Glossary
Acronyms, vendor categories, frameworks and the jargon you need to translate when a client, a junior tech or a board member asks.
All terms, A to Z
A
B
- BAA (Business Associate Agreement)ComplianceA business associate agreement is the contract a healthcare client must have with you before you touch anything containing patient information, setting out what you may do with it and what you owe them if it leaks.
- BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)Endpoint policyBYOD is an arrangement where staff use personal phones, tablets or laptops to do company work, rather than being issued equipment the business owns.
C
- CMMCComplianceCMMC is the American defence department's framework for proving that a contractor handling sensitive but unclassified government information has the security controls it claims, verified at intervals rather than asserted.
- Co-managed ITEngagement modelCo-managed IT is an arrangement where an MSP works alongside a client's internal IT staff rather than replacing them, with responsibilities split by agreement rather than by default.
E
F
H
I
- ITILFrameworkITIL is a published framework of IT service management practices — incident, problem, change and service request handling among them — used as a common vocabulary and a starting structure.
- ITSM (IT Service Management)Software categoryIT service management is the practice of running IT as a set of defined services with owners, processes and agreed levels, rather than as a queue of requests handled however whoever picks them up prefers.
M
- MDR (Managed Detection and Response)SecurityMDR is detection and response delivered as a service, where an external team monitors the tooling, triages what it produces, and responds — rather than the software being handed over for someone in-house to watch.
- MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)FinanceMonthly recurring revenue is the predictable, contracted revenue an MSP bills every month, counted separately from project work, hardware resale and hourly labour.
P
Q
R
S
- SLA (Service Level Agreement)ContractA service level agreement is the part of a contract that states what response and resolution a client is entitled to, usually by severity, and what happens when you miss it.
- SOC 2ComplianceSOC 2 is an audit report in which an independent firm examines how you handle security, availability and confidentiality, and states whether your controls did what you said they did.
T
- TTFR (Time to First Response)Service deskTime to first response is how long a client waits between raising a ticket and hearing from a human who has read it.
- TTR (Time to Resolution)Service deskTime to resolution is how long a ticket takes from being raised to the underlying issue being fixed, measured end to end rather than by how long anyone worked on it.