The advisory board of the International Association of Cloud & Managed Service Providers (MSPAlliance) wants to issue a statement of concern in regards to recent and urgent consumer protection issues facing business users of managed services and cloud.
A recent article in the press describes a managed services provider who was recently facing some financial difficulty. As a result,they approached their customers and attempted to solicit a large sum of money in order to keep the customer servers operating. Already a number of customers have already left this MSP, and now the company is under new management. This issue of financially unstable MSPs is unfortunately not new and is one that we, as an industry association and accrediting body for the managed services and cloud industry, must bring to light.
The company mentioned in the article was a well certified organization, holding no less than Microsoft Gold, ITIL, ISO 27001, and numerous additional certifications and accreditations. Nevertheless the entire customer base was put at risk due to financial instabilities that were never addressed in any of the certifications performed on the MSP.
In light of this story, and unfortunately others like it over the years, our main areas of concern are as follows:
1) Financial health and stability of the provider
2) Transparency in regards to 3rd party partnerships, data storage and security
3) True country of origin of providers’ physical facility
Nine years ago the board of the MSPAlliance made the decision to construct their own standard for MSPs, acknowledging that existing certifications did not adequately address vulnerabilities and risks prevalent to the consumers of managed services and cloud. The result of their efforts is today called the Unified Certification Standard for Cloud & Managed Service Providers (UCS).
An important component of the UCS audit includes, among other things, a review of a provider’s financial and operational risk, not to mention a comprehensive technical and service delivery review of the provider’s operational process. The importance of such nontechnical reviews should be selfevident in light of recent stories in the news. As further evidence of the importance of the UCS approach, stories like the aforementioned, are proof positive that consumers of managed services and cloud may be at risk if their provider has any unsound financial practices or sketchy operational practices. This is precisely what the UCS was designed to identify; with the ultimate goal of protecting the business consumer
We, the board members of the MSPAlliance, all having undergone the UCS audit process, declare that the UCS is vital and absolutely necessary for customers in determining the technical AND financial/operational risks of their cloud and managed services providers. Other technical certifications do not address the unique aspects of the cloud and managed services profession and therefore cannot adequately protect the consumer of managed services and cloud.
Signed,
John Burgess, president of Mainstream Technologies
Michael Corey, CEO of Ntirety
Nicolas Geudens, managing director of Hestia
Peter Kujawa, president of Locknet – A Division of EO Johnson Office Technologies
Cody Griffin, Partner, Frost PLLC
Charles Weaver, CEO of MSPAlliance
Celia Weaver, president of MSPAlliance