Author Archives: Thrive

You may already be managing backup services for some of your clients, but haven’t yet expanded to offering a complete disaster recovery service. Or you simply haven’t added Managed Backup or Disaster Recovery (DR) to your service portfolio at all. Either way, there are good reasons to consider offering your customers DR, not just as a source of recurring revenue, but also as a sticky service that can create a more trusted advisor relationship that leads to new business. It has become easier to add DR to your portfolio with the advent of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), especially when working closely with a DRaaS partner.

DRaaS is a perfect example of an on-demand cloud service that is always on and scales with your client’s needs. For you and your customers, there is the added benefit that you don’t need to keep a second data center for redundant servers and communications services. An additional perk for you is that DR brings in new customers, such as SMBs, who will find it easier to start small and scale as they grow.

DRaaS offers three other main benefits to your customers:

1. Immediate recovery from any kind of disaster with system failover to a secondary infrastructure within minutes.
2. Depending on needs and resources, customers get the flexibility to customize the scope of recovery from all types of disasters, from malware and ransomware to hurricanes and wildfires.
3. DRaaS offers seamless redundancy and no single point of failure to keep data securely protected in the cloud and away from the primary site.

Working closely with a customer to plan for recovery from a disaster that could jeopardize their business, requires that you get a clear understanding of their key operations and those parts of the business that are mission-essential. This disaster recovery planning approach is more strategic and collaborative between provider and customer than with a managed backup service, and requires you and the customer to predefine playbooks for exactly how to respond to different disaster scenarios. This is your opportunity to take your relationship with your customer to a new level. If you are able to add value and insights, you can earn their trust and develop a longer-term relationship with greater revenue potential.

Working on the disaster plan will involve taking the customer through a thorough risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. You may ask, which components are the most important and how do they impact their critical business functions? You will need to calculate both the financial and non-financial costs. Besides loss of revenue, there is the potential loss of opportunity; for instance, companies that recover faster, gain a competitive advantage.

The goal of all this analysis is to develop with the customer what they believe is their realistic recovery time objectives (RTO). In other words, how long can their infrastructure afford to be down? This is often a compromise between what they view as ideal and what they can afford. Similarly, you will also set the recovery point objectives (RPO), which define what level of data must be recovered and at what time-based increment or schedule, which should follow directly out of the analysis of critical business functions.

Qualities and Benefits of a Reliable DRaaS Partner

Having a technology partner that is focused on providing disaster recovery can be helpful during this process. A good DRaaS partner will have extensive experience in helping companies recover from many different kinds of disasters. This experience can be leveraged in formulating a sound disaster plan. Should the time come that a disaster does occur, it’s good to have team members onboard who routinely handle disaster situations and can meet the challenge with a measured and effective response that only comes with experience.

Your DRaaS partner will be particularly useful in the setting and defining of RTO and RPO objectives. These objectives set the parameters for the SLA you agree to and define your relationship and your obligations going forward. This includes identifying the cost-effective services and configurations that are recommended for your customer to meet their RTO and RPO, including full or partial failover, and hot site or warm site replication. It is critical to get it right at the beginning, and this is where the extensive experience of a DRaaS partner can be drawn upon to ensure that the defined service achieves the customer’s objectives as well as your own.

Finally, your ultimate objective in defining a DR plan for your customers is to identify where they are most vulnerable and to help them to address those weaknesses to prevent disasters altogether. Again, you will have to move the needle on your relationship to go beyond reacting to their needs to anticipating them, and as a result, positively shape the way they operate their business.

This is why DRaaS is much more than an additional revenue stream or a sticky service, although it is both of these things. It is above all an opportunity to move you from being regarded as just a service provider to being a trusted strategic long-term partner for their business.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services and can help to guide as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery Services from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around partnering with us to provide your customers with data loss prevention solutions and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

We usually think of being ready for a disaster as a kind of insurance policy against a low-probability event. This approach treats SMB and enterprise DR planning as necessary, but hardly strategic, and most of us would never consider it as a competitive advantage. We should.

