Compliance: An MSP’s Best Friend?

One thing that I have learned in business is that you will not be successful if your product or service is a “nice-to-have” instead of a “must-have.”  People like nice-to-haves, but usually don’t have the budget to indulge themselves. On the other hand, they always find a way to get the must-have.

So how do you make your service a must have? One way is to tie what you are doing to a regulatory compliance requirement. While many compliance requirements are based on prudent best practices, until someone says that they absolutely have to do something most people won’t. In the MSP model, it is often at this point someone realizes that complying using in-house resources may be too costly, if not impossible to accomplish. A managed service provider (MSP) offering expertise in the regulatory compliance area can step right in and earn their business.

If you happen to already perform services for this customer, your ability to help with yet another regulatory compliance requirement can cement your worth and value, as well as beef up your bottom line. For growing more business, the lowest hanging fruit is usually your existing customers.

The Scope of Compliance Opportunity

Regulatory compliance issues cover a wide variety of services. From safeguarding customer’s confidential information to validation of financial results through the keeping and filing of the proper records and beyond – there are many ways an MSP can help ease the burden of the compliance needs of their customers, while building a profitable business.

In the area of disaster recovery and data backup, several different regulatory compliance areas call for certain information to be safeguarded in case of loss. Other compliance rules dictate the proper manner to store this backed up information.

Here at Idera we have prepared a short whitepaper that details which compliance rules say what about backup and how you can use a well-defined backup strategy to achieve and maintain compliance.  Backup lends itself so well to the MSP business model; it is a relatively easy way to roll out a new “must have” service. It can help you acquire new customers, as well as provide another revenue stream from existing customers who are all too happy to let you deal with the compliance headache.

You can follow this link to Idera's website, where you can download and read our compliance whitepaper. Use the same link to find another whitepaper covering the biggest data losses of 2012, and how backup may have helped mitigate the losses. We hope you find them both useful.

Of course there is so much more to compliance than backup or disaster recovery.  Offering compliance services to your customers is a great way to offer them must-have solutions instead of nice-to-haves.  You may very well find that regulatory compliance can be the MSPs best friend!

Scott Bleasdell is a senior product manager at Idera. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.