Author Archives: Maria Koblish

The healthcare industry continues its reign as the number one cyber attack target. For 12 consecutive years, the healthcare industry has incurred the highest breach-related financial damages of any industry with an average cost of $10.10M per incident. Attacks on Trinity Health and Scripps Health, for example, are two of the largest data breaches in history and reveal just how vulnerable PII and PHI data really are. 

Healthcare in the U.S. is a massive expenditure, accounting for more than 18 percent of the United State’s gross domestic product (~$3.5 trillion). With a growing and aging population and an increasingly complex network of companies and healthcare institutions working together and sharing information, hackers do not have to look very hard for rewards. With the COVID-19 pandemic, further vulnerability ensued as the industry was forced to operate beyond the walls of a doctor’s office and hospital: primary communications shifted to email and text in some cases, and doctor’s visits turned into virtual appointments. This sudden shift to remote, digital operations opened a new and vulnerable flank in an industry trying to accommodate the urgent needs of patients. 

Outdated systems, a shortage of IT staffing and protocols, and life-or-death scenarios often create conditions that leave patients and staff exposed to data-targeting attacks. The follow-on consequences, such as a pressing need to pay ransoms quickly to regain patient data, only encourage bad actors to target the industry more. 

Due to the existing patchwork security vulnerabilities within the industry, healthcare providers and facilities are likely to, if not already, incur cyber debt. Cyber debt is the amount of unaddressed security vulnerabilities that accumulate in an organization’s IT infrastructure, usually as a result of the implementation of new systems and technologies over time. It emerges through the improper management of sensitive data and assets. Specifically, outdated systems that have far too few staff and protocols to maintain basic hygiene like updates and patches.

A CyberArk 2022 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report found that less than half of cybersecurity decision-makers have identity security controls in place for their business-critical applications, while 79 percent agree that their organization prioritized maintaining business operations over ensuring robust cybersecurity in the last 12 months. These are negligent – yet all too common – practices that have the potential to rack up cybersecurity debt in any industry, not just healthcare. 

When considering the kinds of information that is at stake, such as medications, diagnoses, medical histories, etc., these outdated practices cannot continue. In the court of public opinion as well as the law, liability judgements are becoming increasingly costly and holding executives personally liable.  

Eliminating risk altogether is impossible, however investing wisely in threat mitigation is possible and a vital step in deterring an attack. For most providers, partners and businesses serving the healthcare industry, the most efficient way to tackle cyber debt is by partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) like Thrive that is familiar with the challenges faced by healthcare organizations. Thrive’s comprehensive IT outsourcing services can eliminate gaps in security and enable internal technology teams to focus on quality of care for patients instead of scrambling to recover their personal data.

With glaring holes in security operations across the healthcare industry, Thrive has the expert resources to augment your over-extended cybersecurity team and modernize your security posture to better prevent and mitigate cyber attacks, create a disaster recovery plan, and help ensure compliance with HIPAA, HITECH, and other compliance regulations. 

Learn more about Thrive’s leading healthcare MSP practice and how our security-first NextGen Managed Services can help your organization in our latest cybersecurity white paper.

Recently, there was a security incident that forced Rackspace to shut down its hosted Exchange environment for an extended period of time. The mitigating solution was to give customers free access to Microsoft 365 for email services. The belief is that the security failure stemmed from known vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Exchange (which Microsoft confirmed and later linked the attacks to a nation-state hacker group.) 

Security experts are seeing a significant number of Exchange servers getting “backdoored” by malware that lets threat actors maintain update-resistant and “stealth” access to the IT infrastructure of a targeted organization. Despite its long-held reputation as a reliable on-premise workhorse for email that allows for total administrative control, many of our clients are starting to see this beloved server as legacy technology. Exchange has limitations that become more noticeable as companies migrate to the cloud, namely, modern authentication and other security features that are unavailable in Exchange environments.

There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy.

The lasting business shift to remote and hybrid work has prompted slow adopters to finally embrace the cloud. Some statistics show nearly 90% of organizations have adopted the cloud for at least some of their business applications, though it appears that for some, the decision to let go of their legacy or hosted email system remains a challenge.

