Boost Your MSP Revenue with Compliance Service

Are compliance services currently a revenue stream for your MSP business? If not, then keep reading and hopefully I can show you how to enhance your revenue and profit by capitalizing on this niche vertical market in our industry. Serving this market provides you with a significant money-making opportunity and gives you a tangible point-of-difference over general MSPs who don’t support it.

Clients come to MSPs like you and I to help them solve some type of problem. A common one regards compliance-driven industries like healthcare, finance, and legal – all vertical markets that are traditionally popular targets for us. However, for your clients to legally serve these areas, they must be compliant and are regularly audited to assess and fix the risks of their organization. You can relieve them of this stress by offering compliance services. This means that you are implementing and managing the required security and privacy regulations – from processes and procedures to advanced technology – and not them. The benefits? Your clients can focus on other important aspects of their businesses and your value to them greatly increases along with your bottom line.

What are other benefits to offering compliance services?

• The ability to offer more advanced security services
• Create more efficiency for your clients by using more advanced tools (encryption, data backup, secure messaging, etc.)
• Transform your company into a business solution provider (BSP)

Some people mistakenly perceive “Compliance” and “Security” as the same thing because they overlap many aspects of a business’s operations, such as encryption, backup and business continuity, secure communications, and network security. But they aren’t the same. “Compliance” is more about proving what you did or didn’t do essentially around policies and procedures, while “Security” in the MSP arena specifically regards technology and defending networks from unauthorized entry.

Steps to Offering Compliance Services

Look at your base of clients and identify if any are in a regulated vertical market. For instance, if a client is in the healthcare arena, then you would need to be compliant with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). This is a complicated one because it regards three rules: Privacy (when protected data may be used and disclosed), Security (safeguards to ensure access to data), and Omnibus (breach notification). It’s probably the most sought-after compliance for MSPs because healthcare is the fastest growing sector of the United States economy and the most vulnerable to cyber risk. Thus, it’s a big market for you to dive into and profit from.

Other primary compliances are:

• Payment Card Industry (PCI), which sets the information security standards for the major credit cards
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which oversees data protection and privacy laws in the European Union as well as the transfer of data outside the EU
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which oversees the standards for the manufacturing sector
• Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which regulates member brokerage firms and exchange markets.

If you have clients in these markets, then you need to become compliant in their respective areas. If you don’t have any clients in a regulated vertical market, then you want to select the markets in which you want to offer compliance services and, of course, become compliant.

Next, you want to determine your business model. Will you be a local or national provider? Then, you need to implement advanced security services, including BDR, EDR, MDR, SOC, and SIEM. If all this is too daunting for your business to handle alone, then consider partnering with another MSP like IT by Design.

We have SOC Type II certification and support the other certifications I mentioned above.

Once you have all of that addressed, then you can go prospecting for clients that need compliance services. The more compliant you are in different markets, the wider you can cast your net. Again, begin with your base because you already have an established relationship with them. But remember: new clients are more lucrative because you can begin with a higher price point.

Specialization – like in compliance services – makes your MSP services much more coveted and differentiates you from the growing competitive market. So when someone asks you, “What makes your MSP business so special?”, you can now confidently respond, “We proudly and legally offer compliance services.”