

While SIEM is very powerful, it ingests significantly more data than the average business would have done 20 years ago. All that information is also of little use if isn’t interpreted in a meaningful way or if it’s not acted upon.

That’s why we launched Kaseya SIEM. Designed for today's data-intensive environments, Kaseya SIEM enhances traditional SIEM capabilities through:

1. AI-driven interrogation: Engineers can use a natural-language chat experience to query security data, identify anomalies and surface compromised assets.
2. Automated responses: Customers can automate the response to certain risks so they can head off threats automatically. You can create your own, but Kaseya also creates rules and IOCs (indicators of compromise) to reduce administration and allow for faster deployment.
3. 24/7 AI augmented SOC: Kaseya SIEM is backed by a 24/7 SOC where Kaseya's analysts monitor, investigate, and respond to threats on your behalf. The AI SOC cuts through alert noise first — so analysts spend their time on the incidents that actually require human judgment.

This model gives companies features that may previously have been out of reach. Most companies cannot justify creating their own SOC or the resulting management burden, but by combining automation along with human know-how Kaseya SIEM allows companies to lower their TCO while responding faster and more accurately to security incidents.

The result is greater cyber resilience, with unified visibility from a unified platform.

For IT teams, it augments their internal capability. For MSPs, it helps them scale — taking on new clients and giving full visibility across all their applications, end points and firewalls without incurring significant investment.

2. Teams are moving from reactive to automated security

Cyberattacks are increasing in both volume and sophistication thanks to AI helping bad actors. Dealing with alerts manually just can’t adequately scale.

MSPs facing margin pressure can’t just throw more people at the problem. But there’s also an argument that they shouldn’t.

More engineers detecting issues won’t help if they’re not working efficiently and meaningfully interpreting your data. And during an active security incident there’s a point where more engineers would just become a detriment.

The answer is not more resources, it's a more intelligent approach to detection and response. Fortunately, the same technologies helping attackers operate at scale are also helping IT teams defend against them.

Tailored detection helps teams focus on what matters

With tools aggregating so much data, how you interpret it is vital.

Our customers are creating alerting rules that are based around what’s important to them, tailored around their environment. This allows them to align alerts to their risk profiles, reduce noise and increase detection confidence.

For security alerts, those automated IOCs allow you to manage when you are notified of potential issues. For non-security issues, such as device monitoring, you can also tailor the notifications you are receiving.

One MSP customer adjusted its after-hours alerting process to verify that an issue persisted before creating a ticket. The result was an 83% reduction in overnight tickets. They were still able to track those blips and investigate later without waking up an engineer.

That sort of adjustment reduces engineer burnout and unnecessary disruption, so they can focus on important issues.

Automated response and a 24/7 SOC are essential for scale

According to CrowdStrike Global Threat Report 2025, attackers take an average of just 48 minutes to move laterally following an initial compromise — so your response speed is one of your biggest advantages, especially if it can be automatically triggered without engineer intervention.

It may be just to lock down a potentially compromised device until someone can investigate, but that initial response could stop the problem from escalating.

Automated responses allow you to pre-define responses to different scenarios and they can respond to threats across cloud and endpoint surfaces simultaneously. It comes back to being more intelligent about how time is deployed. It’s not about adding more headcount; it’s about allowing the engineers you do have to focus their efforts.

We also recognise that many businesses lack the resources or specialised expertise required to investigate and respond to threats around the clock. That's why the SOC capabilities in Kaseya SIEM offer an always-on addition to your team where AI handles the volume and analysts handle the complexity.

It's not a choice between people and automation. The most effective security operations combine both — giving you the tools and expertise you need to respond faster.

3. It’s no longer just about backup — it’s about cyber resilience

Our customers know backup is important, but they also appreciate that it's now just one component of a much broader objective: cyber resilience. As organizations become increasingly dependent on platforms like Microsoft 365 alongside endpoints, cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications, protecting data is no longer enough. The challenge is ensuring the business can continue operating and recover quickly when disruption occurs.

