Common compliance challenges for MSPs

Navigating compliance as a managed service provider comes with unique challenges due to the diversity of industries and clients you serve. Understanding these obstacles can help MSPs proactively address them.

1. Balancing compliance with daily operations

Operationalizing a security and compliance program often requires significant time and resources, which can divert attention from core operations. For smaller MSPs or those with lean teams, this balancing act can be particularly difficult. 

Common struggles include:

• Resource allocation: Ensuring compliance while meeting client service-level agreements with limited resources.
• Limited bandwidth: Keeping up with audits, documentation, and training alongside day-to-day IT support.

How to address this: Automation and AI can help streamline time-consuming compliance tasks, like evidence collection and continuous monitoring, to give you time and resources back to ensure both compliance and operations run smoothly.

2. Keeping up with evolving regulations

The regulatory landscape is constantly changing, with new frameworks and updates to existing ones released regularly. This means MSPs and their customers must track changes across multiple frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 and adapt quickly to maintain compliance for themselves and their clients. If they can’t effectively manage regulatory changes, MSPs and their clients may face compliance violations, legal penalties, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. 

How to address this: Partner with compliance experts or invest in compliance solutions that are updated as frameworks, such as PCI DSS 4.0, ISO 27001:2022, and NIST CSF 2.0, evolve over time. Ideally, do both so you can understand any regulatory changes affecting your businesses and maintain continuous compliance. 

3. Managing documentation and evidence

Compliance requires detailed documentation of policies, procedures, and technical controls, as well as evidence to prove they are in place and effective. MSPs often struggle with managing multiple documents across different frameworks and ensuring all required data is collected and organized in time for audits. 

This manual work can also eat up valuable time and resources. According to a survey by Deloitte, companies spend an average of 2,000 hours per year on compliance activities, with documentation and reporting constituting about 20-30% of this effort. That’s 400 to 600 hours per year. 

How to address this: Use a centralized platform to automate document management and evidence collection, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks and helping to boost efficiency.

4. Training and ensuring security awareness of employees

Employees play a critical role in achieving and maintaining compliance. Most security frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and others, require security awareness training to be conducted regularly to ensure all employees are trained on security and privacy best practices related to their job and/or organization. 

However, many MSPs face challenges such as:

• Making compliance a priority for teams who may see it as an administrative burden.
• Ensuring all staff understand their role in compliance efforts.
• Tracking that all employees completed training annually, especially as new talent joins.
• Unengaging and outdated compliance training.

How to address this: Emphasize how compliance supports overall security and business goals and implement regular, engaging training sessions. A compliance automation platform with built-in proprietary training can provide modern, engaging content so crucial information sticks long after the training and automate the assignment, tracking, and reporting of this training. 

5. Ensuring client alignment

Since MSPs work with a variety of clients, each with unique compliance needs, aligning their services with every client’s requirements can be daunting. Challenges include:

• Understanding client frameworks: Due to the complexity and flux of compliance requirements, most clients can’t fully understand and implement necessary measures on their own and look to MSPs for technical expertise. This requires MSPs to know which frameworks (e.g., CMMC or SOC 2 or ISO 27001) apply to each client, what their purpose and ideal use cases are, and how they overlap.
• Customizing services: MSPs are challenged with tailoring IT solutions to meet specific client compliance needs without overextending resources.

How to address this: Standardize your approach to compliance while offering flexibility for client-specific requirements, and communicate your processes clearly during onboarding. A compliance automation platform can help you implement a framework that is prescriptive and flexible enough to support a client base and then adapt it to all of your clients. 

6. Preparing for audits

Audits can be stressful and time-intensive, especially for MSPs who may need to prepare for their own as well as their clients’. As previously mentioned, compiling the necessary documentation and evidence is a major pain point. Discovering non-compliance issues right before or during the audit can also be a significant issue, causing MSPs to scramble to remediate the issues.

How to address this: Conduct internal compliance assessments regularly and invest in tools that offer audit readiness features, like checklists and mock assessments, and continuous monitoring to ensure you have peace of mind that you are audit-ready and maintaining compliance year round.

MSP compliance solutions

Compliance can be a daunting challenge for MSPs that don’t have the right tools and expertise. 

Juggling multiple frameworks, managing diverse client needs, and keeping pace with evolving regulations require a strategic approach. MSP compliance solutions offer the tools and expertise needed to streamline these efforts, helping MSPs focus on their core services while maintaining trust and credibility with clients.

