MSPs and Supporting Modern Compliance

Michael Peters

5 hours ago

As regulatory scrutiny is increasing, customers are more demanding, and security failures carry reputational and financial consequences that far outweigh the cost of prevention. In response, Managed Service Providers are redefining their role. Instead of offering compliance as a one-off consulting engagement, they are transforming it into a repeatable, scalable managed service.

This is an evolution in how organizations focus on governance, risk, and trust. Here, we’re covering how MSPs can think of this new compliance landscape.

Compliance Is an Ongoing Process

Modern frameworks are, almost universally, turning to risk and continuous maintenance as their ultimate prescription for security. Regulators and customers increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate that controls operate effectively on an ongoing basis.

This represents the evolving nature of cyber threats, which have become persistent rather than episodic. Organizations are no longer defending against isolated incidents but against continuous probing, exploitation, and credential abuse. Additionally, regulatory bodies are tightening expectations around documentation, incident response, and governance.

For most organizations, especially small and mid-sized businesses, managing this internally is unsustainable. This gap is what has driven the rise of compliance as a managed service.

The Emergence of Compliance as a Product and Service

The most successful MSPs have stopped selling compliance as an open-ended consulting engagement and started offering it as a structured service with defined outcomes. Compliance isn’t, and cannot be, a bespoke practice for each and every customer, and MSPs are turning to infrastructure-level compliance as both a protective measure and as a service.

A compliance service usually includes:

Clearly Defined Scope and Responsibilities: Ambiguity in responsibility is one of the most common causes of audit findings and security gaps, particularly in shared-responsibility environments such as cloud or managed services.
Standardized Control Mapping: Mature compliance programs rely on standardized control frameworks that can be consistently applied across clients and environments. These frameworks should be mapped directly to applicable regulations such as HIPAA, NIST, or CMMC.
Ongoing Monitoring: Compliance is no longer a point-in-time exercise. Automated evidence collection helps ensure that compliance data is accurate, defensible, and readily available when needed.
Regular Reviews: It’s not effective to plan for just-in-time reviews. Instead, as an MSP, you can provide ongoing compliance reporting and support that reflects your commitment to the process and helps customers report to their own regulatory bodies as needed.

Standardized Control Frameworks as the Foundation

MSPs are looking to universal compliance built on foundational security and risk management frameworks. These frameworks, typically derived from NIST or ISO standards, provide the structural backbone for compliance, allowing organizations to align security, governance, and operational practices under a consistent model.

What makes this approach effective is not the framework itself, but how it is applied. Controls are mapped to real operational processes, tied to specific systems, and assigned to accountable roles.

Over time, these standardized frameworks also give MSPs leverage. Updates to regulations or best practices can be incorporated once and propagated across customers, improving consistency while reducing overhead.

Turning Controls Into Action With Implementation Playbooks

Implementation playbooks translate high-level requirements into operations. These help you better understand why you are doing what you are doing, so you can scale it across your organization and managed service portfolio.

A strong playbook documents workflows and expectations, such as how access is granted and reviewed, how logs are retained and monitored, and how exceptions are handled. This is where you might find that working with a security and compliance partner can be beneficial, as they have the experience to support long-term plans.

Evidence-as-a-Service and the End of the Audit Scramble

Audits can be hugely disruptive events. Evidence-as-a-Service fundamentally changes that dynamic. Instead of collecting proof only when requested, evidence is gathered continuously as part of daily operations and stored in secure, logged, and protected storage media.

This approach creates several meaningful advantages:

Audits are about inventory, not investigation, especially for reporting purposes, where you should already have your data in place.
Evidence is more accurate because it is captured in real time.
Compliance teams can actually use evidence as data for future planning.

For many organizations, this shift alone justifies the move to managed compliance. It replaces uncertainty with predictability and control.

Expanding Compliance Into Risk and Vendor Management

As compliance programs mature, their scope inevitably expands beyond internal controls. Regulators, customers, and partners increasingly expect organizations to understand and manage the risks introduced by third parties.

Vendor risk management has become a central pillar of modern compliance, particularly in industries where data sharing and outsourced services are unavoidable. Organizations are no longer evaluated solely on their own controls, but on the security posture of the vendors they rely on.

Managed compliance services are adapting by incorporating structured vendor risk processes. These go beyond simple questionnaires and instead provide repeatable, defensible workflows for evaluating and monitoring third parties.

In practice, this often includes:

Standardized vendor risk assessments that evaluate security posture, data handling, and compliance alignment.
Documented due diligence processes to support audits and customer inquiries.
Risk scoring methodologies that help prioritize remediation efforts.
Ongoing reassessments tied to contract renewals or changes in scope.
Centralized documentation to demonstrate governance and oversight.

By integrating vendor risk into their compliance offerings, MSPs help organizations address one of the most scrutinized areas of modern audits. Just as importantly, they reduce the operational burden on internal teams that often lack the time or expertise to manage third-party risk effectively.

Make Compliance Your Competitive Advantage with Lazarus Alliance

In an environment where trust, transparency, and resilience are paramount, compliance is no longer just a requirement.

To learn more about how Lazarus Alliance can help, contact us.

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