Does your business face added compliance measures for how you manage the information of your clients? If so, and its discovered you’re out of compliance, it can bankrupt your business. Sometimes fines stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bad PR your business would suffer is another financial impact to consider. Compliance is necessary for legal reasons, as well as a normal business objective to minimize risk. 

Compliance, MSPs, And You

In terms of compliance, there are managed IT services who provide tech solutions, and oftentimes products, to businesses to assist in meeting the IT regulations in their industry. Take HIPAA, as an example. Healthcare institutions have to abide by HIPAA regulations.

MSPs serving healthcare groups (or other industries) have an incentive to ensure their clients are always in agreement with laws pertaining to compliance. This sort of symbiotic relationship is called “shared liability”. 

Different industries have different compliance idiosyncrasies. These will effect what sort of compliance needs an MSP will have to facilitate. To be sure you get the most effective options, you’ll want to consult the right people. Generally, key areas MSPs help businesses navigate this complicated legal environment in regard to their IT include:

• Maintaining Compliance With Differing Legislation To Avoid Penalties
• Facilitate BDR And/Or DRaaS For Sustainability And Compliance
• Keep Up With changes in the IT Industry, Such As EOL And EOS On Windows 7 for workstaations and Windows 2008 for servers.

Maintaining Compliance With Differing Legislation

Managed IT services are a unique asset in this regard and can make recommendations per your industry. Varying laws exist to protect private information throughout the United States. If your company experiences a data breach, you may be required by law to contact everyone affected. Some states have more restrictive laws than others. Here’s a list of the laws for all fifty states that pertain to breach notification. 

HIPAA is a family of law similar to that of breach notification, though instituted at a federal level in a way that’s a bit different than breach laws by state. As a business, you need to know which compliance laws you’re required to maintain, and that’s not always something straightforward.

Working with an MSP can help reveal where you’ve got a legal vulnerability, what to cover, and the best ways to go forward. If you don’t pursue due diligence here, if discovered, infractions can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Facilitate BDR And/Or DRaaS For Sustainability And Compliance

Working with the right managed IT services group can help you institute protective measures which support operational infrastructure and data when all else fails. Cybercrime is a multi-trillion dollar industry whose economic impact essentially mirrors “white-hat” IT.

The best firewalls, antivirus software, internal education protocols, and monitoring solutions will not prevent a skilled, dedicated human being. No computer system is 100% invulnerable. There is always some crack in the armor. So you need backups. BDR stands for Backup and Disaster Recovery. Essentially, this is a system of protocols designed to preserve data should other defenses fail.

The 3-2-1 strategy of backup is a good way to go–that’s: three total backups on at least two separate types of media, with an additional backup being located off-site. You want to update this backup as regularly as possible, and test it at intervals for reliable replication.MSPs save you time and money here through expedited implementation, and they can also help you apply even more effective data preservation options–such as cloud-based DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service. Between BDR and DRaaS, you’ll have sustainable data management. For some industries, like those which involve intellectual property your company has digital responsibility over, such backup options may be required for compliance. 

Keep Up With changes in the IT Industry, Such As EOL And EOS On Windows 7 and 2008 Operating Systems

Something else working with a provider of managed IT services can do for your business is keep you up-to-date on varying industry trends. The End Of Life and End Of Service (EOL / EOS) on certain OS (Operating System) software can blindside your business if you’re not up-to-date.

A great example is Windows 7, which reaches its EOL date in January 2020. If you haven’t upgraded to a new OS by that time, you’ll be running on legacy software. That’s pretty risky, as technology’s exponential advance makes it so that new threats develop even as new innovations do.

Imagine a desktop computer from the nineties, and its limited capabilities compared to today’s computation. A smartphone from today could hack a government installation in the eighties. You’ve got to keep up-to-date as best you can. If you can’t totally transition, you’ll need secondary options–there are some for businesses that can’t make the switch quick enough. Managed IT services keep you up-to-date, or at the very least secure if you can’t upgrade quite yet. Sometimes running on older equipment may put you out of compliance, but not always–again, consultation with the right tech group helps you figure out where you stand. 

Compliance Management

Managed IT services can be complicated. You’ve got to keep pace with a continually-shifting tech industry, provide backup solutions for emergencies, and maintain legal compliance requirements to avoid associated penalties. Getting the right resources to help you through this complicated arena is fundamental. Take the time to examine your needs and educate yourself for choosing the right resources to help you meet them.

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