MSP compliance solutions are specialized tools, platforms, and services designed to help MSPs meet regulatory requirements efficiently. They combine automation, expertise, and resources to simplify the often-complex process of achieving and maintaining compliance with frameworks like HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more.

These solutions go beyond checklists—they provide end-to-end support for identifying gaps, implementing controls, and monitoring compliance over time. 

Key features of MSP compliance solutions include:

• Automating compliance workflows: From policy creation to control monitoring, compliance solutions reduce the manual burden of compliance.
• Prescriptive guidance: Solutions often provide initial gap assessments to identify areas of non-compliance, paired with actionable recommendations for remediation.
• Framework mappings: Compliance solutions help MSPs align with multiple frameworks, mapping controls across HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, and more, reducing duplication of effort.
• Continuous monitoring and alerts: Compliance solutions continuously monitor and track system activity, flagging potential risks or non-compliance in real-time.
• Documentation and reporting: These solutions have centralized dashboards and automated reporting tools that make it easier to generate evidence for audits, satisfy client inquiries, and demonstrate compliance.

By automating routine tasks and centralizing compliance management, these solutions free up MSP teams to focus on their core offerings. They also unlock other benefits, helping MSPs to quickly adapt to new requirements and client expectations, proactively addressing vulnerabilities and issues, demonstrating a commitment to security and compliance, and enhancing client trust.

How Secureframe can help simplify MSP compliance

Secureframe is known for helping teams reduce time spent on manual compliance tasks by at least 26% per month, increasing security postures and speed to market. The platform allows partners and customers to efficiently implement, manage, and monitor critical security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, and CIS.

Here are a few key ways Secureframe simplifies compliance for MSPs:

• Automated compliance for the most frameworks out-of-the-box: Secureframe automates evidence collection and other compliance workflows for the most security frameworks, including CIS Controls, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, CIS Controls, and more than 30 others, ensuring MSPs can quickly and easily get and stay compliant with evolving requirements.
• Expert guidance: Secureframe customers can work with our in-house team of compliance managers to address complex requirements and get personalized advice based on their unique risks, industry requirements, and clients.
• In-platform training: Secureframe provides proprietary employee training that meets SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, NIST 800-171, CMMC, and other framework requirements including insider threat and role-based training. It is reviewed and updated annually by compliance experts.
• Policies developed by experts: Secureframe offers policies and procedure templates, developed and vetted by compliance experts for all out-of-the-box frameworks. You can easily publish this documentation, assign them to owners, and track policy acceptance and regular review within Secureframe.
• Control mapping: Secureframe automatically maps the controls you already have in place for one framework like SOC 2 to other in-demand frameworks like ISO 27001 to make it faster and easier to achieve compliance with multiple standards.
• Automated gap analysis: With over 220 deep integrations, you can pull in all the compliance data you need and get a constantly evolving and up-to-date gap analysis for each framework your organization is pursuing so you know exactly where your system falls short in protecting customer data and can create a remediation plan to bring them in line before an audit.
• AI innovations: Secureframe continues to lead in AI-driven compliance innovation. You can use AI to automate the process of remediating failing controls, completing risk assessments, creating and editing policies, and more, further simplifying the path to audits and continuous compliance.
• Audit readiness dashboard: Secureframe’s centralized dashboard provides real-time insights into compliance status, helping MSPs quickly identify and address potential gaps across multiple frameworks so they have peace of mind going into an audit. 
• Continuous monitoring: Secureframe continuously monitors your security controls, automatically identifying compliance gaps, misconfigurations, and failing controls. This enables you to maintain a strong security posture and continuous compliance without the need for constant manual checks.

By aligning with relevant compliance frameworks, MSPs can build trust, mitigate risks, and stand out in a competitive market. To help MSPs unlock these benefits faster, we offer unique benefits through the Secureframe Service Partner Program, including:

• Cost savings: With our Not-For-Resale (NFR) offering, Service Partners can utilize Secureframe's cutting-edge compliance software within their own operations, specifically tailored to the CIS framework, for free. If Service Partners want to expand beyond this free limited internal use, we offer heavily discounted use of our software. 
• Free Trust Center: MSPs can showcase their security and compliance posture in real-time to establish transparency and trust and differentiate themselves from competitors through Secureframe’s Trust Center, which is complimentary for Secureframe Service Partners.

Ready to take the next step? Request a demo to see how Secureframe is here to guide you every step of the way.