In the spring of 2007, just before the 2008 financial crisis hit, Nassim Taleb presciently published a widely read book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. As if reading from a crystal ball, Taleb laid out his thesis that as our global economy scales and becomes more and more complex, we begin to see the unforeseen and unpredictable more and more often. He argued that to be competitive and truly profit from these unpredictable “black swan” events, you have to organize your business strategy to be ready for them, even if they seem very unlikely.

Effective Enterprise DR Planning Includes Cybersecurity, Public Health, and Natural Disasters

Since then we have had at least two of these worldwide seismic events. The most recent, the current pandemic, has been a wake-up call for every business worldwide. Disasters on a global scale do happen and, as it turns out, some businesses have been better prepared to meet the needs of their customers during this event. These companies have not only realized a short-term competitive advantage, but they have secured a firm foundation for their future growth.

But if disasters are unpredictable black swans, how do you plan for them? Taleb shows through a series of examples how important it is to think through the worst kind of risks that you might face and take out insurance against those possibilities. If the risk seems low to everyone else, then it will probably turn out that it doesn’t cost that much to insure yourself against it. And a corollary of this principle, if the worst happens, you will also probably be one of the few survivors. Which can put your business in a very strong competitive situation.

One of the important pieces in your disaster insurance strategy has to be a good disaster recovery plan for your company’s data. Cybersecurity events fall into that class of newly emerging black swan threats that face every business. As we embrace autonomous technologies built around IoT, AI, and machine learning, we are unleashing tremendous productive potential, but we are also setting ourselves up for a potential perfect digital storm.

Much as public health professionals have been warning us of the possibility of a pandemic for the last few decades, cybersecurity professionals have been trying to alert the world to its precarious state around digital security. No one knows exactly how or what will occur, but most who work in this field are concerned that we have a good chance of seeing a major cybersecurity event in the coming decades. Will your business be ready to survive and potentially even profit from it?

Key Considerations for SMB and Enterprise DR Planning

As gloomy as these threats are to contemplate, effective enterprise DR planning has to start with thinking through the worst-case scenarios that you might face so that you can ensure that resources and processes are in place to prevent or rapidly recover from a disaster.

Here are some key considerations at a glance.

1. Start by looking at what parts of your business systems, applications, and data that you simply cannot afford to lose.
2. Then take it to the next level by asking, “If all of my competitors were knocked down by the same event as me, what kinds of data recovery would give me an immediate advantage?” There could be an easily achievable difference between being minimally operable and able to pounce on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. In developing a good data disaster recovery plan, you need to analyze the vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and identify the critical components of your operations. This has to be linked to a thorough analysis of your business functions and an assessment of which are the most critical to your ability to not only survive but successfully compete.
4. You must also ensure that your disaster recovery plan is well understood by your teams. Ensure that they are prepared to execute the DR plan when the time comes. This is difficult to do when the threat is a black swan event that is unpredictable and looks to most people consumed in their daily to-dos as highly theoretical, at best.
5. For this reason, it is important to fully script out the responses to a wide variety of emergency scenarios. Training and periodic trial runs — fire drills — are also a good way to ensure that when the moment comes, people will have developed some engrained patterns that they can fall back on when their amygdala has gone into overdrive.
6. To ensure that you have the skill sets and coverage needed during a disaster, also think about engaging the services of a third-party disaster recovery team. We have firefighters and other first responders for a very good reason. Training and constant practice in dealing with disasters is the only good way to be prepared for them when they strike. However, most businesses and organizations want to avoid having ‘constant practice’ with recovering from disasters for obvious reasons.

A Disaster Recovery partner can allow you to focus on your day-to-day operations, while also having access to reliable and specialized backup and recovery support. A DR partner can apply the deep expertise that they have honed with disasters day in and day out to your specific business needs. They can help you think through your business priorities, identify vulnerabilities in your systems, design backup systems and protocols, and provide critical and rapid response support. This will ensure that you cannot only recover gracefully but seize the moment when your competitors cannot.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services and can help to guide as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around data loss prevention and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

Over the past six months, the cybersecurity landscape has undergone a seismic shift. Nearly overnight, corporate network perimeters expanded to include employees’ homes, new virtualized infrastructures and far more widespread usage of cloud applications. New challenges emerged. From how to keep newly remote teams engaged and collaborating productively to how to repair devices when many IT service providers weren’t able to offer field support, there were far more questions than answers.

