Author Archives: Sydney Pujadas

Ransomware, phishing, data breaches, and insider threats are rising at an alarming rate. To stay protected, it’s no longer enough to rely on firewalls and antivirus alone. A modern cybersecurity strategy must include Managed Detection and Response (MDR).

At Thrive, we help businesses implement comprehensive cybersecurity plans that include 24x7x365 threat detection, rapid incident response, and proactive threat hunting—all essential elements of an MDR solution designed to keep you secure and resilient.

Why a Cybersecurity Plan Is No Longer Optional

Cyberattacks are inevitable, but the impact is not. Businesses that invest in a strategic cybersecurity plan are far more likely to:

• Prevent breaches before they escalate
• Minimize downtime and data loss
• Avoid costly fines and legal consequences
• Meet cyber insurance and compliance requirements

Unfortunately, many organizations operate without a clear cybersecurity roadmap. That’s a dangerous risk in a landscape where attackers exploit unpatched systems, unsecured endpoints, and weak detection capabilities.

What Is Managed Detection and Response (MDR)?

Managed Detection and Response is a next-generation cybersecurity solution that provides:

• 24x7x365 security monitoring
• Advanced threat detection
• Expert-led incident investigation
• Automated and manual threat response

MDR is the foundation of a strong cybersecurity plan. It closes the gap between alerting and action, something traditional tools and internal teams often struggle to do alone.

Why MDR Should Be a Core Part of Your Cybersecurity Strategy

Cyber Threats Move Fast. You Need to Respond Faster: Attackers don’t wait for business hours. Thrive’s MDR services deliver real-time monitoring and response, 24x7x365. That means threats are detected and neutralized before they can do damage, no matter when they strike.

• Most Businesses Can’t Keep Up Alone: Internal IT teams are often stretched thin and lack the resources to monitor threats 24/7. MDR fills this gap by providing access to a dedicated Security Operations Center (SOC), threat intelligence, and automated playbooks managed by experts.
• You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See: With hybrid work, cloud adoption, and growing attack surfaces, visibility is a challenge. Thrive’s MDR solution gives businesses complete insight into endpoints, networks, cloud workloads, and more, so no threat goes unnoticed.
• Compliance and Cyber Insurance Require It: Regulations like HIPAA and GDPR increasingly expect businesses to have threat detection and incident response capabilities. Additionally, many cyber insurance providers require MDR as a baseline for coverage. Thrive’s MDR offering supports both compliance and insurability.

Building a Cybersecurity Plan with Thrive’s MDR Services

A strong cybersecurity plan starts with assessing your risks and understanding your environment. Thrive works with you to design a tailored security roadmap, integrating MDR into a broader strategy that includes:

• Vulnerability management and patching
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
• Security awareness training
• Incident response and remediation

Our MDR platform becomes your frontline defense, detecting and stopping threats in real time while providing valuable insights to strengthen your overall cybersecurity posture.

Don’t Wait for a Breach. Build Your Plan Now.

Every business needs a cybersecurity plan. And by today’s standards, no plan is complete without Managed Detection and Response.

Thrive helps you stay secure, compliant, and confident in your ability to withstand modern threats. Let’s build a cybersecurity plan that works—for today and tomorrow.

Contact Thrive to assess your current security posture and explore how MDR can protect your business.

Executives might know they need better security, faster systems, or modern cloud solutions, but struggle to connect those needs to tangible outcomes like increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, or operational efficiency.

So, how can you bridge the gap between technical goals and strategic business outcomes? It starts with a mindset shift and a roadmap that aligns IT investments with real-world business impact.

Step 1: Understand the “Why” Behind Your IT Needs

Every IT initiative should begin by clearly defining the business objective it supports. Are you trying to:

• Reduce downtime to keep operations running smoothly?
• Improve customer experiences through faster application performance?
• Meet compliance requirements to avoid costly fines?
• Enable remote work to attract and retain top talent?

If the answer is “we’re upgrading because we have to,” dig deeper. Understanding the “why not” clarifies priorities and helps ensure leadership buy-in and long-term ROI.

Step 2: Translate Needs Into Measurable Goals

Once you understand the business purpose, convert it into SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example:

Instead of saying you want to “Improve cybersecurity,” aim for “Reduce phishing-related incidents by 50% over the next six months through security awareness training and email filtering.”

Rather than committing to “Moving to the cloud,” target “Reducing infrastructure costs by 25% over 12 months by migrating key legacy applications to a cloud model.”

This level of clarity helps IT teams stay aligned with leadership priorities and makes it easier to track success.

