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As a managed service provider (MSP), your clients rely on you for all things related to IT — and that includes compliance.
As clients come to you looking for answers, you need to show them you’re prepared to understand and address their needs.
Luckily, you’ve come to the right place.
In this guide, we’ve broken compliance readiness into five simple steps. Browse all our resources, or hop right to the things you need most right now. And when you’re done with this article, be sure to check out our Compliance for MSPs page, where we’ve rounded up even more compliance resources for MSPs.
Why Compliance Is Challenging for MSPs
Customers rely on MSPs to deploy, maintain, and secure their IT infrastructure. The responsibility for meeting compliance needs is part of that expectation, but no two companies are alike. Compliance doesn’t scale easily across multiple IT environments, so MSPs need to conduct in-depth analysis of each customer on a case-by-case basis.
Two companies may operate in the same sector and use the same tech stack, yet have entirely different compliance goals. Despite their similarities, an MSP managing two such companies would have to deploy full-featured multi-tenant solutions for capturing and analyzing compliance data for each.
This makes compliance different from the usual products and services that MSPs offer. It doesn’t offer the same economies of scale as expanding cloud infrastructure or managed detection and response — yet customers still expect results.
This puts a burden on MSP IT teams. Three of the most common challenges that MSPs face include:
- Meeting diverse customer requirements. If your MSP serves organizations in different industries and regions, it may need to support regulatory compliance for multiple different frameworks. The larger the number of different regulations you support, the more demanding the process becomes.
- Staying on top of changing regulations. Regulations are not static. They constantly change in response to new laws, risks, and market conditions. MSPs caught unprepared for regulatory changes will have to adapt quickly to new conditions, often at great cost.
- Managing limited resources and expertise. Compliance issues can demand a great deal of time and talent. MSPs covering multiple compliance frameworks across different industries may find their resources stretched thin. This is especially true for smaller MSPs that don’t have a dedicated in-house compliance team.
1. Become Fluent in Compliance
Compliance can be overwhelming for your clients — and for you as an MSP too, if you don’t know where to begin. To help make it more manageable, start your compliance training with these three introductory blogs.
- What Is IT Compliance? | If you’re brand new to compliance, start here. This blog will give you a detailed overview of what compliance is, why it’s important, potential roadblocks, and the most common regulatory requirements.
- What Is Cloud Compliance: A Comprehensive Overview | If you’re familiar with on-prem compliance but need to know how it translates to the cloud, this is the blog for you. Learn what makes on-prem and cloud compliance different from one another, compliance challenges unique to the cloud, and how to ensure cloud compliance.
- Compliance Regulations Demystified | IT compliance has three main phases. Learn what they are, and how to break them down into manageable subtasks.
After reading these blogs, you should have a great foundation in what compliance is, why it matters, and the top-level steps to ensuring it for your clients. Now, you’re ready to share your knowledge with your MSP customers.
2. Build Client Trust with Your Knowledge
As an MSP, your primary responsibility to your clients is to be a knowledgeable partner that can guide them through compliance, regardless of which regulations they’re tasked with meeting.
Recommended Reading: Start with this Data Compliance Hygiene eBook to get an overview of the compliance benefits of enforcing IT hygiene. Then, drill down into the regulations that specifically affect your clients, so you can be prepared to meet them.
Overview of Regulatory Bodies
The following list is not exhaustive, but it covers some of the most popular requirements that your clients may wish to pursue.
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) describes mandatory legal requirements for the healthcare industry. That includes healthcare providers, medical clinics, pharmacies, health insurers, billing services, and more.
Any organization that processes protected health information (PHI) must adhere to this framework. Examples of PHI include:
- Patient names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and biometric identifiers.
- Patient medical conditions, treatments, and records.
- Most payment information related to patient care.
HIPAA compliance requires deep visibility and knowledge of healthcare-specific processes. MSPs that work with healthcare organizations will need to deploy solutions that streamline the process, or risk facing violation fines and audits.
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publishes cybersecurity regulations in a format called Special Publications. These are voluntary frameworks, which means private organizations don’t have to adopt them as a prerequisite for doing business, but there is significant overlap between NIST and the legally mandated standards used in other industries.
For example, NIST SP 800-63 describes digital identity guidelines covering enrollment, authentication, and lifecycle management. Good password policy is a major element of this publication, and many organizations voluntarily comply with it even if they don’t pursue full NIST compliance.
SOC 2
System and Organization Controls (SOC) certifications provide deep visibility into how organizations manage customer data. That includes data processed by third-party vendors, which makes SOC compliance a key value for MSPs.
SOC 2 compliance defines five trust service principles — security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. SOC Type I certification focuses on a specific point in time, while SOC Type II examines security controls over a period of time. Organizations have significant flexibility in how they achieve and demonstrate these objectives.
For MSPs, that flexibility comes with advantages and drawbacks. It helps that organizations can achieve SOC 2 compliance in different ways, but it can also create complexity for MSPs managing compliance for multiple clients.
