Historically, managed service providers (MSPs) have struggled to help their small and midsized business (SMB) clients understand and align with compliance for their specific business sectors, including defense, healthcare, financial, or even their cybersecurity insurance requirements. A lack of awareness and implementation of required safeguards make small businesses vulnerable to cyberattacks and regulatory penalties due to unintentional non-compliance.
One of the most critical areas in cybersecurity today is the Microsoft 365® environment. Given the constant changes in cybersecurity threats, compliance standards, and platform features, both MSPs and SMBs can find it challenging to stay on top of the updates required to adequately secure their environments.
Why compliance is crucial for MSPs
Due to the complexities of scaling security assessments and implementing necessary changes across a multi-tenant environment, MSPs are continuously seeking ways to enhance efficiency while ensuring alignment with compliance and cybersecurity standards across all clients, including themselves.
One way to tackle both the scaling issue and the alignment to compliance issue is to consider ConnectWise SaaS Security™. With nine cybersecurity frameworks available—listed below—including the Microsoft Security Framework, CIS, NIST, ISO, and HIPAA, MSPs can efficiently identify gaps in framework coverage for an individual tenant while also creating a common baseline minimum for all tenants.
Building alliance to compliance: How to address alignment challenges
To address the challenges of scalability and compliance alignment, MSPs can leverage ConnectWise SaaS Security. With support for nine frameworks, including the Microsoft Security Framework, CIS, NIST, ISO, and HIPAA, MSPs can efficiently identify gaps in framework coverage for individual tenants while establishing a common baseline minimum standard for all clients. This approach streamlines security management processes and enhances overall security posture across the MSP’s client base.
Currently, the supported frameworks are:
- Microsoft Security Framework
- CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark V4
- CIS Critical Security Controls V8
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework V2
- ASD’s Essential Eight
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Information Security Controls
- HIPAA Security Safeguards
- AICPA Trust Services Criteria (SOC2)
- NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework V3.2
Conclusion
By using ConnectWise SaaS Security to run comprehensive reports across all tenants, identify security issues, and automatically remediate them, a single engineer can run reports against all tenants, remediate issues, and ensure alignment with the MSP minimum standards or specific compliance areas quickly and efficiently.
For more information on scaling your Microsoft 365 protection, check out this product walkthrough >>