Step 3: Prioritize Based on Business Impact

Not all IT projects are created equal. Use a business impact analysis to prioritize initiatives based on their potential to drive revenue, reduce risk, or improve efficiency. Consider questions like:

• What is the cost of doing nothing?
• What departments or processes are affected?
• Will this project create a competitive advantage?

By mapping IT investments to strategic outcomes, you can build a business case that resonates beyond the IT department.

Step 4: Collaborate Across Departments

An effective IT strategy isn’t created in a vacuum. It requires collaboration between IT leaders, department heads, executive stakeholders, and potentially your outsourced MSP. Business users offer critical insight into real-world workflows, pain points, and customer expectations.

Creating cross-functional teams for major initiatives fosters alignment, reduces friction during implementation, and ensures that technical solutions are built with the end user in mind.

Step 5: Choose the Right Technology Partners

Even the best internal plans can stumble without the right external support. A strategic technology partner should go beyond selling software or managing infrastructure; they should act as an extension of your team, helping you:

• Translate goals into tailored solutions
• Stay current with best practices and compliance standards
• Deliver ongoing support and optimization

Look for partners who understand your industry, speak your language, and prioritize outcomes over transactions.

Step 6: Communicate Outcomes, Not Just Outputs

Once a solution is in place, shift the focus from technical achievements to business results:

Instead of saying “We rolled out new collaboration tools,” highlight something more specific, such as “Our team collaboration score rose 30%, improving productivity and reducing project delays.”

This approach reinforces the value of IT investments and helps secure ongoing support and funding for future initiatives.

Step 7: Continuously Evaluate and Evolve

Business needs, technology, and compliance and regulatory standards are constantly changing. That’s why successful IT strategies include regular reviews and updates. Establishing KPIs for each project, tracking results, and gathering feedback from users can help businesses better align internally to meet their goals. Using KPIs can help to refine processes, scale successful initiatives, and sunset tools or services that no longer deliver value.

Continuous alignment keeps your business agile, secure, and competitive.

The Bottom Line

Translating IT needs into actionable business outcomes isn’t about chasing trends or overhauling systems overnight. It’s about making smart, strategic decisions that are guided by your business goals. With a clear plan, collaborative approach, and the right technology partner, IT stops being a cost center and starts being a catalyst for growth and innovation.

Is your organization ready to align IT with business strategy? Contact Thrive today to learn more about not just what you need, but why you need it, and how it will make a difference.

As organizations generate and retain more data than ever, traditional legacy storage methods are no longer able to keep up with the demands around security, scalability, compliance, and cost. Thrive’s Cloud Object Storage Services offer a smarter solution—secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud storage that grows with your project needs.

A Modern Approach to Storage

Cloud object storage enables organizations to seamlessly and securely extend their storage from on-premises environments into the cloud. Unlike traditional data centers, Thrive’s cloud-based approach removes the need for complex capacity planning or siloed systems. With a standard method of accessing data across platforms, teams can store and retrieve information quickly and efficiently, no matter where it originates.

Security and Immutability Built In

Security is at the core of Thrive’s Cloud Object Storage Services. All data is encrypted and protected during transfer, ensuring it stays secure as it moves into the cloud. Once in the cloud, the data becomes immutable, meaning it can’t be altered or deleted. In the event of a ransomware attack, natural disaster, or local compromise, organizations can confidently recover from an untouched, cloud-based version of their data without large stretches of downtime.

This makes Thrive’s storage solution ideal not just for backup, but also for data protection and long-term resilience.

Infinite Scalability to Meet Business Demands

Storage needs can grow overnight, especially for businesses dealing with compliance, digital transformation, or large volumes of unstructured data. Thrive’s solution supports virtually infinite scalability, making it perfect for a wide range of use cases:

• Offsite backup: Extend your on-prem backup infrastructure into the cloud without replacing what’s already in place.
• Long-term archiving: Comply with regulations that require multi-year data retention.
• Elastic storage expansion: Quickly meet demand when local storage runs out—no hardware purchases, no delays.

Performance and Reliability You Can Trust

Thrive’s Cloud Object Storage is highly reliable and performant by design. The storage is distributed across a secure environment, making it always accessible and resilient to outages or failures. Unlike many cloud providers, Thrive does not charge ingress or egress fees, removing hidden costs and making it easier to manage data workflows and IT budgets.

Enterprise-Grade Compliance and Trust

Your data deserves the highest level of protection and compliance. Thrive’s storage services are hosted in SOC-certified data centers and meet a wide range of industry standards, including:

• PCI DSS
• HIPAA
• CJIS

Whether you’re in healthcare, finance, law enforcement, government, or any industry with strict data regulations, Thrive ensures your storage solution is audit-ready and compliant from day one.

