Consortium for Responsible IT Services: Cole Knuth Outlines New Path for MSP Accountability

**Dave Sobel** (0:01)
Dave Sobel here reporting from the floor of Channel Con in San Diego. I'm sitting down with Cole Knuth. Cole is the Associate Director of Entrepreneurship at Texas A&M University, where he helped to build the Consortium for Responsible IT Services, that's CRITS, which Texas A&M's Global Cyber Research Institute and GTIA announced here this week. It's an effort to write the first widely accepted professional, operational, and cybersecurity standards for IT service providers, and to stand up a self-regulatory body for the profession. So I've got two disclosures here. I couldn't get to Cole's session, so this is me learning in real-time the same way you are as a viewer, and I have argued on the show repeatedly that this industry needs exactly this. So I want this one to work, that's why I'm going to press the way I am. Cole, welcome to the show.

**Cole Knuth** (0:55)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

**Dave Sobel** (0:57)
So let's start out, start at the beginning. What is the Consortium and what exactly did you announce this week?

**Cole Knuth** (1:03)
The Consortium is primarily going to be the university hosting and developing an architect and framework for us to operate with, right? So think about it this way, like the university is going to host it, companies are going to fund it, right? In and through GTI, and the intended outcome is for us to be able to take an artifact, probably a publication, and use that as the way that we operate as an industry, because we have to find a way to organize before we professionalize, before we regulate, right? So the first step of this is to find what that looks like, and then for us to start to change, change the way we function, change the way we meet, change the way we communicate, right? Because self-regulated organizations are groups forming for single purpose first, well before they get to anything related to regulation, but it creates a bigger voice, right? You aggregate all the minds and creativity of the industry, and it gives you a precursor to be able to influence the people who write our legislation or write our laws.

**Dave Sobel** (2:01)
So today, is there something actionable that an MSP can do today by sending announcements?

**Cole Knuth** (2:06)
So this announcement basically, we actually announced the intention to do this at CCF, so the councils and forum that GTI does.
Then, Paxi Beyond, they announced their support and investment in it. This is us launching it. So basically, from today, it's official. The university made it official in the last couple of months, and that just means that the Department of Research has accepted it, they've agreed to put their name next to it, and they've agreed to finance it, and let the Consortium operate in the university, because it is a legal construct, bylaws and all.

**Dave Sobel** (2:44)
Right. Okay, so GTIA's release says, GTIA will be the future SRO resulting from this work. Now, my understanding, a self-regulatory organization normally exists because a government delegated authority to it, the example being FINRA has the SEC behind it. So is there a delegating authority here for this organization?

**Cole Knuth** (3:02)
No, no, this would match more like how the bar association came into fruition, right? Which I watched your podcast from 2020 It's more like us coming together because we need some organization and we've got too much fragmentation in our channel.
And the economic and even geopolitical forces are moving quicker than we are. And the longer we stay independent, the more, I think, more liability we create for ourselves.

**Dave Sobel** (3:25)
So prior to the CompTIA split to form GTIA, the advocacy and public policy groups went over to the public policy. Like, that isn't in this organization. So my understanding is nobody in the channel really has the legislative muscle to do this. Who carries this to a legislature?

**Cole Knuth** (3:43)
Well, so TechSatAnim won't necessarily do it all the way to the finish line for us. But one of the reasons we, I say we, I now work for the university. One of the reasons TechSatAnim was where a lot of this idea went from concept to practice, was the different investment areas that A&M has and how large it is. So I'll start with early 2000s, George Bush Sr. picked TechSatAnim as its presidential library. With that, it also endowed a school of government. That school of government public policy has a lot of masters and graduate degrees and PhDs that are developed about creating policy. It's actually the largest single aggregate of graduate students in DC is TechSatAnim University. So that was one of it. The other was I think maybe early 2010s, don't quote me on the date, TechSatAnim purchased a law school. They put that law school with the school of government to have presence in DC as well. So you have a lot of students that go and work and internships and different things. So the university is very well practiced at helping influence legislators to write law.