Jason Schaller, Anderson Zurmuehlen ”MSSP’s: The Wild, Wild West of Risk Assessment”

Jason Schaller joins us in today's episode to discuss the importance of regular assessments and compliance reviews.  Anderson Zurmuehlen started as a traditional audit and accounting firm and ultimately added technology as a division of their business.  Leveraging their existing relationships where trust was established it only made sense to move into IT where trust of private information is also required. 

Jason is responsible for both internal security and serving as the vCISO for the AZTS technology clients.  AZTS has built a strong advisory firm focused on IT governance and performing audits like SOC2 and CMMC..

Jason tells us how there is a huge opportunities for MSP's to provide security based resources to the small to mid-sized business community.Accountants have long been conversing with clients about risk management and in his role he is able to use that common language and extend it to IT.

We then discuss how many MSP's are changing their models to MSSP, but most are falling short in the areas of governance and maintaining security policy and controls.  While tools are being brought in to support security the talent hasn't often caught up to really identify vulnerabilities.

We talk about how the industry and how the MSSP community mirrors how the early days of the MSP world got started, a number of proven premium security players and a large numbers of upstarts that may not be qualified (yet) to truly be an MSSP and opening up risk to themselves.

One of the biggest black holes for many MSSP's today is a proven incident response team.  Jason speaks of the key to mitigating that risk is having a good front end and build a quality prevention program.  

We close with that MSP's that are unsure if they are conducting assessments and evaluating risk prevention appropriately they can engage Jason and his firm by visiting Anderson Zurmuehlen and engaging with their firm.