Future-Proof Your Data Storage with Thrive

Thrive’s Cloud Object Storage Services combine modern scalability with enterprise-grade security and compliance, all while delivering flexible pricing and zero hidden fees. Whether you’re backing up local systems, archiving critical data for the long haul, or preparing for the unexpected, Thrive ensures your data is protected, accessible, and future-ready.

Contact Thrive today to learn more about how your business can extend its storage infrastructure—securely and seamlessly—into the cloud.

With cybersecurity threats growing more complex and regulations becoming increasingly demanding, many organizations are looking for leadership to guide their security programs. However, hiring a full-time Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) isn’t always practical, especially for mid-market businesses. That’s where Thrive’s Virtual CISO (vCISO) services step in.

A vCISO provides executive-level security guidance without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. Thrive’s vCISO offering stands out by combining deep expertise, flexibility, and strategic alignment to help your business stay secure while achieving its broader goals. Here are the top 10 reasons why Thrive’s vCISO services are the right choice:

1. Cost-Effective Expertise

Hiring a full-time CISO can be expensive. Thrive’s vCISO services give you access to seasoned security leadership at a fraction of the cost, typically one-third to one-half the price. That means you can reallocate budget to other critical areas of your IT or security program without sacrificing quality leadership.

2. Meet Demand Without the Struggle

Finding and keeping a qualified CISO is difficult. The role has a high turnover rate, and experienced professionals are in short supply. Thrive solves this problem by offering access to highly experienced, credentialed professionals who can step in and drive your security initiatives from day one. With Thrive, your vCISO will work closely with your team to build a strong, long-lasting relationship, allowing them to help you reach your business goals.

3. Flexible Engagement

Every organization is different, and so is its security journey. Thrive’s vCISOs work with you to define goals, set priorities, and determine the level of engagement that makes the most sense. Whether you need a strategic advisor, hands-on help, or something in between, our vCISOs fit into your workflow, not the other way around.

4. Objective, Unbiased Advice

Because Thrive’s vCISOs are external experts, they offer a fresh, objective perspective on your security posture. Without internal politics or legacy bias, they can help you make the best decisions for your organization based on risk assessments, compliance needs, and long-term goals.

5. A Team Approach to Solving Problems

You’re not just getting one person—you’re getting the power of Thrive’s entire cybersecurity team. Our vCISOs collaborate with peers and draw on a network of subject matter experts to address even the most complex security challenges.

6. Scalable to Fit Your Needs

Security priorities evolve. Thrive’s vCISO services scale with you. Whether your business is growing, undergoing digital transformation, or adapting to new regulations, your vCISO engagement can expand to keep pace and continue delivering value.

7. Breadth of Knowledge Across Industries

Unlike an internal hire who may only have experience within a single organization or industry, Thrive’s vCISOs bring broad experience across sectors and scenarios. They’ve seen a variety of environments and can apply best practices from across the security landscape to your unique situation.

8. Certified and Credible

All of Thrive’s vCISOs hold industry-recognized certifications like CISSP and CISM. That means you get leadership that understands the strategy, the frameworks, and the technical depth needed to protect your data and meet modern security demands.

9. Tailored to Your Business

Thrive’s vCISOs take the time to understand your business objectives, risk profile, and operational needs. Then, they create a customized security roadmap that aligns with your goals, maximizes ROI, and helps reduce risk.

10. Focused on Compliance

Whether you’re navigating HIPAA, CMMC, DORA, or other regulatory requirements, Thrive’s vCISOs bring the experience to help you align your security program with relevant compliance frameworks. They’ll help you put policies, processes, and controls in place to stay ahead of audits and reduce legal or reputational risk.

Ready to Strengthen Your Security Leadership?

Thrive’s vCISO services offer a powerful, practical way to bring top-tier cybersecurity strategy to your business. With flexible engagement, industry-certified leadership, and a scalable approach, our vCISOs help you build and maintain a strong security posture without the overhead of a full-time hire. Contact Thrive today to learn more about how our vCISO services can help your business reach its goals.

Cybersecurity teams are constantly bombarded with alerts from disparate tools, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms, SIEM solutions, firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and vulnerability scanners. While these alerts are crucial for maintaining security, the large volume of alerts often leads to a phenomenon known as alert fatigue.

Alert fatigue is more than just an operational headache; it’s a critical security risk. When teams are overwhelmed, real threats can be missed amid the noise. Worse, alert fatigue can lead to slow response times, desensitization to high-priority incidents, and burnout among security professionals.

So how can organizations cut through the noise and focus on what matters most?