By now, we’ve begun to adjust to this so-called “new normal,” and alternative investment firms are beginning to look to the future. A clear majority of employed Americans worked from home during the global pandemic, and 80 percent report that they enjoyed the experience. 69 percent say they were at least as productive if not more so when telecommuting.

From Google and Facebook to small asset managers seeking to reduce the expense of renting office space in dense urban centers, many companies will never return to the ways of working they’d adopted prior to the pandemic. Some will reopen their offices but continue to rely on more flexible hybrid infrastructures and agile business processes in order to be better prepared to weather upcoming uncertainties; others may permit or even encourage increasing numbers of employees to telecommute while they maintain physical workspaces.

This means that the security concerns that arose during the initial lockdown period are being supplanted with more complex, longer-term questions. Microsoft Teams, for example, had 25 million users in March, and by late May this number had soared to 75 million. Such a rapid transition to a distributed workforce simply couldn’t have been accomplished without the cloud, but many cloud services are thin on security features, especially if default configurations are applied. And many users simply haven’t been educated on how to work securely from their home networks, how to evade phishing attacks, or how to follow best-practice remote access protocols. It’s also unclear what kinds of regulatory changes the global financial services industry can expect to see in the months and years to come.

What’s needed is increased attention to building resilient infrastructures that can stand up to the ongoing change that likely will be the only constant in tomorrow’s distributed and hybridized world. Security must become multi-layered, user education must become ongoing, and compliance must shift from preparation for a point-in-time certification to proof of diligence over a longer period through continuous logging and configuration management. It’s challenging to design and implement security plans that allow users to work from home safely without adding roadblocks or inhibiting their productivity, but it can be done.

Let’s take a closer look at what securing cloud-based environments in the “new normal” will entail.

Multi-layered security will become essential.

No single physical or logical access control measure is adequate to secure today’s complex, perimeter-free computing environments. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be circumvented by a determined attacker or foiled by a careless user’s thoughtless click on a text notification. Even the most complex passwords can be compromised in brute force attacks. And remote desktop protocol (RDP), often thought to be highly secure because it doesn’t allow files to be downloaded or executed locally, has recently been used as a vector for ransomware attacks.

Multi-layered security relies on redundancy to extend coverage from the endpoint to the cloud with consistent rigor. Multiple security measures should be configured to control access across every entry point into your cloud environment. This includes conditional access policies that ensure that passwords are complex and are changed regularly. It should also include MFA as well as blocking of unauthorized applications and unregistered devices. Device registration allows you to ascertain that all patches for applications and operating systems (OSs) are up-to-date on end user devices before they’re permitted to connect to corporate resources.

Solutions like data loss prevention (DLP) or properly configured remote access protocols can automatically block copy/paste, printing or file transfer from in-office computers or corporate virtual machines to end users’ personal devices. And containerization can greatly increase application-level security.

Here at Thrive, we designed our CyberSuite service portfolio with the specific needs of alternative investment firms in mind. We understand what it takes to secure data and assets, and know how to bolster investor confidence, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide peace of mind. Our cybersecurity consulting and solutions have always been grounded in a multi-layered approach, which has long been a best practice in information security. Today, it’s imperative.

User education will become an ongoing process.

No matter how comprehensive and robust your policies and security controls, your financial firm will remain vulnerable as long as your employees don’t know how to use systems properly or can’t recognize the signs of an attack. Human error remains the second leading cause of disruption to cloud services, and is often the enabling factor that permits malicious activities to succeed.

Security awareness training programs can do a great deal to close this gap. If your hedge fund, private equity firm or other alternative investment firm adopted new cloud applications or altered remote access or authentication procedures during the unexpected shift to remote work, it’s especially important to educate your users on security best practices for unfamiliar tools and solutions.

