For many years now the message VARs and other IT providers have been sending their clients has been wrapped around the concept of technology and how it can help their businesses. Starting with the technology boom in the 1990s businesses and end-user consumers around the world have been relentlessly told that their businesses need technology in order to compete effectively in the global economy.

Today, that message has been successfully delivered. Now what? It is difficult to imagine any business or end-user consumer who does not understand that technology is essential. The message now must be how to secure and maintain that IT infrastructure. As an industry, managed service providers must do a better job of informing and educating their clients about the perils of unmanaged (or mismanaged) IT. Specifically, the civil and now criminal consequences of unprotected IT are becoming ever more prominent and threatening for many businesses around the world.

During the last decade the field of regulatory compliance as it pertains to information technology has been largely dominated by the large accounting and consulting firms. Issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA have been popular topics in magazines, conferences, and boardrooms. Small and medium-sized businesses, however, have largely left alone when it comes to education and solutions aimed at them. This has been an ongoing mistake that must not continue.

A number of factors have contributed to this neglect of the small and medium-size business community and most of these factors have to do with money. Simple economics made it very unlikely for the large consulting/accounting firms to pay any sort of attention to the SMB marketplace. In their defense, it has only been the last several years that the SMB community has faced any significant form of legal penalties for lax or nonexistent IT management. The large accounting/consulting firms never really had a big market for their services at the SMB level.

Now, SMB organizations everywhere are being threatened with civil and criminal consequences for the decisions they make with regards to their IT management. It is difficult to pick up a newspaper and not see a story about data breaches and IT security. Such stories are becoming commonplace in today’s global culture. The days when a small business did not have to worry about who was accessing their corporate network and potentially stealing their data are over. Today, businesses of all sizes are becoming more and more alike when it comes to the civil liability and criminal culpability they face. Companies no longer can shrug off a data breach as simply a lesson learned. Businesses can no longer be nonplussed when one of their employees misuses company technology. Simply put, businesses are fast running out of excuses when they fail to take even the most simple and basic steps to safeguard and manage their IT.

The global community is growing less patient by the day with improperly managed IT and the threat of personal data lost by the hands of even the smallest businesses. It is likely a matter of time before certain countries begin to see widespread civil lawsuits against businesses who allow their IT networks to become compromised. This is the real threat of unmanaged IT.

The role the large accounting/consulting firms used to have with large enterprises is now being supplanted by MSP’s who are not only diagnosing these errors in IT management but they are also prescribing effective solutions for the ongoing protection of their clients’ IT infrastructure. As the IT channel continues its steady march towards the managed services profession they are quickly becoming experts at identifying not only technological problems but the business objectives those problems impact. This is the fundamental difference between MSPs and other IT providers. This difference will continue to be the distinguishing characteristic of managed services professionals as they carve out a role for themselves in the global business economy.