What steps should MSPs take to support client compliance? From international user privacy laws to US government regulations for protecting classified data, almost every industry has its own ever-evolving set of legal frameworks that their processes and technological implementations must comply with.
Managed service providers (MSPs) and IT administrators must support compliance with all of these laws across their client base, presenting an ongoing challenge that affects data governance, documentation, monitoring, and reporting.
Being able to assist clients with compliance can improve MSP business
Being able to help your clients remain compliant with the regulations that apply in their region, industry, or due to the nature of the data they handle is not just a legal necessity – it can enhance the position of your MSP, putting you above your competition when vying for new customers in regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and education.
Providing managed services that are compliant with general regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and CCPA, as well as industry-specific standards such as those enforced by FINRA and the SEC, can attract businesses that lack their own in-house resources for building secure and compliant infrastructure.
It’s also critical for MSPs to be compliant themselves: MSPs can be held accountable for the data they handle, or for data breaches on infrastructure they host or have configured, even if it is on behalf of their clients, leading to potential legal exposure. 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, ranging from basic data protection measures, to full regulatory certification.
As with all compliance and legal-related matters, any entity handling sensitive or legally protected information (either for themselves, or on behalf of others) should consult with legal and domain experts to ensure the processes and technologies they implement result in 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
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 is possible to ‘overdo it’ and recommend measures that are not needed or already met. This can result in wasted resources and extended timelines, and 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 should include:
- Mapping current security controls to regulatory standards
- Identifying technical vulnerabilities and policy gaps
- Using automated tools to 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.
Step 2: Establish governance policies
Once a roadmap has been established, you can then build the policies that address both the regulatory and internal requirements that must be met. 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:
- Define policies for access control, encryption, data handling, and incident response
- Document required security practices and data retention rules
- 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), and a change management policy.
Step 3: Implement controls and secure configurations
Whether implementing IT infrastructure from scratch or bringing existing systems into compliance, your governance policies can then inform the technical and administrative controls that you will implement.
This will include:
- Configuring endpoint protection, firewalls, multifactor authentication (MFA), encryption, and backups
- Implementing minimum 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 with a security baseline that meets established policies (and in turn, is compliant with the regulations and standards those policies address), and hardened against cybersecurity threats.
Step 4: Enable logging, monitoring, and auditing
Systems must be fully logged and auditable for visibility and accountability so that suspicious behavior, potential breaches, or configuration drift leading to non-compliance can be quickly identified and rectified.
This should involve:
- Deploying centralized logging, such as SIEM or 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 ready access to all policies, infrastructure documentation, alerting dashboards, as well as live and archived event logs and audit trails (kept per regulatory retention 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 with staff training, both in how to properly use their tools, avoid social engineering attacks, and of their legal responsibilities.
As part of this, end-users should be given the opportunity to participate in:
- 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 is not a one-and-done job: it is an ongoing process that must address the changing legal obligations of your MSP and your clients, as well as how their business operates and their industry evolves.
This must include taking regular actions, including:
- 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.
To enable client compliance, your MSP must be compliant, too
‘We thought we were compliant’ doesn’t cut it – even accidental violations of data protection and privacy laws result in harsh penalties. MSPs must create service level agreements (SLAs) that clarify security obligations, and establish clear boundaries between what the client owns vs. what the MSP is responsible for (especially in co-managed environments). 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 a proactively 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 overheads. 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.