The major benefits of migrating to Microsoft 365 can be broken down into three categories:

• End-user productivity
• Security and compliance
• Scalability and cost-efficiency

Growing companies need more than just email. Around 80% of Fortune 500 companies have already undertaken data migration to Microsoft 365, and start-ups to medium-sized organizations are now following this trend. Smaller organizations are implementing Microsoft’s productivity suite into their everyday operations and utilizing its set of tools to drive business productivity at a flexible, calculable cost.

… and Re-Think Productivity.

Cost reduction is frequently cited as the core driver for migration plans, however there are many arguments in favor of taking the leap to the new Microsoft 365 including an array of novel tools, product updates, and the opportunity for new workflows and routines. Yes, migration can be a complex task, but it’s one that brings many benefits:

• Upfront cost certainty 
• Preserves business agilily
• Enhances organizational communication
• Boosts employee productivity and reduces downtime
• Streamlines IT operations

And there is no need for Capex spend on hardware, software, data center space, ever. Here are some additional benefits for your in-house IT department:

• Flex user count up or down very quickly
• More times than not the mailbox size quota is substantially greater with Microsoft 365
• No need to audit MS licensing, as all licenses are included
• No need to patch or keep servers up to date
• No need to patch or update Office versions
• Users are spread out among many servers so a single server outage does not impact all users
• Guarantees compliance with industry-specific, local, and national regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC 1, 2, & 3, ISO/IEC 27001, CIS Benchmarks, CDSA, and more
• Faster onboarding with Thrive Customer portal integration

How can Thrive’s Cloud-First, NextGen Managed Services help your business? To discover more, please CONTACT US.

Cybersecurity Rule 206(4)-9 for investment advisers and private funds is expected to be finalized April 2023 according to the SEC’s 2023 regulatory agenda.

Proposed in February 2022, the rule is designed to promote a more comprehensive framework to address cybersecurity risks for advisers and funds, including their ability to effectively respond and recover from a cyber incident, while also strengthening investors’ confidence in the security of their investments. The proposed changes impact disclosure requirements, include a mandatory 48-hour incident reporting requirement, and establish new record keeping requirements for advisors and funds that are designed to improve the availability of cybersecurity-related information and help facilitate the Commission’s inspection and enforcement capabilities.

How will your cybersecurity program perform during its next regulatory audit?

Financial organizations, such as banks, investment firms, private equity firms, wealth management firms, hedge funds and more are facing new and growing market pressures, technology disruptions and cyber threats, seemingly on all fronts. Thrive has decades of experience working with financial services firms worldwide building risk mitigation and compliance programs that help companies protect their data and grow their business.

Our Financial Operations Platform helps our clients by making it easier to navigate regulatory processes and meet standards – on time – thanks to its simplified compliance reporting capabilities.

A member FS-ISAC, Nicsa and AIMA, Thrive is here to help your firm navigate the complex world of financial services technology and regulatory best practices to improve data security posture while generating value to your business operations. Our consulting team provides assessment services specifically tailored to evaluating registered investment advisors – contact us today to learn more.

It’s been an incredible year of growth and progress at Thrive! To our expanding team of colleagues in offices around the world, a warm thank you for your dedication to our customers and for making Thrive thrive in a business climate that has been unpredictable (to put it mildly.) With that in mind, we want to share some 2022 business highlights and sprinkle a few more reasons to be joyful as we carry on into 2023.

Thrive’s position as a leading global technology provider was strengthened in 2022. Demand from small and mid-sized businesses in need of our end-to-end managed services to help drive their secure digital transformation climbed steadily across multiple industries. It is a sign of the times. According to IDC, for the first time ever, the majority of enterprise organizations (53%) now have an enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy which is a 42% increase from just two years ago. 

When clients come to Thrive for help, they’ve often just paid for a custom or off-the-shelf solution that doesn’t fit the realities of their business and the lasting headache of unwanted “technical debt” in the form of maintenance, aging software, updates, migrations, and service packs. These “solutions” end up being expensive paths to nowhere. 

With a growing consensus that digital transformation is an ongoing process — one that needs to adapt and evolve as technology, people, and businesses change – Thrive is very well positioned to help its customers along this journey in 2023.

Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Things from 2022:

Growth

• Thrive acquired six managed services providers in 2022. We welcome InCare Technologies, Preemo, SouthTech, and DSM in the U.S., and Edge Technology Group and Custard in the U.K.
• Our workforce is now represented by more than 1,000 employees based in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
• We welcomed two new members to our leadership team: Bill McLaughlin becoming President and Richard Gardiner as EVP of Global Marketing. 
• Thrive welcomed 130+ new customers in 2022.
• Sales and agent revenue had impressive, double-digit increases. 

Key Investments

• We made a significant investment to upgrade our 24x7x365 eyes-on-glass Security Operation Center (SOC) by integrating a Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) engine to significantly reduce incident response times for client threats and provide higher quality information for the Thrive SOC to combat intricate cyber risks in real-time. 
• ThriveCloud opened its ninth in world-class SOC 2 Type II certified data center, located in Atlanta, GA

Industry Awards

• Thrive was recognized by CRN twice in 2022, making the CRN 2022 MSP 500 List and the CRN 2022 Solution Provider 500 List. We were also named to the 2022 Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies and to Boston Business Journal’s Fast 50! At the solution level, Thrive’s Managed Endpoint Security and Response solution won the 2022 Fortress Cyber Security Awards for the Endpoint Detection product category.

Thank you for your commitment and hard work. And Cheers! to a prosperous 2023!

2022 saw continued supply chain disruptions, the evolving pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising inflation, rising energy costs, and a looming recession that impacted business operations and plans. Despite these challenges, or perhaps because of them, businesses have continued to invest in digital transformation to adapt to changing demands and fluctuating market dynamics. With more connectedness between devices and workplaces and cities that can seamlessly transmit data to one another comes more easy access to sensitive data than ever before, particularly for cybercriminals who seek data for profit. According to a recent study, global data breaches were up 70% in Q3 of 2022, compared to the previous quarter. 

Underscoring the reality that no company is immune to a data breach, big names such as Medibank, Rockstar Games, American Airlines, and Cash App were recently attacked. And for organizations that have adopted some form of remote working model, the average cost of a data breach was $4.99 million, almost $1 million more than organizations where remote work is not a factor. While the growing frequency of such hacks are concerning, so too is the amount of time it takes to detect a breach, well north of six months – and the longer a breach remains undetected, the higher the financial impact will be.

To get a beat on what to expect in 2023 with respect to cybersecurity trends and budgeting priorities, Thrive’s CISO Chip Gibbons shares his pick list of what organizations should keep in mind from a people and process perspective: 

End Users Are the Top Cybersecurity Target in 2023 

Business Email Compromise (BEC) will continue to be a top attack method from cyber attackers and the easiest way into an organization. With the increase in zero-day attacks, people are going to be looking at reducing their externally available footprint. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) will be ubiquitous and nothing should be externally available without it.

Budgeting Security in 2023

Currently the economy is in flux and many tech companies are laying off employees or not hiring new ones. Cybersecurity budgets will continue to rise, but not as quickly. Companies know and can see the risk due to ransomware and other attacks, but they will need to be more careful in how they spend their money.

Be Cautious of the Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT devices continue to pose threats as many companies that create these devices are focused on getting to market quickly and security is an afterthought. There are real-life implications of IoT hacks such as being locked out of your house via a smart lock, being unable to access your car via a connected keyfob, or malfunctioning smart appliances – meaning that hacked IoT devices pose real safety and monetary threats at the individual level. 

Know Where Data Lives No Matter What Industry

Financial institutions, law firms, healthcare providers, and other companies that deal with sensitive customer data should already understand that threats in 2023 will be complex and constant. But even for those companies that aren’t typically managing lots of data, it’s crucial to know where your data lives and how to protect it. Increased ransomware attacks, which will get through in zero-day attacks, as well as account compromises will happen to make it vital to have multiple layers of protection to stop an attack and potential data exfiltration if one layer fails.

Work From Home Is Here to Stay

Most companies have embraced some form of work-from-home policy and there was a large scramble to get people secure and situated at the beginning of the pandemic. Companies should continue to evaluate their end-user workstation security and work on securing with DNS filtering, EDR, and email filtering.

