What Steps Should MSPs Take to Support Client Compliance?

What steps should MSPs take to support client compliance? From international user privacy laws to regulations protecting classified data, almost every industry has its own evolving set of legal frameworks that govern its processes and technological implementations.

Managed service providers (MSPs) and IT administrators must support compliance with the laws, regulations, and standards that apply to each client. This presents an ongoing challenge that affects data governance, documentation, monitoring, and reporting.

Assisting clients with compliance can improve an MSP business

Being able to help your clients remain compliant with the requirements that apply to their region, industry, or the nature of the data they handle is not just a legal necessity. It can enhance the position of your MSP. This puts you above the competition when vying for new customers in regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and education.

Providing managed services that support applicable requirements such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and CCPA, as well as industry-specific rules enforced by organizations such as FINRA and the SEC, can attract businesses that lack their own in-house resources for building secure and compliant infrastructure.

• CMMC 2.0 (mandatory for defense contractors, with a November 2026 enforcement deadline),
• NIS2 (which explicitly includes MSPs within its scope for EU-connected clients),
• SOC 2 (now expected by roughly 78% of B2B enterprise buyers), and
• those enforced by FINRA and the SEC.

This can attract businesses that lack their own in-house resources for building secure and compliant infrastructure.

It’s equally critical for MSPs to be compliant themselves. They can be held accountable for the data they handle or for data breaches on infrastructure they host or have configured, even if it’s on behalf of their clients, leading to potential legal exposure.

At the same time, this exposure isn’t limited to client data. Under frameworks like NIS2 and CMMC, MSPs fall directly within regulatory scope. NIS2 explicitly names providers of managed services as covered entities, and MSPs supporting defense contractors may need their own CMMC Level 2 certification if their systems touch controlled unclassified information (CUI). Overall, this leads many MSPs to specialize in specific industries so that they can focus on building standardized, compliant configurations that they fully understand and can have vetted. This can range from basic data protection measures to full regulatory certification.

The financial stakes have grown sharply as well. European regulators issued €1.2 billion in GDPR fines in 2025 alone, bringing cumulative penalties since 2018 to more than €7.1 billion. Beyond direct fines, IBM’s research shows that non-compliance adds an average of $174,538 to the cost of a data breach on top of any regulatory penalty.

As with all compliance and legal matters, any entity handling sensitive or legally protected information (either for itself or on behalf of others) should consult with legal and domain experts to ensure that the processes and technologies it implements achieve full compliance, especially if self-certifying. Once this guidance is obtained, planning and implementation can take place.

Step 1: Perform a risk assessment and gap analysis

MSPs should begin compliance work with a risk assessment that maps a client’s existing controls against the regulations that apply to them.

Ideally, your MSP’s clients will already be compliant or near compliant with the applicable regulations. However, this is frequently not the case, and you must assess exactly what actions need to be taken for them to reach the required standards.

This planning stage is critical: not identifying unmet requirements could lead to a breach of policy and potential legal or reputational ramifications for both your client and your own business. Contrarily, it’s possible to “overdo it” and recommend measures that aren’t needed or already in place. This can result in wasted resources and extended timelines as well as potentially damage your relationship with your customers.

The key actions you should take to identify how to get your customers where they need to be are as follows:

• Mapping current security controls to regulatory standards
• Identifying technical vulnerabilities and policy gaps
• Using automated toolsto generate compliance scorecards

At the end of this stage, you should deliver to your client a baseline risk report, a compliance maturity model, and a prioritized remediation roadmap.

Note: HHS’s Office for Civil Rights has proposed the first major revision to the HIPAA Security Rule since 2013. OCR had targeted a final rule for spring 2026, but that window has passed with nothing published, and there is no confirmed timeline for when (or whether) a final rule will issue; a coalition of more than 100 hospital and provider groups has asked HHS to withdraw the proposal outright. If adopted as proposed, safeguards like multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption, and network segmentation—currently optional “addressable” items—would become required controls, and covered entities would need annual, documented compliance audits rather than periodic reviews. MSPs serving healthcare clients should build these requirements into gap analyses.

Step 2: Establish governance policies

Once gaps are identified, MSPs should codify how those gaps will be closed in written governance policies covering access, encryption, data handling, and incident response. By clearly defining what must be done in a unified policy, you can ensure that all items are fully addressed during the implementation stage.

