Living and working in the IT channel tends to alter our perceptions of reality and it is only when we talk to people outside our industry that we really understand perspective. Last week I gave a briefing to the FFIEC, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. This is the governmental body that goes around examinating banks and other financial institutions to ensure they are abiding by secure and best practices. They are also the group that examines bank IT practices.
Last week, at the invitation of the FFIEC, I briefed the federal bank examiners on what the Managed Services Accreditation Program (MSAP) is all about. The obvious meaning of being invited to Washington, DC was this group is running into a lot of MSPs and they want to know exactly how they do what they claim to do.
The session was a very interesting and a lot of questions were asked. In the end, the role of the MSAP and the MSPAlliance has undoubtedly been expanded in some measurable way as a result of this meeting. Now that this governmental body knows about the MSPAlliance, knows about MSPs, and knows about the MSAP audit process, the question will become how much reliance these bank examiners will place on the MSP community.
More to come...