What Is Immutability?

In the basic sense, to be immutable means to be unchangeable. Something that is fixed, set, or permanent can also be said to be immutable. 

In the world of cybersecurity and disaster recovery, immutability is important – immutable backups mean that they are fully protected from tampering or deletion. While we don’t want all files to be immutable, adding this barrier of protection to your routine backups – or even at the SAN layer with immutable snapshots – could be the difference between a minor security hiccup and full-blown ransomware disaster.

Why Is Immutability Important?

An immutable repository protects your data from modification, tampering, and even deletion from bad actors, disgruntled employees, or even accidental modification. It allows data to be read, but never changed or removed, thus making it a safer choice when it comes to your organization’s data backups.

The majority of organizations are now running routine backups, but simply having backups available without also protecting them promotes a false sense of security. In fact, only 57% of businesses hit by ransomware reported being able to recover their data from a backup. Bad actors know to focus on compromising backups before aiming at the larger, more important systems to better guarantee complete failure if their ransom demands are not met. Creating immutable, hard-to-reach backups can ensure business continuity in the case of a cyber disaster for your organization.

What Makes a Good Immutable Solution?

Air Gapping

One way of protecting your backup data is a practice called ‘air gapping’ — a fully separate system that houses and manages your backups. These systems are often off-site and fully isolated, keeping data fully immutable. Old-school data recording that took place on removable media (floppy disks, CDs, tapes, etc.) had a natural air gap built in — once the media was removed from your machine, it was incapable of being changed. With the emergence of backups being stored in software, on the cloud, and on-premise, this traditional air gap no longer exists. However, out-of-band solutions like utilizing a service provider can achieve similar levels of separation. 

Maintained

With each new day comes a list of new threats. Keeping ahead of these threats is a full-time job often delegated to a CISO or similar – someone whose sole job is to stay on top of potential information security issues and create proactive action plans to protect against bad actors. It’s dually important to keep your backups in mind when maintaining your system security – in the event of a disaster, your backups are your last means of defense. 

Fully Managed

Outsourcing your backup management to a third party is one great way of adding a necessary air gap between your business operations and your system backups. Rather than individually sourcing rack space at a Colo facility or investing in hardware and spending the time spinning up compatible software to ingest and manage your backup files, allow a DRaaS specialist to take the entire process out of your hands for both a better experience and improved safety. Fully managed solutions are kept under a watchful eye and routinely maintained, checking all of the boxes of true, secure immutability. 

Immutability On-Premises and in the Cloud

It is still possible to create ‘immutable’ backups without a traditional air gap, but recovery data is still open to potential vulnerabilities. CIOs and CISOs sometimes have different opinions on what immutability looks like in practice, making the benefits and shortcomings of storing backups without a traditional air gap difficult to weigh. A quick look into the pros and cons of managing backups in-house or without a traditional air gap can help you determine whether the risk is worth the reward:

Pros of Managing Backups In-House

• Can protect against data deletion within a given timeframe
• Ability to choose which levels of admin have access to backups

Cons of Managing Backups In-House

• Disgruntled employees (admins) can still delete backups
• On-premise hardware can be physically stolen or destroyed
• Cloud-based data can still be compromised via stolen credentials

Cyber Liability Insurance Implications

It’s important to fully understand the details of your cyber insurance policy. Just the same as any other insurance policy, certain security and safety benchmarks need to be met to qualify for remediation in the event a breach does occur. If your company is backing up its data, but not securing those backups, there is a chance you could be held liable in the event of a ransomware attack. 

Safeguard Your Backups Today

Choosing what kind of immutable backup security solution works for your business can be tricky. Air-gapped solutions offer the highest level of data protection, but taking that data off-premise makes it more difficult to access. However, cloud-based and on-prem backups don’t provide the level of full immutability offered by a fully managed backup storage solution. In every case, it’s important to weigh your options and select what will work best for your enterprise.

If you need help building a data recovery plan that works for your business, Thrive’s DRaaS team is here to help.

Due to the conflict in Ukraine and disruptions in the flow of natural gas across Europe, energy prices are increasing in the UK. While the government is taking steps to cap the coming pain, there will be an increase.