The Problem with “More” in Cybersecurity

Modern IT environments demand layered security architectures. While each layer is necessary, every added system brings more alerts. Some of these are redundant. Others are false positives. Many are just informational, offering little context or next steps.

Without proper integration and correlation, alerts multiply without clarity, creating:

• Unmanageable alert volumes
• Duplication across tools
• Lack of prioritization or context
• Manual triage bottlenecks

These issues make it hard to detect and respond to real threats effectively

Why Alert Fatigue Is a Security Risk

• Critical Alerts Get Buried: Security teams may overlook or ignore critical events when overwhelmed by low-priority notifications.
• Slower Response Times: Investigations are delayed as analysts sort through thousands of alerts manually.
• Increased Risk of Human Error: Repetitive alert triage leads to cognitive overload, increasing the chance of misclassifying a real threat.
• Burnout and Talent Retention Challenges: Alert fatigue contributes to burnout and the ongoing talent shortage.

Strategies to Manage The Noise and Focus on Threats

To combat alert fatigue, organizations must improve how they filter, correlate, and respond to alerts.

Implement Advanced Correlation and Contextualization

Not every alert deserves the same level of attention. Incident Response and Remediation platforms or Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions should correlate data from multiple sources, identify patterns, and highlight alerts that are part of a broader attack sequence.

Look for platforms that:

• Enrich alerts with threat intelligence
• Connect seemingly isolated incidents
• Suppress redundant or low-confidence alerts

Prioritize Alerts Based on Risk

Risk-based prioritization uses factors such as asset criticality, threat actor tactics, and potential business impact to score alerts. This allows analysts to focus first on what poses the greatest risk to the organization.

Solutions with built-in machine learning and behavioral analysis can improve prioritization over time.

Automate Repetitive Triage Work

More mature security teams are automating and orchestrating repetitive tasks such as:

• Validating indicators of compromise (IOCs)
• Gathering context from threat intel feeds
• Containing endpoints or isolating users automatically

This reduces analyst workload and improves consistency in incident response.

Establish Clear Alert Routing and Escalation Workflows

Ensure that alerts are routed to the right team members based on skill set, urgency, and severity. Set thresholds for automated escalation when a certain alert volume or severity is met.

Defined playbooks and runbooks streamline response, reduce confusion, and ensure critical alerts aren’t dropped.

Continuously Update Alerting Rules

Security environments change, and so should alerting thresholds and detection rules. Regularly review what’s triggering alerts and fine-tune your systems to reduce noise. Engage with MDR (Managed Detection and Response) providers to ensure configurations align with evolving threats.

Thrive’s Approach to Reducing Alert Fatigue

At Thrive, we help mid-market and enterprise organizations cut through cybersecurity noise with a managed detection and response service that goes beyond basic alerting. Our SOC analysts work 24x7x365 to:

• Aggregate data across tools and environments
• Use AI-driven correlation and prioritization
• Provide only actionable alerts backed by full context
• Automate containment and escalation where appropriate

Thrive doesn’t just flood your inbox with notifications. Thrive helps you identify and act on real threats fast, while filtering out the noise that clutters your inbox and wastes your team’s time.

Alert fatigue isn’t just annoying — it’s a serious obstacle to effective cybersecurity. To fight back, organizations must shift from raw alert generation to smart alert management, combining automation, correlation, and expert oversight. By filtering out the noise, your team can concentrate on what matters: stopping threats before they cause damage.

Contact Thrive to learn how we can help you reduce alert fatigue and improve your security outcomes.

Businesses need a strong technology governance framework to remain competitive, secure, and efficient in today’s marketplace. But what does excellence in governance look like? Organizations that achieve excellence align their technology investments with strategic goals, maintain robust security and compliance measures, and implement processes that promote accountability, agility, and innovation.

The Foundations of an Excellent Technology Strategy

A well-defined technology strategy provides a roadmap for leveraging IT to drive business success. A robust strategy will cover both current objectives and ways to adapt as new situations emerge:

• Business Alignment: IT investments and initiatives should directly support business objectives, enabling growth, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
• Innovation and Agility: A forward-looking strategy incorporates emerging technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and automation to foster innovation and maintain a competitive edge.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Organizations must ensure their IT infrastructure can scale to accommodate growth while remaining flexible to adapt to new opportunities and challenges.
• Risk Management: Proactive identification and mitigation of risks, including cybersecurity threats, regulatory changes, and operational disruptions, are essential for sustainability.

Defining Governance Excellence

One way of looking at technology governance is that it focuses on how to execute the IT strategy in a secure, compliant, and efficient manner. Excellence in IT governance can be characterized by:
Clear Policies and Standards: Organizations should establish comprehensive IT policies that govern data management, security, procurement, and compliance.

