Navigating the world of compliance isn’t just about passing audits — it’s about gaining a strategic advantage and building an MSP practice around resilient growth. Blacksmith empowers MSPs to master compliance as both a business driver and a security pillar, combining regulatory expertise, automation, and customization in a single platform.
The scope of regulatory demands for MSPs has expanded dramatically. Beyond safeguarding IT infrastructure, providers now must ensure clients meet complex requirements like HIPAA, the FTC Safeguards Rule, NIST, and ISO 27001 — with regional and industry-specific nuances multiplying every year. Service providers are racing to transform compliance stress into service differentiation and sustainable revenue by integrating compliance as a core offering.
Global MSP revenue is projected to approach $600 billion in 2025, and clients increasingly expect MSPs to deliver risk reduction, compliance assurance, and audit support.
Blacksmith enables MSPs to seamlessly manage these obligations and turn regulatory complexity into opportunity.
Compliance solutions for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are broad, with various categories tailored to distinct needs across the industry.
Some tools market themselves as Governance-as-a-Service platforms, offering high-level oversight and centralized management of governance, risk, and compliance activities. These solutions can be difficult to learn, often requiring the MSP to become compliance experts to minimize their risk exposure when using them. Turned off by the prospect of months of training or weekly peer group meetings, many providers turn elsewhere.
Traditional GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) tools are another major category. These typically excel in risk assessments, control mapping, and documentation — ideal for larger organizations with established risk programs. However, they can be complex, requiring more customization and onboarding time, which may be impractical for MSPs focused on efficiency and scalability.
Document management tools, meanwhile, provide streamlined storage and workflow for policies, contracts, and audit evidence. While effective for maintaining organized records, they are often limited in automation, real-time monitoring, and integration with external security or business systems. For MSPs, the challenge is to choose solutions purpose-built for multi-client oversight, fast-changing frameworks, and ongoing monitoring — with automated reporting, robust dashboards, and strong integration capabilities to meet their unique operational pressures and client commitments
Blacksmith builds on industry expectations but goes further by crafting a tool rooted in the compliance sector, but built specifically for MSPs.
Regulations rapidly evolve; MSPs must address frameworks such as:
| Compliance Framework | Target Industry | Coverage Highlights |
| SOC 2 | Technology providers | Security, availability, confidentiality, privacy, integrity |
| HIPAA | Healthcare | Security rules, Business Associate Agreements, risk assessments |
| NIST 800-171/CMMC | Defense contractors | Controlled unclassified information, covered defense information, federal contract information requirements |
| FTC Safeguards | Finance and insurance | Data protection, risk management, vendor oversight |
| ISO 27001 | Organizations globally | Information security management system |
Blacksmith delivers expertise and tools for all these frameworks and more, with built-in support for the latest requirements and ongoing updates reflecting regulatory changes.
Automation has transformed the compliance landscape by streamlining repetitive, administrative tasks and enabling organizations to keep pace with increasingly complex regulations. When used intelligently, automation accelerates evidence collection, tracks policy sign-offs and adoption, and maintains an always-current audit trail — all of which reduce the risk of human error and free up compliance professionals to focus on nuanced, high-value activities.
However, the belief that compliance can be entirely automated is a common — and risky — misconception. While software can quickly identify gaps and generate real-time alerts, the ultimate responsibility for addressing issues, interpreting ambiguous requirements, and applying professional judgment always remains with human experts. Automation excels at scaling consistency, speed, and documentation, but it cannot replace the expertise required to craft policies, assess organizational risk, or navigate complex business situations.
See how Blacksmith helped this MSP increase profits and operationalize compliance.
Visibility and centralized control are the backbone of effective compliance management. As regulatory requirements and client demands multiply, the challenge isn’t just implementing controls, but making sense of compliance status across dozens — or even hundreds — of client environments in real time.
Siloed systems and fragmented oversight create blind spots, raise the risk of noncompliance, and make it nearly impossible to respond quickly to evolving threats or audit requests. Without a unified dashboard, teams can’t efficiently identify issues, manage document flow, or demonstrate due diligence to clients and regulators. Delays, inconsistencies, and missed deadlines are common in legacy workflows, but each gap is a potential source of liability and lost trust.
A modern compliance management dashboard empowers MSPs to see the full picture, prioritize risk, coordinate resources, and drive operational excellence. It transforms compliance from a last-minute scramble into a strategic, real-time discipline that underpins business growth and resilience.