The best cybersecurity education programs incorporate a variety of mediums and methods (videos, email reminders, test “phishing” attempts, etc.) to boost end user engagement and encourage long-term retention of the material. Training should be ongoing and provide additional reinforcement to employees who struggle.

Organizations will move beyond point-in-time compliance.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, regulators around the globe have had a range of different responses. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) hasn’t pushed out any new rules yet, while the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has updated only their Office 365 security recommendations. In the U.K., the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has updated its guidelines for data storage in contact tracing applications as well as on customer log retention. More frequent advisories and notifications have been issued, with a particular emphasis on security awareness training for employees.

Going forward, regulators anticipate an increase in the number of organizations adopting 100 percent remote work models. The likely responses will include changes in audit processes to better support virtual auditing and a shift in emphasis from point-in-time certifications to more longer-term oversight to ensure that processes are adequate and there aren’t gaps in due diligence. A more modern approach to risk management will attempt to mitigate vulnerabilities iteratively on an ongoing basis rather than merely preparing for audits since this emphasis results in more robust security overall.

We’re proud of the early and frequent successes we’ve had in helping our clients navigate the transition to distributed workforces with ease. Our field engineers continued to provide vital on-site support throughout the lockdown period, and our 24x7x365 help desk maintained its commitment to industry-leading white glove customer service for clients around the globe. The agile, diverse and highly customized cloud solutions we create for CloudSuite Platform clients made the adjustment smoother, easier and more secure.

We see these successes as a harbinger of things to come. As we look to the future, we see alternative investment firms not just surviving but thriving as they support fully or partially remote work environments. We know that many challenges are still to come, and we look forward to partnering with our clients to overcome them together.

Would you like to learn more about how cybersecurity risks are evolving in tandem with the transition to remote work? Our subject matter expert for Cloud Architecture and Security, Michael (MJ) Laudenslager, teamed up with a group of leading experts from Thrive our partner, eSentire, to present an informative panel discussion on the future of security and regulatory compliance in the cloud.

View the panel discussion now: Digital Distribution and the Regulatory Landscape: Key Learnings and the Path Forward.

Participants include UK Information Security Manager Ian Bowell at Thrive, Christopher Tiu, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific at Thrive, Chris Bradden, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at eSentire, and Eldon Sprickerhoff, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at eSentire.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1 and is well underway; for the first time in recorded history, nine named tropical storms formed before August and thirteen formed before September. Out of those storms, Hanna developed into the first hurricane of the summer as a category 1 event, striking South Texas in July and leaving behind an estimated $485 million USD in damage. That’s one heck of an opener to the season!

The escalating frequency and severity of these natural disasters is posing an urgent and critical threat to businesses and organizations located along the Gulf of Mexico, the North American Eastern Coast from Florida all the way to Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Caribbean. Already struck by economic hardships from the pandemic, these regions simply cannot afford another catastrophe on their shores – and yet they are barreling towards them at an alarming pace with many organizations unprepared and without hurricane disaster recovery in place.

While the season typically peaks by September 10, the second half of the 2020 season is projected to be just as volatile. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted that in total, we may see between 19 – 25 named storms between June and November 30 – the first time that the agency has ever predicted that we may have to start using the Greek alphabet to name our storms.

Out of those 19 – 25 named storms, NOAA forecast that 7 – 11 will become hurricanes, with 3 – 6 of those becoming major hurricane events with extreme damage and potential loss of life. As of this writing in early September, we have already seen 15 named tropical storms. Out of those, 5 became hurricanes with one developing into a major 3+ category storm. The 15th tropical storm was named Omar on September 1, breaking the previous record held by Ophelia in 2005 for earliest named 15th storm of the season.

Enabling Effective Hurricane Disaster Recovery

While early preparation is the best way to mitigate risks to businesses from a wide range of threats, given the early onset, rapid succession and severity of these storms, many organizations have been caught flat-footed. Most have had little time to check that their hurricane disaster recovery plans are in place and updated after only recently activating pandemic planning processes. Many are looking for help to address IT business continuity with their already stretched resources and expanded demands for DR.