For many businesses that maintain their own on-premise IT infrastructure, 2022 presented never-seen-before challenges that are a harbinger for 2023 as well:

• Electricity bills rising 4-5 fold over the last three years with uncertain times ahead due to the reworking of Ofgem price caps and a revisiting of fixed-price energy deals.
• Recent reports find that 60% of U.K. Data Centre professionals have said their electricity bills had increased by up to 40% over the past three years, with 3% reporting a price increase in excess of 50%. 
• This past summer, temperatures broke 40 degrees Celsius for the first time ever in the UK during the sustained heatwave.

While third-party data centres are not immune to rising costs, they often provide greater energy efficiency, superior backup systems, and around-the-clock support, making them a smart choice for businesses that want to manage costs and preserve their business application performance. One area for organisations to consider is making the move to a colocation model that makes businesses more cost-efficient simply by pooling resources. For example, cooling can be 70-80% more efficient on average.

Looking for Business Assurance in Uncertain Times

The energy crisis will affect businesses that manage their own infrastructure in ways big and small. There are top-level business benefits to making the move from managing your own on-premise IT infrastructure and into a colocation environment such as lower total cost of ownership, uptime SLAs, bandwidth, and greener operations. However, companies need more than just a warehouse. For example, Thrive owns its own state-of-the-art facility in Luton which features an in-house Technical Assistance Centre that supports customers with engineering and strategic design services onsite to help companies execute their digital transformation roadmap.

The onsite Thrive team in Luton has decades of experience helping businesses navigate their technology needs and is on hand helping clients run their own data centre within the Luton Tier 3 facility. The team can speak of their first-hand experience with how costs have changed and what can be done to help mitigate them. Recently, Thrive’s U.K. data centre clients have reported an average 20% efficiency gain just from pooling resources.  

If you are considering taking a key next step in your IT journey or face an acute talent shortage to keep things running smoothly, the forthcoming winter season and cost of energy could be the right time to make a move out of your server room. Learn more about Thrive’s data centre and schedule your tour today.

Every Month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month

While October is a great time to make sure you are up to speed on all best practices, hackers don’t have a schedule. Every day is a new opportunity for malicious actors to catch you and your systems off guard, and it’s the responsibility of every CIO, CISO, and individual to stop them in their tracks.

Observed every October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month was created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Cybersecurity Alliance to bring more awareness to the growing barrage of sophisticated attacks targeting individuals and organizations alike. From basic brute force attacks to more sophisticated malware and ransomware breaches, no one person or business can be too cautious in who they allow access to their accounts and systems.

Today, the mission of Cybersecurity Awareness Month has expanded beyond government agencies to the private sector and to individuals, with a focus on what we can all do to better safeguard our personal and sensitive information.

From Government to the Private Sector

Much of the nation’s infrastructure is privately held – one report by FEMA in 2011 estimated 85% was owned and operated by the private sector – meaning that hackers have a variety of attractive avenues into some of the nation’s most critical operations. From pipelines to water treatment plants, the services we rely on the most are also the most at-risk of suffering a cyberattack. One study by Trend Micro found that 52% of global organizations had one of their suppliers hit by ransomware. 53% of those attacks were hidden in legitimate tooling like Cobalt Strike, meaning that 3rd parties were suffering without actually doing anything ‘wrong’.

Steps You Can Take to Stay Protected

CISA’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month Campaign, “See Yourself in Cyber” is aimed at helping individuals and SMBs alike step up their cybersecurity posture. At Thrive, we strive to bring businesses into the age of NextGen IT and better protect their most crucial systems and sensitive data. Here are a few things we recommend for everyone to practice good cyber hygiene during Cybersecurity Awareness Month and beyond.

Enable MFA Wherever Possible

Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) means that you’ll need more than just one form of ID to get into your secured accounts. Turning on MFA is crucial, and oftentimes quite simple – depending on the sensitivity of the information your organization handles, secondary ID can range from a text sent to your personal cell phone to fingerprint scanners or even facial recognition. Regardless of the type of multi-factor authentication, adding an extra layer to your login procedure not only deters attackers from trying to breach your account, but can stop them in their tracks entirely.

