Author Archives: thrivewpengine

The New Basics That Every Business Should Have Budgeted

For years, we’ve been told anti-virus and firewall should be all you need to protect your network.  Those days are long past given the rise of new, more sophisticated cyber attacks.  As many businesses head into budget season, it is important to add new cyber security services into the budget assuming they are not already in place.

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DEF CON Hacker Convention took place last month, bringing to the table many new Workshops and Villages in which attendees can sit down and hack things. The most notable and written about Village this year was the new Voting Village – A new area of DEF CON where you can take a crack at cracking an election machine.

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There are so many ways your company’s information can be breached.  If you read the news, you know that companies large and small are being hacked every day. This is becoming a very real threat to your business.  With all of the different ways a hacker can get into your network, it can be overwhelming. So, where do you start?  Let’s start with the top 5 things you can do to prevent a data breach.

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Thrive Named to 2017 CRN Fast Growth 150 List: The Top 50

List Recognizes Thriving Solution Providers in the IT Channel

Thrive, a leading provider of next generation IT services in the Northeast, announced that CRN_®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Thrive to its 2017 Fast Growth 150 list. The list is CRN’s annual ranking of North America-based technology integrators, solution providers and IT consultants with gross sales of at least $1 million that have experienced significant economic growth over the past two years. The 2017 list is based on gains in gross revenue between 2014 and 2016, and the companies recognized represent a total, combined revenue of more than $16,717,688,643.

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Part 3 of 4

In part 2, we reviewed many of the high level features available in Azure Active Directory.  At this point, we’d like to drill-in on some of the critical features that you can take advantage of.  With all of the different bundles that are available it’s easy to get lost among the offerings.

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Since SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 (released 1/2013), Microsoft has included the ability to backup directly to Azure. And starting with their 2014 version, they have included a Managed Backup capability that offers the simplest way to get started backing up to the cloud. In addition, in 2014 they released an external tool that enables automatic copying of older SQL Server versions’ backups to Azure. However, while these capabilities offer a welcome alternative to on-premises drive and/or tape backups, there are many things to consider and configure in order to create a robust and fully capable SQL Disaster Recovery (DR) solution in Azure. Which is to say, there are always many things to consider and configure in order to create a robust and fully capable SQL DR solution, and the Azure capabilities do not, in most cases, significantly simplify the planning, implementation, and assurance of your DR capabilities. Backing up to the cloud, however, offers a robust alternative to traditional on-premises approaches in that it is immediately geographically isolated, relatively cost efficient, and supports substantial DR advantages such as in-cloud recovery and failover.

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Regulatory compliance has many different definitions depending on what industry you are applying the policies to. Since compliance means integrating standards that follow specific requirements, regulatory compliance is the regulations a company must follow to meet specific requirements.

When you apply regulatory compliance to IT, the regulations apply to two different aspects of company operations. These include the internal requirements for IT and compliance standards. They are set forth by external entities. Both types of regulatory compliance affect IT company operations and can potentially restrict what a company can and cannot do. (more…)

As we are seeing by the recent breaches of well-known brands (WWE, Verizon, Dow Jones) the public clouds are becoming the source from which the data is being obtained.  The easy way to describe what has been happening is a cloud version of a file server (Blob storage – Microsoft Azure Storage, AWS S3 Storage) has been populated with sensitive files and then permissions were set to allow a very large number of people access to those files.  These recent breaches are not the direct fault of the cloud vendor but rather humans or processes created by humans not knowing how to configure proper security within the clouds.  (more…)

The industry is moving to smarter and faster firewalls, they have combined the intelligence and awareness of an application and content with traditional firewall protections.  Next Gen firewalls have a tighter, more purpose-built architecture. They look deeper at the packets to create risk assessments that are coupled with the source and destination policies to better block both known and potential threats.

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How much time do you spend looking for a document, or notes, or maybe an email you know exists, but you just can’t remember exactly what it was called, or where it was put. When managing information, for yourself, and especially for an entire organization, a key success metric is the ability to find information quickly. Or, as we experts like to call it, “findability” (I know only experts use this word because it’s not yet even in the dictionary).

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