An experienced cloud backup and disaster recovery service provider can address many of those business needs by lending their specialized expertise for effective hurricane disaster recovery planning and best practices while also recommending the best and most cost-effective Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions. DRaaS providers can support your team with on-demand services such as managing your offsite data replication to a secure datacenter and ensuring that data is stored geographically distant from threatening storm systems.

Have questions? Our team is ready to help you weather the storm. Contact us today!

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrivee is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection and security services.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around data loss prevention and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

Secure remote access safeguards sensitive data transmission when applications are accessed from devices outside of the corporate network. It also enhances cybersecurity by introducing complexities for threat actors. In many cases, vulnerabilities in software applications, especially critical ones, may become harder to exploit as the configuration of the service begins to move away from the generic default to a more customized configuration.

What is Secure Remote Access?

Secure remote access is an umbrella under which a number of security strategies reside. It can refer to any security policy or solution that prevents unauthorized access to your network or sensitive data.

With more remote workers, different techniques may include the use of both VPN and RDP together (using different authentication mechanisms), implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA), restrictions on which accounts may use remote access, during what times, with what password strength, and internal operating system controls that manage and protect passwords and authentication processes.

Why is Secure Remote Access Important?

If an organization does not implement any other layers of authentication besides the standard login with a username and password, there is a higher probability of a successful ransomware attack which could result in encryption and exfiltration of data, demands for payment, damage to reputation as well as lost data and revenue.

Read our Ransomware Best Practices eBook for insights on security threats and steps that you can take to mitigate your risk and rapidly recover from an attack.

Remote Access Risk Mitigation While Keeping it Simple

Some of the most effective ways to potentially reduce the risks associated with remote access systems are also some of the simplest:

1. Disable remote access technologies if not required for the business.
2. Restrict remote access to only the users that require such access, and restrict individual user access to only the services/systems that such users may require.
3. Use current versions of operating systems and applications, and regularly update and patch. Critical patches should be applied to remote access systems within 3-7 days.
4. Enforce a strong password policy with regular password changes. A strong password policy means both the strength of the password and its complexity, lock-out policies, and similar settings.
5. Restrict and segment remote access services based on data classification.
6. Use a VPN with MFA if you do use RDP.
7. Where possible use multiple account login credentials as opposed to configuring all layers to authenticate via the same active directory.
8. Implement internal monitoring tools to ensure that access is being used correctly and that systems are not being accessed outside of normal parameters.

Thrive Can Help

Old access security measures are no longer enough to ensure that your cybersecurity strategy is protecting your data and business continuity and must be replaced with safeguards that allow employees and other verified users safe and secure access from anywhere, at any time, from any device.

We can provide your business with a suite of customized options to safeguard your business. Contact us now to get started.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around data loss prevention and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

Between market volatility and the imperative for a sudden and prolonged shift to remote work at scale, pension funds, like many other firms, are facing uncertain times. Now more than ever, having reliable technology infrastructures in place is essential for remaining productive in order to weather the storm. With the corporate perimeter having expanded to include (potentially) tens of thousands of employees’ homes but regulatory standards—and the real-world consequences of a data breach—remaining as severe as always, it’s critical to ensure that your pension fund has access to all the resources it needs, both human and technological, to continue to maintain its security posture and support its personnel.

Given this climate, it may be time to consider the benefits of outsourcing responsibility for some key functions to a highly qualified managed service provider (MSP) with deep experience in your specific industry. Avail your firm of the benefits of this type of outsourcing, and you’re likely to see a substantial reduction in costs as well as risk.

Here’s a detailed rundown of the top five benefits you stand to gain. 

#1: You can leverage economies of scale to reduce procurement costs and get advantageous pricing for services.

Even though a pension fund may be managing hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, every dollar of its operating expenditures will likely be subject to strict controls and a great deal of scrutiny. Compliance auditors and the pension’s administrative organization typically require detailed and granular cost reporting and demand that funds economize wherever possible. It’s therefore essential to find the best possible pricing for hardware and outsourced helpdesk support.

