Compliant Managed Services & Solutions

Protecting an organization’s data can be a major pain point for senior IT managers. With attacks coming from all angles, and tactics constantly evolving, IT executives must use every tool, resource and relationship at their disposal to ensure that data has rock-solid protections in place.

For senior leaders in large enterprise-level or government organizations, strong cybersecurity is an urgent concern and very often critical to satisfying legal and compliance criteria. Internal and external hackers may use an onslaught of tactics to gain access to proprietary data, including social engineering and exploitation of weak passwords.

Considerable in-house resources are required to keep up with security best practices, particularly vigilant network monitoring, network health and vulnerability checks, penetration testing and patching. These ever-shifting requirements aren’t going away anytime soon.

As IT leaders know, a dizzying array of regulations, including CAN-SPAM, GLBA, COPPA, FERPA and more dictate how data is collected, used and shared. Privacy requirements can be a cost center, shifting resources from innovation and growth projects. These privacy obligations leave executives short of headcount for projects that add value to the bottom line.

Data protection, cybersecurity and privacy require tremendous resources and up-to-date expertise, but there are other factors that IT teams must manage, including compliance.

The issue of compliance is a thorn in the side of senior IT leaders. It can be difficult to stay on top of all the latest requirements, let alone the implementation details.

Compliance requirements are particularly rigorous in healthcare, finance, manufacturing and government organizations. Regulations such as HIPAA, HITECH, PCI DSS, FISMA, CMMC, SOC 1/ SOC 2 hosting and others require 100 percent compliance, and implementation is mandatory.

The knowledge of teams who have been through the compliance process before may already be obsolete, and this can leave IT teams in a difficult position.

Project roadmaps can shift significantly, and strategic projects get bumped to the back burner to put out compliance fires.

As senior IT leaders are well aware, sometimes unthinkable disasters happen — ones that you didn’t anticipate. Hurricanes, floods, fires and data breaches can devastate IT systems and make data recovery difficult or impossible.

Planning for business continuity — including remote redundant servers — eliminates single points of failure, so that systems can withstand even the biggest calamities. The need for remote backups and restorability leads to a number of questions:

• Which company should we trust with backups and recovery?
• Is their infrastructure secure, compliant and robust?
• Are their data centers located in different parts of the country, so they won’t be wiped out at the same time as our infrastructure in the event of a disaster?

Although disasters are not a daily occurrence, preparing for them falls in the hands of senior IT leaders and their teams. Deferring is not an option. After all, both natural and man-made disasters can strike at any time.

Finding ways to shave down costs without affecting core competencies or the security, protection and integrity of organizational data and systems can be difficult. Enterprise organizations must find ways to reduce IT costs and become more efficient wherever possible.

To remain competitive, cost savings cannot come at the expense of innovation and growth. This makes finding a trusted partner who can take responsibility for non-core functions even more important for senior IT leaders.

The reasons for outsourcing IT functions and using managed services are as diverse as the organizations who use them. But one thing is for certain — delegating and identifying easy wins for cost savings can help senior leaders meet their objectives and strategic priorities.

It’s a tall order, and AISN is here to help.

We specialize in helping senior leaders operationalize their IT strategy, and managed services are an excellent way to do that.