When discussing and defining your compliance-oriented data governance and security policies, you should do the following:

• Define policies for access control, encryption, data handling, and incident response
• Document required security practices and data retention rules
• Inventory client AI and automated decision-making tool (ADMT) usage as well as classify it against applicable risk frameworks
• Create an organized, comprehensive “compliance binder” for audit-ready documentation

The resulting documentation from these actions should include a written information security policy (WISP), acceptable use policy (AUP), a change management policy, and (increasingly) an AI governance policy that inventories client AI tools and maps them against frameworks like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework or ISO/IEC 42001.

Step 3: Implement controls and secure configurations

Governance policies are then translated into technical controls—endpoint protection, MFA, encryption, and least-privilege access—that bring infrastructure into compliance:

• Configuring endpoint protection, firewalls, MFA, encryption, and backups
• Implementing least privilege access using role-based access control (RBAC)
• Patching systems regularly and restricting external access vectors

This should result in cloud and on-premises infrastructure that operates according to an established security baseline and is hardened against cybersecurity threats. The controls should also be tested, documented, and mapped to the applicable compliance requirements.

Step 4: Enable logging, monitoring, and auditing

Systems must log relevant activity and remain auditable for visibility and accountability so that suspicious behavior, potential breaches, or configuration drift leading to non-compliance can be quickly identified and addressed.

This should involve the following steps:

• Deploying centralized logging, such as SIEMor log aggregation tools
• Deploying tools that integrate anomaly detection, access logs, and audit trails
• Configuring alerts for critical changes to systems, user access, or sensitive data access/updates for the relevant stakeholders

As an MSP, you should have appropriate access to the policies, infrastructure documentation, alerting dashboards, event logs, and audit trails needed to deliver agreed services. Logs and audit trails should be retained according to applicable legal, contractual, and business requirements. You should establish a well-rehearsed incident response workflow so that problems are addressed in as short a timeframe as possible.

Step 5: Train end users and stakeholders

The first line of defense against cybersecurity incidents and data mishandling is your users. Accidental compliance violations can be greatly reduced through staff training on how to properly use their tools, avoid social engineering attacks, and understand their legal responsibilities.

As part of this, end-users should be given the opportunity to participate in the following:

• Regular security awareness training (including how to identify phishing, how to securely share data, etc.)
• Role-specific training for IT administrators, C-level executives, and general staff
• Regular simulated attack campaigns to test that users respond appropriately

Building a culture of security is imperative for the ongoing compliance of any business.

Step 6: Maintain and document ongoing compliance

Compliance isn’t a one-time project. It requires scheduled reviews, updated documentation, and audit-ready evidence on an ongoing basis.

This must include taking regular actions such as the following:

• Reviewing relevant policies and controls, either at a regular interval (potentially defined by regulation) or after major changes
• Maintaining change logs, access reviews, and policy update records for the prescribed periods
• Preparing for audits by keeping documentation centralized and up to date

This should result in documentation such as quarterly compliance checklists, evidence binders for auditing purposes, and data to populate client compliance health dashboards that provide ready access to compliance performance metrics. Automation can also be leveraged for identifying potential compliance issues.

A new compliance frontier: AI governance

As clients adopt AI tools across their operations, regulators are starting to treat AI governance as an auditable compliance area rather than a voluntary best practice. California’s updated CCPA rules now require privacy risk assessments for automated decision-making technology, profiling, and AI training uses, and the EU AI Act’s Article 50 transparency obligations take full effect on August 2, 2026. MSPs can get ahead of this by maintaining a client AI inventory and mapping it against the NIST AI RMF or ISO/IEC 42001 the same way they already map security controls to HIPAA or PCI DSS.

To enable client compliance, your MSP must be compliant, too

“We thought we were compliant” doesn’t cut it. Even accidental violations carry real financial exposure: PCI DSS violations can reach $500,000 per incident, and GDPR fines can reach €20 million or 4% of global annual revenue, whichever is higher.

MSPs must create service level agreements (SLAs) that clarify security obligations and establish clear boundaries between what the client owns versus what the MSP is responsible for (especially in co-managed environments). This is especially important under CMMC, NIS2, and the incoming HIPAA Security Rule update, all of which expect documented evidence of compliance, not just a written policy on file. MSP compliance initiatives should also be aligned with cyber insurance requirements to ensure coverage.

Through methodical planning, implementation, and operation, MSPs can ensure that both their business and their customers are fully compliant with all relevant regulations and standards. Automated tools—including governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platforms—can assist with this, helping you provide proactive, compliant IT infrastructure and support as a managed service.

Industry-specific, compliant MSPs are increasingly attractive to enterprises looking to scale, without adding their own internal IT overhead. NinjaOne gives you a complete MSP platform that is highly compliant with a range of international regulations and can form the technological foundation of your business, unifying remote monitoring and management, backup, and endpoint protection in a single interface.