Turn to an IT service provider with longstanding relationships with the leading vendors who sell to firms in the alternative investment and financial services space, and you’ll be able to avail yourself of better pricing than you’d get if you were buying direct from the vendors. This is because the service provider or reseller is procuring hardware for the entirety of their global customer base and can offer lower per-unit prices as a result. An industry-leading reseller will also offer rapid turnaround on quotes, and will be able to have in-stock equipment delivered the very next day. This enables your pension fund to be more operationally agile while maintaining low overhead costs.

The same general premise holds true for outsourced 24x7x365 helpdesk support. A pension fund can take advantage of the always-on services that an MSP’s experienced support team can provide for a tiny fraction of the costs you’d incur by building an on-site 24x7x365 support center and retaining the talent needed to staff it yourself.

#2: You’ll see a meaningful reduction in vulnerability and risk, which can even be extended to investment decisions.

The pension funds industry generates and handles enormous amounts of sensitive data. And retirement plan sponsors hold a fiduciary duty to the fund’s participants: they’re required to protect their personal and financial information at all times. Regulators are taking notice, and institutional investors are increasingly aware of cybersecurity risk as well. In this climate, it’s vital to partner with an IT service provider with industry-specific expertise—and one that’s long proven trustworthy.

Even if your fund handles cybersecurity risk management internally—especially at a strategic level—there will likely be many times when your team might benefit from the wide-ranging insights that an active partner can share. When your IT partner has working partnerships with hundreds of hedge funds and other alternative investment firms around the globe, they’ll have a firm grasp on industry standards and best practices. You can also leverage that expertise by asking their team to perform vulnerability or risk assessments on other firms that you’re considering for investment, and you’ll know that their opinion will be impartial—but conditioned by their extensive experience in the industry.

#3: You’ll reap the rewards of high-quality support, including greater productivity and less downtime.

Some people think of IT helpdesk services as a commodity, but if your employees are spending countless hours of their limited and valuable time on hold or waiting for an email reply, the advantages of having a professional and highly available support team at the ready will be clear. If an IT service provider can offer helpdesk support in multiple regions (including yours), you won’t have to worry about language barriers or long wait times at hours that are busy for you but are “off” hours in another time zone. What’s more, a top-tier MSP with an industry-specific focus will be able to seek out support professionals with financial industry or alternative investment experience, which means they’ll already be familiar with your employees’ most common challenges and most pressing issues—even before they answer the phone.

#4: Your partnership with an MSP will enable you to free up internal resources for higher-level tasks.

Digital transformation is more of a journey than a destination: it’s a far-reaching process that will ultimately impact every facet of the organization. Not all pension funds have internal expertise in all areas where it’s needed. You might, for instance, have a top-notch security team but lack resources when it comes to cloud configuration management. Much as you’d partner with outside compliance consultant to streamline the process of meeting regulatory requirements or engage a law firm to provide legal advice, you can avail yourself of a qualified MSP’s deep internal resources in every area of technology. This means you can supplement your own team whenever and wherever you need to—without making the commitment or facing the expenses associated with hiring permanent employees.

#5: You’ll become more agile, flexible and ready to meet your industry’s ever-changing demands.

Turning to the cloud enables you to spin up new services at a moment’s notice. Employees working remotely for the first time? Cloud applications can support their productivity at home temporarily as well as back in the office when it’s time for them to return. But what you gain in flexibility you may also lose in security and control if you don’t have the internal expertise to manage cloud configurations and settings on an ongoing basis.

Partner with an IT service provider with a team of experts who understand these services and their constant evolution, and you’ll be able to manage the security risks without needing to find scarce talent or invest in salaries and compensation packages. For many pension funds, it’s easier to draw upon a services budget for outsourcing than to get an internal hire approved. And, if the MSP offers flexible contract terms, you can scale up or down services to suit the fund’s needs and budget as circumstances change.

Want to learn more about how Thrive can help your pension fund realize cost savings, new efficiencies and a stronger security posture? Contact us today to set up a free, zero-obligation consultation.