Update All of Your Software

Software updates oftentimes are much more than bug fixes and usability improvements. They patch potential vulnerabilities and close security loopholes. Worried you might miss a crucial update? Turn on auto-updates!

Participate in Security and Phishing Awareness Training

Often a point of discontent, employee awareness training is meant to help you think before you click. Hackers are constantly coming up with new ways to trick users into clicking malicious links and stealing sensitive data.

Use Strong Passwords and Protect Them

Every one of your sensitive accounts should have a unique, complex password. While sometimes hackers use bots to crack passwords, it is always a person using the password once it’s cracked. That means that once one of your accounts is compromised, any others using the same password are likely to follow. Choosing a password manager to encrypt all of your unique passwords is a great way to keep track of and secure all of your unique logins.

For more cybersecurity tips and industry insights, sign up for our blog below or contact a member of Thrive’s expert team today.

Public Cloud services caught fire when COVID hit. All over the world, companies needed to shift their employees to remote work and needed to do it quickly and easily. Luckily, those are two of the top benefits of public Cloud services – they’re simple to use and fast to get up and running. This low technical barrier to entry paired with zero capital expenditure to get “spun up” makes public Cloud an attractive operating option. What is often not accounted for, however, are its costs over time.  

Public Cloud’s variable expenses can become volatile and are often underestimated. Public Cloud is often seen as the lower risk, lower cost option when compared to more permanent solutions like private Cloud, but that cost difference often compares capital expenditure to operational expenditure – you can read more about Cloud types and their benefits in this recent blog. In the short term, public Cloud is the cheaper option. Month-over-month though, that is not the case; this year alone, end-user spending on public Cloud services is expected to rise 20.4% in 2022 to $494B, compared to $411B in 2021 according to Gartner. Over months or even years of higher unpredictable OpEx costs, investing in a more stable private Cloud build often outweighs the agility-focused benefits of public Cloud. 

These benefits offered by public Cloud providers are focused on short-term benefits, and often have short-term pricing models to match them. In some scenarios, pay-per-play makes sense; for example, at the beginning of the pandemic when there was not the time nor resources to get the entire world up and running on their own private servers at the same time. Public Cloud stepped in and was a fantastic replacement for more durable private Cloud options. After 2.5 years though, the message has become clearer than ever – remote work is here to stay, and companies of all sizes should be shifting to more mature Cloud models to stabilize costs and build out more reliable infrastructure. So, is your company still relying on a variable cost, one-size-fits-all public Cloud service?

The Cost of Public Cloud

If your company is utilizing public Cloud services, especially those that prioritize agility and operational speed above all else, public Cloud is a fantastic option. For other companies, the potentially high costs incurred on a public Cloud platform might not be in alignment with organizational goals. Let’s look at some pain points to consider when conducting a cost-benefit analysis of your organization’s Cloud spending. 

Pay to Play

Things like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are offered by companies like Microsoft to inherently help manage the underlying hardware layer and offer basic governance controls. They don’t even require dedicated IT personnel or hardware investment to get set up – with the simple click of a button, you can be up and running on a public Cloud server from a company like Google, AWS, or Azure in minutes. Desktop as a Service (DaaS), which allows users’ desktops to be operated from a Cloud environment, further enables companies with high turnover or seasonal employee spikes by hosting employee desktops in the Cloud, rather than a dedicated workstation or laptop. This alleviates an incredible amount of IT support needed to build out infrastructure, maintain security posture, and stay in compliance. 

Each of these services comes at a price, however – usually a per-head or per-kilobyte cost for usage. In the short term, those costs might be worth it – say when a global pandemic hits. In the long term, however, do those costs align with their value?

Irregular Monthly Costs

Rather than paying for your infrastructure setup and maintenance, public Cloud services charge for storage space and overall traffic. Need to spin up a custom app and share it with your team for testing and debugging? It’ll be easy to get up and running, but you’ll be paying per KB for storing it and for each user interacting with it – which can get very pricey, very fast. 

At the end of each month, public Cloud costs need to be meticulously reviewed and their benefits weighed. If the costs of transacting on the public Cloud do not align with a company’s agility goals, there may be more money going out the door than there is opportunity for further funding or buyout. 

