Your Ticket to Hitting a Compliance Home Run? The Assessment Scorecard

Tools are the pinch hitter for offering everything you do “as a service.”

Take Compliance Scorecard; it’s the tool that supports MSPs offering compliance as a service (CaaS), and our scorecards guide compliance conversations in a way that resonates with clients. In this post, we review the Assessment Scorecard, covering everything from what it assesses to how MSPs can use it to hit the ball (i.e. compliance) out of the park.

The Importance of Regular Assessments

As an MSP, you know the importance of setting a regular review cadence. Take your Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and Technology Business Reviews (TBRs), as examples. Regularly rallying with clients builds trust, strengthens relationships, and gives you an opportunity to provide solutions that fit growing needs.

Compliance is no different. It requires a regular assessment cadence.

Maintaining compliance is akin to a continuous loop. The slightest change, whether in laws, regulations, frameworks, workplace dynamics, or even new equipment, can introduce new risks that ripple through the compliance ecosystem. Regular assessments ensure these changes are identified, accounted for, and addressed promptly. This ongoing vigilance is crucial to staying aligned with evolving requirements, identify potential security gaps brought on by new threats, and adapt training procedures for new hires – all essential for a robust compliance posture.

What Needs to be Assessed?

Remember our 4-step process: Alignment, Authorization, Assessment, and Adoption? Alignment is — as we like to say — about “how a thing aligns with a thing” — and assessment scorecards are how you measure that alignment across the thing.

They can, of course, facilitate gap analysis and risk assessments, but assessment isn’t always about risk. Our assessment scorecards function for the assessment of anything.

The Assessment Scorecard is templated to support more than a single conversation about technology. It functions for the assessment of attrition plans, backups for cash flow, or supply chain infrastructure. Whatever and whoever it is that your MSP works with, assessment scorecards support you in measuring what they need against what they have/are doing.

How to Use the Assessment Scorecard

Because the Assessment Scorecard offers such flexibility, listing its potential uses would take us into overtime. Instead, here are three ways to use them that will resonate with most MSP rosters.

#1 Practical Procedures

Policies and procedures guide how people behave while going about their daily work and, as such, it’s imperative that they’re aligned with compliance controls. The Assessment Scorecard measures that degree of alignment.

The scorecard maps out relevant procedures against specific compliance controls. With that insight, you can see where procedures lack corresponding controls, or where controls are implemented but not reflected in documented procedures, and take corrective action.

#2 Risk Register

Our Risk Register integrates seamlessly with assessment reports. After conducting an assessment, a single click automatically transfers “At Risk” items to the Register, eliminating the need for manual data entry and ensuring all potential risks are captured.

The Risk Register combined with the Assessment Scorecard helps you improve your client’s security posture and, in turn, strengthens your own position as a trusted and valuable partner in that effort.

#3 Evaluations and Audits

The Assessment Scorecard assigns scores based on the level of alignment identified, and reports generated from the scorecard highlight areas where procedures and controls are misaligned, allowing for targeted improvements.

This ensures that controls are actually mitigating the risks they are designed to address and prevents gaps in compliance that could lead to violations and penalties. It also provides evidence to auditors and regulators that procedures and controls are in place, which is a benefit to the client, but also to the MSP responsible for their compliance program.

Play With the Compliance Scorecard Advantage

We do things a little differently at Compliance Scorecard, and that’s why you want us on your team. Here are just some of the ways we set ourselves apart from the other guy.

Making the risk conversation easy

We know that MSPs may struggle to deliver value during TBRs or QBRs, which makes it difficult to get clients to show up. We also know that if MSPs don’t comfortably understand how to communicate the importance of compliance, they’re going to struggle even more to set that meeting cadence.

Using the Assessment Scorecard, you can have a conversation around risk that resonates with your client. It’s a digestible way to demonstrate “this is what you’re doing, this is what you need to be doing, and if you don’t do this, this is the risk.” When the risk is related to reputation damage and financial penalties, that makes you a key part of their continuity.

Creating a collaborative environment

Assessment scorecards help MSPs create a collaborative environment around compliance. For example, the Risk Register allows MSPs to generate and assign action items for each risk, and it’s up to the client to decide on actions such as Accept, Mitigate, Transfer, Avoid or Defer.

With actionable items to complete and the ability to track and view progress in understandable, color-coded terms, clients can better understand where they have risk and what the potential of that risk is. This brings clients into the process of compliance. and empowers them to prioritize accordingly.

Shifting the risk

The collaborative environment isn’t just about building trust and maintaining strong client relationships, it’s also about doing your own due care.

When you can assign items for review and action, you’re shifting the risk from your MSP. Should an event occur, you want to be able to demonstrate that you did everything you could to mitigate that risk on your end. Compliance Scorecard tracks everything from signatures on policies to the avoidance of identified risks.

Avoid Fumbling, Start Using Compliance Scorecard

The Assessment Scorecard is how you measure alignment across “the thing.” Whether that thing is as simple as cash flow or as complicated as SOC2, we’ve made the measurement so easy to use that even your least experienced account manager could read the results and lead the compliance conversation with your client.

Avoid fumbling the ball and give your clients something to get excited about at your next business review. Contact Compliance Scorecard or join our weekly live demo to learn more about how our scorecards make CaaS simple.

Want to read all about the compliance magic our full suite of scorecards brings? Don’t miss our new guide, Game On for Compliance: The Quick Guide to Scorecards for MSPs

Download the Guide Now

Read More

Why MSPs should draft CaaS into their game plan
Understanding Compliance as a Service (CaaS) and Its Importance for MSPs
How Compliance Scorecard Helps Manage SOC 2