Blacksmith’s multi-client dashboard offers single-pane-of-glass control:
Unlike legacy or spreadsheet-driven approaches, this ensures deadlines are met, documents are preserved, and operational scalability is achieved — eliminating the chaos from compliance management.
Policy creation is one of the biggest pain points for compliance-minded MSPs. Blacksmith’s robust toolkit includes:
This depth saves hours, accelerates onboarding, and increases margins by making compliance delivery quick and scalable.
Audit-ready reporting and documentation have become absolutely critical in today’s compliance-driven business environment. Regulatory agencies and industry frameworks are imposing ever-stricter requirements, while clients, partners, and stakeholders expect rapid, indisputable proof that compliance is not just claimed — but actively demonstrated through organized, verifiable records.
Maintaining a state of audit readiness is no longer about scrambling to assemble evidence before an audit; it’s about integrating rigorous documentation and reporting practices into daily operations. This proactive approach minimizes operational risk, avoids costly compliance failures, and builds trust — not just with auditors, but with clients who increasingly view transparent compliance as a core criterion in vendor selection.
Blacksmith generates detailed, client- and auditor-friendly reports, including:
Clients get the proof they need, and MSPs stay prepared for any regulatory inquiry at a moment’s notice.
The best solutions will remove manual data entry and silos of information by integrating directly with major Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platforms, document repositories, SIEMs, vulnerability scanners, and endpoint protection.
For example, Blacksmith offers:
This allows MSPs to scale confidently as client count grows, maintaining a frictionless compliance workflow.
Managing compliance through spreadsheets and manual processes introduces significant risks that can undermine an MSP’s performance. Manual workflows are notoriously prone to human error — recent studies find that up to 94% of operational spreadsheets contain faults, with every new document amplifying complexity and vulnerability. Data can become outdated, access rights go unmanaged, and audit preparation devolves into time-consuming consolidation efforts that frequently miss critical information.
In addition, spreadsheet-driven approaches lack automation, real-time updates, and robust audit trails. Teams may waste hours tracking down missing documents or updating disparate records, while security and compliance fall hostage to lost files and inconsistent procedures. For MSPs expected to deliver reliability and rapid, transparent compliance, relying on spreadsheets means growing risk, zero scalability, and poor client experiences.
MSPs running compliance processes with spreadsheets or email invite risk and inefficiency:
Blacksmith replaces manual chaos with standardized, auditable, and scalable systems that grow with the MSP’s business.
Clients demand risk reduction and ongoing assurance, not one-time fixes. Blacksmith enables:
MSPs build defensibility and resilience with quarterly reviews, documented risk assessments, and comprehensive evidence — a competitive edge powered by Blacksmith.
Blacksmith guides MSPs through every major compliance framework with deeper, actionable support than alternatives. Every framework is supported with real-world, practical implementation guidance, customizing compliance delivery for every client niche.
While many compliance tools offer these frameworks, it’s important to ask two questions:
With Blacksmith, you know that your policies are crafted by compliance experts with decades of experience creating security/compliance programs for major enterprises. We’ve given our compliance solution enough customization to make your job as an MSP easier, while keeping enough guardrails in place to help ensure you and your clients stay aligned to requirements.
And all policies are included — no upgrades, fees, or à la carte packs required.
When evaluating MSP compliance platforms, prioritize:
Blacksmith excels on every point, offering education-first, service-enabled methodology and proven implementation pathways for rapid scaling.
When selecting a compliance solution, it’s important to understand which compliance tasks can be entrusted to intelligent automation and which require the oversight, reasoning, and expertise of seasoned professionals. Automated, data-driven risk scoring and regulatory updates can accelerate routine compliance processes, but human review and policy judgement remain essential for navigating ambiguity, ensuring fairness, and responding to newly evolving standards.
To that end, Blacksmith is committed to a smart, steady approach to blending AI with compliance — leveraging automation where it genuinely adds value, but always respecting the critical limitations of current AI technologies. Experience demonstrates that overreliance on AI in compliance can result in dangerous inaccuracies, lack of explainability, outdated interpretations of law, and unintentional bias. Such risks are unacceptable when managing complex regulations or defending audit trails.
This hybrid methodology — using AI as a supportive tool, not an authority — keeps Blacksmith clients ahead of competitors and regulatory change without risking compliance failures or audit vulnerability.
Regulations will only get more demanding, but the MSPs who harness compliance create better client relationships, command higher margins, and establish leadership in their markets. Build compliance into the DNA of your service practice with Blacksmith and transform mandatory obligations into a winning growth strategy.
and see how quickly you can operationalize compliance!