ISO 27001
ISO 27001 is an international standard for information security management. Unlike US-based frameworks like NIST and SOC 2, ISO 27001 is designed for organizations of all sizes, in all industries, in any territory or jurisdiction.
Its approach focuses more on risk management than on specific technologies or processes. ISO 27001 is a comprehensive framework, with 114 annexes that each contain unique criteria. MSPs have a pivotal role to play helping their customers achieve and demonstrate ISO 27001 compliance.
Data Privacy Laws
Many different territories have data privacy laws that apply to their residents and the organizations that do business with them. Examples of these laws include the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
These laws generally apply to residents of the jurisdiction in question, as well as the companies that process their data. For example, GDPR regulations extend to organizations that process EU citizen data even if the organization itself is not registered in the EU.
When it comes to data privacy laws, many organizations expect compliance from their service providers. That means that if one of your clients processes transactions from a customer in an EU country, they may expect your IT infrastructure to already be compliant with GDPR. The possibility that you aren’t prepared for GDPR-compliant transactions may not even cross their mind.
FDE
While not a compliance regulation itself, many regulations (PCI DSS, GLBA, HIPAA, FRCA, and GDPR) require full disk encryption (FDE) in order to meet their requirements. If any of these apply to your clients, you will need to deploy a solution that fully encrypts hardware storage on your devices.
This is different from file-level encryption, which only encrypts specific files and directories. Whole disk encryption protects the entire volume — and all the data it contains — against unauthorized access. BitLocker and FileVault are two popular encryption features built into Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, respectively.
Once you’re up to speed with what your clients need to reach and maintain compliance, proactively start the conversation with them. Share that you’ve researched the compliance regulations that affect their business, and you have a plan for making sure they meet the requirements. That way, they’ll automatically link you to their compliance success.
3. Address Common Compliance Challenges for MSPs
Once you understand the scope of your clients’ compliance needs, you must begin addressing the obstacles that stand in their way. In most cases, that means confronting three main issues unique to MSPs.
Identifying Compliance Gaps
Before setting up a roadmap to compliance for a client, you must understand where they are right now. That means identifying processes that don’t meet compliance standards and finding ways to optimize those that do.
This is easier said than done. A comprehensive audit will uncover all of your clients’ regulatory issues, but audits are expensive and time-consuming projects. You may need to scale down your approach to individual business units and conduct compliance assessments one at a time.
Addressing Evolving Regulatory Requirements
Compliance regulations are constantly changing, and organizations must adapt accordingly. Enterprise organizations with dedicated compliance teams struggle to do this on their own, so it’s no surprise that MSPs sometimes have trouble doing this for their clients.
Adopting the right technology and working with clients to consolidate their approach to compliance can help. Instead of handling the regulatory needs of several independent organizations piecemeal, you may be able to batch compliance tasks together for multiple clients at a time, earning efficiencies of scale in the process.
Managing Client Data Securely
MSPs are responsible for the infrastructure their clients use to store, transfer, and process data. Being a responsible data steward means having robust, secure processes in place for those activities.
This can be challenging when multiple clients use different tech stacks to conduct routine processes. You may need to build a complex set of integrations just to get all your clients’ data in one place. After that, you’ll still have to deploy compliant workflows for processing that data.
4. Continue to Build Your Security Framework
To keep your clients’ businesses secure and compliant, you must never stop evolving. Keep tabs on the latest and greatest in IT admin trends, upcoming threats, and the newest cyber criminal attack surfaces so you’re prepared to meet whatever challenges come your way.
Implement Robust Compliance Management Systems
MSPs can leverage specialized software solutions to automate compliance processes. These processes often involve a large number of repetitive tasks, and automation goes a long way toward streamlining them. Consider deploying tools to monitor data privacy, track regulatory changes, and manage documentation for compliance purposes.
Regular Compliance Audits and Assessments
Audits are time-consuming and difficult, but they are necessary. Most MSPs struggle to conduct comprehensive audits as often as they would like to. Smaller-scale assessments can help balance that need by providing insight at a faster velocity. This helps organizations correct themselves when drifting away from compliance requirements over time.
Employee Training and Awareness Programs
Ongoing training and education is vital to maintaining compliance in the long term. MSPs are responsible for providing training and education to employees on the relevant regulations and standards. This ensures the team is equipped to detect and address compliance violations before they disrupt business workflows.
5. Turn Compliance Challenges Into Opportunities
While demonstrating compliance is rarely easy, it does provide a competitive advantage to MSPs that dedicate time and resources to the process. Helping your clients achieve their compliance goals adds considerable value to your managed service portfolio and significantly reduces customer churn.
JumpCloud helps MSPs deliver compliance through full-scale flexible controls, deep security features, and centralized data management. As a true multi-tenant solution for mobile device management, JumpCloud gives MSPs valuable insight into their client’s directories, systems, and security configurations. That makes it easy for MSPs to activate security features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) without compromising the user experience in the process.
