Author Archives: Thrive

Dear Valued Thrive Customers,

Just a quick note to assure you that in this very difficult time, Thrive is here for you. We’re currently weathering the COVID-19 storm better than expected and the Thrive team is well-positioned to assist with any technological hurdles that may arise in your business — whether it be remote work, emergency Cloud & workspace migrations or cyber security concerns, our team is stepping up to the plate and admirably tackling all new challenges as they present themselves.

Thrive began a work from home policy last week on 3/16 with only a handful of senior management staff at each of our five core offices in New York, Massachusetts, Maine and Maryland. The transition went better than expected, with productivity INCREASING nearly 20%. Our ticket workloads began rising on Friday 3/13, steadily through Wednesday 3/18, before normalizing last Thursday through today. Overall, we’re currently outpacing the increases and rapidly chipping away at any backlog.

Starting this week, Thrive is transitioning to 100% remote workforce and personnel will only be allowed in the offices for emergencies. Our team is resilient. We are equipped with the best diagnostic tools, technologies, and communication & collaboration suites in the industry. Our top two core values are PEOPLE (employees) and CUSTOMERS. Everyone at Thrive knows during normal times, our customers come first. However, these are not normal times and we have been constantly emphasizing with our employees to be EXTRAORDINARY in our customer interactions. The rally cry is “Service first, ask questions later.”

In closing, if you or any of your employees need ANYTHING during this COVID-19 situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your account manager or a Thrive senior executive. Best of luck to your business, customers, employees and loved ones.

Please rest assured, better times are ahead.

Rob Stephenson, CEO
&
Marc Pantoni, President

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Along with the massive influx of users working from home, there’s been a massive increase in remote collaboration.  The level of remote collaboration has been climbing steadily for several months – the tipping point is here –Microsoft Teams.

To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s review the recent growth of Teams usage:

• 22 million in November of 2019
• 32 million last week
• 44 million earlier this week

This growth is unprecedented and what’s even more interesting is that Microsoft was late to the market, as Slack had a huge head start. Industry analysis aside, the key is the more productive collaboration that’s happening here. Employees are going beyond idle chat to see what time they can meet, then meeting online, co-editing spreadsheets and sharing their work in real-time. End users are now pushing their IT teams to deliver collaboration and get away from traditional tools like file shares.

While Teams is technically free, it does come with strings attached. For instance, when a user shares a file with a co-worker on Teams, where is that file stored? What happens to that file if the employee loses it? Fortunately, there are several backup and archiving solutions for Teams. This is the tip of iceberg in the most positive way possible. Users are more engaged in their work than ever before and it’s resulting in better quality work. This has been the dream of many CIOs, but it was clearly the lack of tools that was in the way. Now that Microsoft has cleared away this issue, it’s impressive to witness.

For those who may not be aware, this platform is mostly powered by SharePoint or it’s SharePoint-based. There have been more failed rollouts of SharePoint by IT teams than have been successful. Teams could be called the biggest success of SharePoint in the history of Microsoft. Many of the users driving this success have only scratched the surface on what this collaboration suite can do. There are several additional ways to enable your employees including upgraded calling features, shift management and application integration with Teams.

If you have questions on Microsoft Teams, please contact us today.

Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) oversubscribe their bandwidth and networks as typical inbound and outbound traffic are bursty and often don’t sustain high levels on a continuous basis. Fortunately, most of the larger National Providers have had sufficient time to prepare for the impact of COVID-19 and plan for the possibility of business workloads shifting to the home. Regardless of this capacity planning, Internet traffic patterns are about to change drastically based on schools across the country opting for virtual learning and business work from home migrations. Thrive recommends that everyone be prepared to possibly experience some diminished performance as a result. These networks were simply not designed for everyone to consume all their bandwidth 24×7.

One step towards mitigation is to utilize your 4G & 5G unlimited data plans on your mobile devices and set up your phone as a hotspot. This will provide an additional layer of security for business traffic if your home isn’t properly equipped with a business-level firewall or you don’t have SSL VPN capabilities. The cellular option for your kids is also a great idea for streaming Netflix and online video learning sessions, assuming they also have unlimited plans.

