Industry Glossary

Amazon's public cloud platform.

The set of points where an attacker could try to enter or extract data.

Combined backup plus orchestrated restore capability designed for fast recovery.

Policy that allows employees to use personal devices for work.

Holistic plan and tooling to keep a business running through an outage and recover after.

California law granting consumers rights over their personal data.

Process for proposing, approving, and implementing changes safely.

Company that resells, integrates, or delivers a vendor's products to end customers.

Service model where the MSP works alongside an in-house IT team rather than replacing it.

Identity policy engine that enforces access rules based on user, device, and risk signals.

Service that scans criminal forums and marketplaces for leaked client credentials.

Any device connecting to the network: workstation, laptop, mobile, or server.

Endpoint security that detects, investigates, and responds to suspicious activity on workstations and servers.

Microsoft's cloud identity platform, formerly Azure Active Directory.

Security platform that correlates signals across endpoints, identities, email, and cloud.

Part-time CISO engagement, typically a few days per month per client.

Part-time IT leadership or staffing arrangement, billed for a fraction of a full-time role.

EU regulation on personal data protection.

Discipline that aligns IT and security to business risk and regulatory requirements.

U.S. law governing the handling of protected health information.

Coordinated process to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from a security incident.

Best-practice framework for IT service management.

International standard for information security management systems.

Ecosystem of vendors, distributors, MSPs, and resellers that delivers technology to end customers.

Framework and tooling for managing IT as a service.

Outsourced service that combines detection technology with human analysts to investigate and respond to threats.

Company that delivers security services (monitoring, response, compliance) on contract.

Company that delivers IT services to clients on a recurring contract.

Vendor funding earmarked for partner marketing activities.

Umbrella contract that governs the ongoing relationship with a client.

Microsoft's bundle of productivity, identity, and security cloud services.

Microsoft's public cloud platform.

Microsoft's cloud-based endpoint management platform.

Authentication requiring two or more independent factors.

Team that monitors network and infrastructure health, often on behalf of MSPs.

Curated, confidential group of MSP owners who share financials and operating practices.

Decision-driven procedure for handling a class of incident or workflow.

Platform that handles ticketing, time tracking, billing, and project management for service businesses.

Software that lets MSPs monitor, manage, and patch client endpoints from a single console.

Step-by-step procedure for executing a recurring operational task.

Platform that aggregates logs and security events for analysis and alerting.

Team and facility that monitors security events and responds to incidents 24x7.

Contract clause defining promised response and resolution times.

Audit framework covering security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

Document defining scope, deliverables, and price for a project.

An isolated instance of a multi-tenant cloud service, typically one per customer.

Proactive search for adversaries already inside the environment.

A unit of work in the PSA representing a client request or incident.

Fractional CIO who provides strategic IT guidance to clients on a recurring basis.

Fractional CISO who owns the security program for clients.

Security model that assumes no implicit trust and continuously verifies every request.