Businesses that process sensitive personal or financial data must comply with regulatory requirements to protect their privacy and security. Governments and specific industries develop data-handling requirements that companies operating in certain regions or markets must follow. Organizations can be subject to severe penalties if they do not meet these regulatory standards.
Companies can find it challenging to navigate complex compliance requirements efficiently. For example, a small medical device manufacturer with U.S. and European Union (EU) customer bases must comply with at least three sets of regulations. They will need to comply with HIPAA to protect healthcare data for U.S. customers, PCI-DSS to safeguard credit card information, and GDPR for the personal data of EU citizens.
Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have small IT staffs and limited experience with maintaining regulatory compliance. Decision-makers should strongly consider engaging a managed service provider (MSP) to ensure compliance and avoid the financial and reputational penalties of noncompliance. Let’s look at the ways an MSP can help your company meet its compliance goals.
What Activities Can MSPs Perform to Support Regulatory Compliance?
A reputable MSP has teams with extensive experience in supporting business compliance requirements. The following activities are some of the most impactful ways an MSP supports regulatory compliance for your business.
Aligning IT operations with regulatory frameworks
The most effective way to ensure compliance is to build it into daily IT operations. An MSP can leverage its experience with specific regulatory frameworks to map your company’s IT operations to the regulatory frameworks you need to follow. The objective is to develop processes and controls that support compliance and provide audit evidence.
MSPs work with your company to implement repeatable processes and technical safeguards that support compliance. The specific requirements of processes such as backup and access management can vary depending on the regulatory framework. The MSP’s experience ensures that mistakes or oversights do not expose a business to noncompliance penalties.
The benefits of having an experienced MSP include:
- Identifying compliance gaps that must be addressed;
- Prioritizing operational deficiencies that affect compliance initiatives;
- Implementing required safeguards to protect regulated data;
- Understanding areas where weak controls make it difficult to achieve compliance.
Implementing and managing necessary security controls
One of the primary goals of most regulatory standards is to protect the security and privacy of sensitive and personal data. Regulations such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS require companies to implement strict security and technical safeguards to maintain compliance. MSPs can design, deploy, and manage the necessary baseline security controls while providing documentation to support compliance audits.
The following specific security measures can be implemented and managed by an MSP.
- Endpoint protection, including endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, helps minimize security risks by safeguarding a company’s ever-expanding attack surface.
- Identity and access management (IAM) is essential for protecting the confidentiality of protected information. The MSP will work with the customer to develop and enforce least-privilege access to keep data away from unauthorized users.
- The MSP’s technical teams can manage upgrades and patching to ensure all identified vulnerabilities are corrected.
- All sensitive and regulated data should be encrypted at rest and in transit. The MSP can assist with key management to ensure encrypted data can be recovered when necessary.
- Experienced infrastructure teams can enforce strict firewall rules and network segmentation to protect regulated data.
- The MSP can manage SIEM event monitoring and logging to provide evidence of compliance.
Centralizing monitoring, logging, and audit evidence collection
Companies must be able to supply auditors with documentation to support their compliance activities. The failure to provide timely and complete evidence can result in audit findings and, eventually, noncompliance penalties. An MSP can leverage its experience with specific regulatory frameworks to monitor compliance-related operational processes efficiently.
For example, all access to regulated data must be logged, with logs retained and made available to audit teams. The logs must be readily available upon request, and monitoring gaps constitute compliance failures. The MSP can institute procedures that all employees can follow to centralize monitoring and logging, making it easier to access and speeding up the audit process.
Supporting continuous risk and compliance maintenance
The risks associated with processing regulated data are constantly evolving, as are the specific measures companies must take to protect this sensitive information. An MSP can help companies stay current with regulatory changes and introduce new solutions to support compliance. Organizations that do not keep up with changing regulations risk noncompliance, which can be very expensive and impact your company’s bottom line.
Facilitating compliance audits
An MSP can help your company reduce the cost and complexity of regulatory audits. Normal business operations may be disrupted by audit requirements, including gathering the requested documentation and evidence to demonstrate compliance. Companies that lack experience navigating audits can make the process more painful than it needs to be.
For instance, auditors should be given precisely the information they request. Providing additional data may result in further questions that the team is unprepared to answer and that the auditors previously considered irrelevant. The MSP’s team will provide guidance on successfully interacting with the audit team so all parties are satisfied with the outcome.
Let VAST Streamline Regulatory Compliance for Your Business
VAST’s teams have the requisite experience to help your business meet all of its regulatory compliance requirements. We understand the complexity involved with simultaneously addressing multiple regulatory standards. Our experts offer the skills your company needs to achieve and maintain compliance.
VAST has multiple services that support compliance.
Managed backups ensure that regulated data meets retention guidelines.
Our Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) offering lets companies tailor backup schedules and retention periods to meet their compliance objectives.
VAST’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) makes it easy to meet recovery and availability objectives such as those defined in HIPAA.
Our security lifecycle review can help identify areas that need strengthening to maintain compliance.
We work with your company to implement effective data governance, so you control data usage without negatively impacting business operations.
Get in touch with VAST to help your business protect its regulated data and meet its compliance requirements.