As businesses pursue digital transformation, their key assets are shifting from physical infrastructure to data. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other kinds of analytics rely on data to power their algorithms. Data is now the most valuable asset for many businesses; not just customer and financial data, but operational data as well. Loss of that data for even a short time can bring operations to a standstill. And yet, legacy disaster recovery services and solutions such as offsite tape repositories don’t provide the immediate and dependable response needed to meet today’s business demands.

It is no surprise then that the latest trend in disaster recovery is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Relying on the cloud to provide flexible, scalable backup resources, DRaaS is always on and always available. Disaster recovery services provide the fastest options for restoration of operational and other kinds of data, and it can automate many of the tasks. Along with the agility and speed of recovery that DRaaS makes possible, it also provides increased flexibility, improved security and saves you money. Having access to your backup data without having access to computing to run your business is only part of the equation in a disaster.

In traditional disaster recovery, IT maintains or has access to a second, standalone data center for the disaster recovery operations. This duplication includes storage and compute resources as well as duplicate network resources such as firewalls, routers and switches. There are also extra operational processes such as configuration, maintenance and support. In addition, there is the time needed to access the equipment at the second site as well as the time needed to re-route network traffic to this new location.

The manual side of disaster recovery can be the Achilles heel for many businesses because their backup operations are manual. This puts the burden on data center employees, who unless the business is very big, are often caught up in other day-to-day operational tasks. It is not always easy to ensure backup tasks remain on the daily to-do list despite more pressing short-term issues.

Rapidly growing businesses also need to expand their redundant data center to match the growth of the business. This can impose the need for significant expenditures at a time when all available Capex is being used to increase productive capacity. As with manual operations, long-term strategic issues such as disaster recovery often fall lower on the priority list when the business is consumed with short-term issues.

Cost-effective and Reliable Disaster Recovery Services for Businesses of all Sizes

Disaster recovery services address most of these shortcomings. The pay-as-you-go approach of cloud services is one of the principal drivers of the trend to the cloud, and it is no different with DRaaS. It moves disaster recovery to the expense side of the ledger where it can more closely match the ebbs and flows in revenue, and it ensures that precious capital resources are available for expanding productivity to meet growing demand.

Disaster recovery services can automate the tasks associated with replication, backup and restoration. The cloud provider takes over the day-to-day operations, administration, and maintenance of the DR data center and associated services, which frees IT to focus on the more pressing concerns of managing the fast-growing digital operations side of the business.

In addition, disaster recovery services can also assist in disaster avoidance. Failing over just one or a few Virtual Machines (VM) and running those workloads from a Cloud site without having to formally declare a disaster and initiate all of the associated actions with disaster declaration can be invaluable.

Documenting and automating the restoration process or “run book” of Virtual Machines (VM) with your DRaaS provider through the use of features such as Failover Plans can ensure that the appropriate steps are taken more rapidly and without having to make those decisions during the disaster declaration process, since they were determined well in advance.

The DRaaS provider also brings their expertise and experience in handling disaster recovery and prevention daily; whereas most business’s IT departments will only occasionally deal with data restoration tasks and may never experience a full-blown loss of data — at least, not until it happens.

Your DRaaS provider can work with you to develop your Disaster Recovery Plan. They can help you to assess the risks and business impacts, lay out the best ways to prevent data loss from occurring and help your IT staff to prepare for how best to respond and recover from various disaster scenarios. Finally, they can help you to test these systems regularly to ensure that the plan is comprehensive and update it when new threats emerge.

This last point is perhaps the most significant. Cyber-security threats are the area most prone to rapid change, and the area where it is most difficult for IT departments to stay current. Again, the DRaaS provider is singularly focused on the security of their data center operations and is completely attuned to the current state of security threats. Their infrastructure is also separate and apart for that of the businesses they serve which offers additional protections through these barriers.

In this era of digital transformation, the cloud is playing a key role in the development of information and operational technologies. It allows businesses to be more agile, responding quickly to shifts in demand and enabling them to be more flexible and adjust their offerings and services to optimize the customer experience. Cloud providers offer the latest capabilities and leverage the most advanced technological platforms. Every business today needs to put cloud at the heart of their business strategy and, now more than ever, that includes disaster recovery services.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Experts

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection and security services.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services that can help you to meet your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.