It’s driven by the knowledge that any downtime is lost business, and that today’s incident could have a negative impact on tomorrow’s stock price. There’s also legislation (such as NIS2 in Europe) making it a legal responsibility for businesses to factor in business continuity.

Tool sprawl strikes again

The ability to satisfy that complexity comes at an increasing cost. It comes back to the tool sprawl discussed earlier.

What might have once been largely on-premises data could now span Microsoft 365, Azure workloads, endpoints, SaaS applications, cloud services and traditional on-site infrastructure. As organizations adopt more Microsoft services alongside other business-critical platforms, IT teams are often left managing multiple backup and recovery tools, each with their own policies, interfaces and reporting. The result is more systems to manage, more dashboards to navigate, more overhead.

Engineers are responding to alerts. Fixing failed jobs. Managing exceptions. Handling one-off recovery scenarios that all work differently.

For MSPs that means lower efficiency, more engineers and suppressed margins. For those within corporate IT teams it means spending time keeping the lights on and not getting to focus on those larger IT initiatives that deliver value to the business.

The rise of unified cyber resilience

Initially, many organizations attempted to address these challenges with a collection of native and point solutions. While these tools can solve individual problems, they often introduce additional operational complexity, fragmented visibility and higher long-term costs.

Today, organizations are increasingly looking for a better approach. At Kaseya, we describe this as unified cyber resilience: bringing backup, recovery and continuity operations together through a single management experience.

The benefits are significant:

• Consistent workflows: There’s no re-learning between environments, no context switching, no complexity to manage. Instead, policies are aligned, alerts are standardized and users get one unified experience.
• Standardized recovery: MSPs can template their recovery processes, meaning standardization across clients. That means less complexity to manage, but also more reliable and trusted recovery for clients thus boosting satisfaction.
• Proactive risk mitigation: Knowing a backup is complete is not enough. It’s having the confidence — and proof — that recovery of your protected assets can happen successfully. Features such as AI-powered screenshot verification give confidence that your backed-up data is complete and recoverable while saving on average 8 tech hours a month.
• Centralized reporting: One dashboard, one reporting structure. It’s easier to see the backup status across your IT estate and for MSPs across all the clients. By having that data and gaining those insights it’s easier for proactive management.
• Lower TCO: Consolidating backup, recovery and continuity operations into a unified platform reduces licensing, management and operational overhead. By not stitching together multiple native and third-party tools to protect Microsoft and non-Microsoft workloads, customers can typically achieve up to 30% lower TCO while simplifying day-to-day operations.

This shift to resilience is being driven by a focus on outcomes. The discussion is less about operational elements of how backups are achieved and more focused on how to reduce risk and how quickly recovery can be completed.

And that’s compelling for MSPs and business leaders alike.

Change is needed — and fast

A common thread ran through the conversations at Kaseya Connect Europe: the need to adapt is becoming increasingly urgent.

The ability to pivot and meet those demands is what will make or break businesses.

For MSPs, it’s directly connected to your ability to grow — consistently, predictably and profitably — in a market that’s becoming less forgiving. There’s a widening gap between MSPs who have built scalable, standardized service models and those still operating with higher complexity and thinner margins. That division has real consequences: the majority of MSPs’ growth relies on winning clients from competitors, only 12% of MSPs report first-time adopters. Meanwhile, 33% of MSPs cite slower new client acquisition as a key factor affecting growth and 24% report clients are reducing their IT budgets; these forces constrain revenue growth and limit expansion opportunity.

Internal IT teams face their own challenges: it comes back to standardizing, automating and boosting efficiency so you can deal with the ever-increasing demands you face.

We're excited by the progress our customers are making and confident that the teams that embrace these three core shifts will survive and thrive.

To learn how Kaseya can help your business navigate these shifts — book a demo.