• Strong Leadership and Accountability: IT governance should be overseen by a dedicated team, including executives, IT leaders, and compliance officers, ensuring accountability across all levels.
• Cybersecurity and Compliance: A robust governance framework includes proactive security measures, continuous monitoring, and adherence to industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2.
• Performance Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and regularly assessing IT performance ensures continuous optimization and alignment with business needs.

How Thrive Can Help

Thrive enables organizations to achieve their strategic objectives by helping them define and execute technology strategy and governance. Thrive provides real-world experience and insights through a comprehensive suite of services:

• Trusted Advisors: Thrive offers a variety of different types of consulting and engagement to meet you where you are and inform your overall IT approach. From current-state assessments to vCIO engagements, you can gain a deeper understanding of your IT teams, processes, and platforms and how to align them to your overall goals.
• Strategic IT Planning: Thrive works closely with organizations to develop a tailored technology roadmap that drives innovation, scalability, and efficiency while helping organizations reach their business goals.
• Security & Compliance Expertise: Thrive’s cybersecurity solutions, including endpoint detection and response, threat intelligence, and compliance support, help businesses stay ahead of evolving risks.
• Managed IT Services: Thrive provides 24x7x365 monitoring, proactive support, and automation-driven IT management to ensure continuous operations and minimize downtime.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Optimization: Thrive’s cloud solutions help organizations modernize legacy systems, optimize workloads, and enhance IT resilience.

By continuously evolving their strategies and governance models, companies can remain resilient and adaptable in an ever-changing technological landscape. Download our latest Mid-Market Guide to Microsoft 365 Governance for more information on how to get started.

Contact Thrive to learn more about how your business can confidently navigate the complexities of technology strategy and governance, ensuring a secure, scalable, and future-ready IT environment.

As cyber threats continue to evolve, businesses need more than just visibility into security incidents; they need rapid, automated responses that mitigate risks before they escalate. That’s why Thrive is introducing an enhanced Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service for Microsoft 365 that delivers cutting-edge threat detection and auto-remediation capabilities.

Why Microsoft 365 Detection and Response Matters

Microsoft 365 is a cornerstone of modern business operations, but it also presents a significant attack surface for cybercriminals. Hackers and other threat actors are increasingly targeting SaaS environments, exploiting vulnerabilities in email, collaboration tools, and identity management systems. Traditional security information and event management (SIEM) solutions can identify suspicious activity but lack built-in mechanisms to respond in real-time. This gap leaves organizations vulnerable to breaches, data loss, and account takeovers.

Thrive’s Microsoft 365 Detection and Response

To strengthen Microsoft 365 security, Thrive enhanced its security platform with new capabilities to continuously monitor Microsoft 365 for anomalous activity, unauthorized access attempts, and potential security breaches. What sets Thrive’s service apart is its new auto-remediation feature, which proactively responds to identified threats in real time.

Thrive Microsoft 365 Detection and Response goes beyond simple threat detection. It enables automated protective actions, such as:

• Locking accounts exhibiting problematic behavior.
• Blocking access to compromised services.
• Restricting unauthorized attempts to modify security settings.

This automation significantly reduces response times, minimizing the window of exposure and mitigating risks before they cause harm. Thrive Security Operations Center (SOC) and support teams will then investigate and help get the compromised account back to secure state.

Migration and Availability

Starting in April, our existing O365/M365 Security Monitoring customers will be enabled with the new response capabilities. This transition will ensure they benefit from enhanced security automation and streamlined threat response. The new Microsoft 365 Detection and Response features will also be available as an add-on option for clients subscribed to EDR, MDR, and other Thrive security services.

The Thrive Advantage

Thrive’s security-first approach ensures businesses can operate with confidence in today’s evolving threat landscape. Our MDR services provide:

• 24×7 Threat Monitoring: Continuous oversight of Microsoft 365 environments to detect and respond to cyber threats.
• Automated Response & Remediation: Auto-remediation feature that proactively neutralizes security risks.
• Expert Security Guidance: Thrive’s cybersecurity professionals help organizations optimize their security strategy.
• Seamless Integration: Enhanced MDR services align with existing security infrastructure, including EDR and SIEM, for comprehensive protection.

Secure Your Microsoft 365 Environment Today

With cyber threats becoming more sophisticated, businesses can’t afford to rely on detection alone. Thrive’s MDR services provide real-time threat response and automation for Microsoft 365 environments, ensuring security teams stay ahead of attacks. Contact Thrive today to learn how you can strengthen your Microsoft 365 security with next-gen MDR capabilities.