Regulated clients
When your clients are regulated, "we have an MSP" is not an answer
If your client list includes care providers, healthcare practices, financial firms or accountants, their regulators' questions become your questions. Helios is built so the answers are already written down when they arrive.
The duty flows downhill
Regulators stopped treating IT as background plumbing years ago. Care providers answer an annual questionnaire about patching, antivirus and backups. Financial firms must prove they can survive an IT failure, and outsourcing to an MSP explicitly does not outsource the responsibility. Every UK business that loses personal data has 72 hours to tell the ICO what protections were in place.
In practice the client turns and asks their MSP, because you run the systems the questions are about. That moment splits MSPs into two kinds: the ones who spend a fortnight assembling screenshots, and the ones who export a report. Which kind you are is decided long before anyone asks, by whether your tooling was keeping records all along.
Care and healthcare clients
Care providers registered with CQC are inspected on governance, and protecting people's records is part of well-led. More concretely, organisations that handle NHS patient data or use NHS systems complete the Data Security and Protection Toolkit every year, and commissioners increasingly require it of the care providers they fund. The DSPT does not ask for feelings. It asks, in writing, questions like:
- Are any of your systems running unsupported software?
- Are security updates applied promptly?
- Is antivirus running and current on every machine?
- Are backups taken, and would they actually restore?
- Who has access to what, and is that access reviewed?
An MSP running Helios answers from records rather than memory: an asset register that flags devices on out-of-support operating systems, patch status and history per device, Microsoft Defender status across the estate, and backup monitoring that is measured on the last restore point per device rather than whether the backup product shows a green tick. When the toolkit deadline comes round again next year, the same reports are one export away.
Finance and accountancy clients
The FCA's operational resilience rules are fully in force: firms must know which of their services matter most, set impact tolerances for disruption, and be able to show they can stay within them. IT providers sit squarely inside that assessment, and the firm remains accountable for what its outsourced providers do. A regulated client who cannot describe how their MSP monitors, patches and recovers their systems has a gap, and sooner or later their compliance function will notice it.
Accountants are rarely FCA-regulated, but they hold something just as sensitive: payroll, tax and banking data for every client they serve. After an incident, UK GDPR's question is brutally simple: what measures did you have in place? Documented monitoring, patch history, access control and MFA are the difference between an uncomfortable letter and an indefensible one.
Helios gives the MSP that story in the client's language: alert and ticket timelines that reconstruct an incident hour by hour, SLA performance you can put in front of a compliance officer, access and credential logs, and a console where two-factor authentication is mandatory, not a setting someone forgot to turn on.
The insurer asks the same questions
There is a third examiner now. Cyber insurance proposal forms ask the same things the DSPT and the FCA ask: is MFA enforced, how quickly are critical patches applied, are backups monitored and separate from production. Vague answers mean loaded premiums or declined cover, and a claim can fail if the answers turn out to have been optimistic. The same evidence Helios keeps for regulators is the evidence that keeps your clients' premiums honest, and yours.
What you hand over when they ask
| The question on the form | Where the answer lives in Helios |
|---|---|
| Are systems supported and patched? | Patch status and history per device; the asset register flags out-of-support operating systems and end-of-life hardware. |
| Is antivirus running everywhere? | Microsoft Defender status across the estate, surfaced per device and per client. |
| Are backups working? | Backup monitoring measured on the last restore point per device, with staleness alerts, not a relayed green tick. |
| Who has access to systems and credentials? | Per-client user management; an encrypted credential vault where every reveal is logged. |
| How do you detect and respond to incidents? | Alert-to-ticket timelines, SLA tracking and escalation history, reconstructable after the fact. |
| Can you show this regularly, not just today? | Client-ready reports and QBR packs, generated from the same live data. |
The honest limit: Helios does not make you or your clients compliant, and no software does. Compliance is how you operate. Helios is where the evidence of how you operate accumulates, so that proving it stops being a project. Our own security posture is documented in the same plain terms on the trust page.
Why this is need, not nice-to-have
None of these regimes is loosening. The DSPT comes back every year. The FCA's rules moved from policy statement to supervision. Insurers tighten their questionnaires at every renewal. Each cycle, "we will pull that together" gets more expensive and "here is the export" gets more valuable. MSPs that can answer on the spot are not just safer to buy from, they can charge for compliance reporting as a service, because for them the marginal cost is a button.