Why Private Cloud?

The costs of private Cloud are predictable, and the environment is designed to meet your specifications. Rather than a recurring operating expenditure to use the service, companies can expect a one-time capital expenditure for setup and onboarding that is paired with a much smaller, predictable maintenance and/or access fee. 

Predictability

Using the same example as above, spinning up an application on a private Cloud server would take a bit more time, and would need to be provisioned manually. However, once that application is up, there are no additional costs associated with accessing and running it. 

No Financial Management Overhead

Does the overall capex spend align with the long term benefits your company will experience from a dedicated private Cloud infrastructure?  If the answer is yes, then no further resources need to be allocated to reviewing that decision. Choosing to work with a partner to build out your private Cloud infrastructure can be tricky, but the results at the end of the day will consistently outperform what can be done in the public Cloud in the areas of cybersecurity, customizability, and overall user experience. 

Thinking about moving some or all of your infrastructure to the Cloud? Let one of the experts at Thrive walk you through the benefits of all Cloud types to choose what is best for your business.

Attitudes toward cybersecurity responsibility are shifting worldwide. Impacts of successful breaches can be seen across the globe, challenging nearly every public and private industry. The financial services sector needs to be especially vigilant and prepare ahead of time for upcoming regulation changes that could further impact incident reporting procedures. 

Earlier this year, Costa Rica declared a state of emergency after its Finance Ministry was targeted in a ransomware attack carried out by the group known as Conti. The ransomware hold brought the country to its knees for nearly a month, with more than 27 infrastructure-supporting institutions unable to fully operate. This attack limited the country’s ability to collect taxes, froze payroll for thousands of public employees, and even paralyzed foreign trading. Costa Rica’s troubles could be linked almost directly to shortcomings of the previous administration; underinvestment in cybersecurity and insufficient incident reporting. 

This is just one of many “worst-case-scenarios” we’ve seen over the last few years as attackers set their sights on larger, more critical infrastructure targets than ever before. 

Signed into law in March of this year in the US, the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) requires critical infrastructure companies, such as those in the financial services sector, to report cybersecurity incidents like ransomware attacks to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within 72 hours. With these upcoming changes to regulation in the US specifically, now is the time to get a jump-start on not only protecting your company’s best interests, but also the country’s financial infrastructure as a whole. Here are 3 things CISOs and CIOs in the financial industry can do right now to protect their sensitive data and prepare for upcoming changes in regulation:

1. Enforce due diligence questionnaires for vendors

Knowing how your information – and your customers’ information – is protected when it’s outside of your internal system is vital to keeping that data out of the hands of malicious actors. Would you send your child to a daycare without first checking their credentials? CISOs and CIOs need to treat their data the same way they would their most valued assets – ensure they’re in trusted hands at all times, and that there are procedures in place to adequately handle emergencies.

2. Keep an eye on foreign cybersecurity legislation

The EU, India, and others are already far ahead of the US in terms of high-level cybersecurity regulation and reporting procedures. India’s newest CERT-In regulations, passed in April 2022, enforce much stricter reporting and recordkeeping guidelines than ever before. Organizations are required to report incidents within 6 hours of identification and maintain IT communications records for 180 days. If these new regulations are proven to deliver positive results, it may not be long until other countries like the US begin adopting similar reporting guidelines. 

3. Start keeping detailed logs of data breaches now

Enforcement of CIRCIA begins in March of 2024, but now is the time to get ahead of the learning curve and begin keeping better tabs on your cybersecurity posture. If you aren’t yet keeping detailed records of threats to your business’s network security, it is imperative that you start doing so immediately. The best way to keep your organization’s data and reputation secure is by being prepared to demonstrate compliance and report breaches at a moment’s notice.

If you need help building a disaster recovery plan, have questions about best practices when writing an information security policy, or if you aren’t sure where to start, Thrive’s vCISOs are here to help. Reach out to a member of our expert cybersecurity team today for a free consultation. 

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Note from the author:

Check out my recent LinkedIn post for some additional insight on this article from Harvard Business Review that details upcoming policy changes in the US.