Another step is to analyze your equipment. If you’ve had the same router for more than three years, now may be a good time to upgrade. Newer routers offer multi-band wireless networks. With newer, multi-band routers you can also segment your wireless network into two networks: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, making “one personal and one business” or segment as “private and guest”.

Finally, many service providers are assisting clients with temporary upgrades of their bandwidth without long-term contracts. Even if your provider requires a long-term contract, there are likely good deals out there for substantial increases in bandwidth based on a multi-year term pending the network capacity coming into your house is available on their networks in the area.

If you would like more information or have questions on network capacity, feel free to contact us today.

Due to the heightened attention around the COVID-19 virus, attackers are extremely likely to take the opportunity to develop new attacks and leverage social engineering as a means to compromise networks. It is likely there will be an influx of phishing attempts around COVID-19. For example, an email subject line may refer to an announcement of a vaccine or some amazing statistic around the virus. If something seems unbelievable, it probably is. Before opening an email or clicking a link with this kind of information, try to review other channels such as Twitter, major news networks or official government websites. A simple Google search of the headline should tell you whether or not it is real.

Falsifying outbreak maps is another method attackers are exploiting to deliver malware. It’s critical to pause before reviewing these online resources. I ask that everyone keep their guard up not only as good practice, but because there are bad actors that are going to try and strike in the middle of this event.

The World Health Organization update site is: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

The National Institute of Health update site is: https://www.nih.gov/health-information/coronavirus

On this topic, you are likely to be on home networks with your families or housemates much more over the next couple of weeks. It would be beneficial to mention the above to them as what they do could impact your work environment. If you have a computer on the network at your house that you know does not have antivirus installed, please advise the user to enable Windows Defender at minimum.

If you would like more information or have questions on security awareness, contact Thrive today.

Dear Valued Customers,

Thrive is closely monitoring the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) situation and guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to ensure the health and safety of our team members and customers in these challenging times. We remain committed to providing the highest levels of service throughout this emerging situation.

Rest assured, Thrive has designed and implemented an operational service delivery platform that allows us to fully meet all our contracted customer responsibilities, whether our employees are in one of our five offices or working remotely. The redundancy and availability of our network monitoring systems, hosted VOIP call management system, ServiceNow ticketing and workflow management system, and every other key service delivery component are fully redundant and/or Cloud-based. Our comprehensive business continuity plan, which is routinely tested, covers all our service delivery locations nationwide and every aspect of the service you receive from us. Thrive has begun initiating certain aspects of these plans (remote resource planning and call routing), similar to what we have done in the past as related to projected extreme weather events. We are prepared for whatever comes next with COVID-19.

We highly recommend that all our customers walk through their business continuity plans to ensure that you are adequately prepared. As your services provider, Thrive is committed to help you navigate the inevitable technology challenges this situation may present, particularly around remote work, as well as meetings and collaboration. Please feel free to reach out to your account management representative with any questions or concerns.

Thank you for your confidence in Thrive and your continued loyalty as our valued customer.

Sincerely,
Rob Stephenson, CEO & Marc Pantoni, President

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If you have read Thrive’s blog or other security blogs, you probably have come across patching. Everyone preaches patching. You should know where all your machines are, and you should patch these machines often. Also don’t forget routers, switches, firewalls and other appliances in your network.

I absolutely believe you need to patch all this equipment, and you should have a process and schedule for doing it. While it might look daunting, having a plan does make it a little easier, but not everything can be patched. Yes, I said that. While you should patch everything, for business reasons not everything can be patched. It might be that your mission critical application is running on outdated software or equipment, or patching causes something else to break. Whatever the reason, I’m sure there is some equipment somewhere that you can’t patch. That is where understanding the risk that unpatched equipment poses to your organization is critical.

If you have a public website running on a Windows server that can no longer be patched and it is the repository of your client data, that data is at an extremely high risk. Meaning you need to be prepared to have that client data stolen. Not only should management understand that there is a high risk of this happening, they should be working on a solution. If you have an old internal webserver that is only accessible to the marketing department, your risk is considerably lower; but if that marketing server also contains PII (Personally Identifiable Information) then your risk increases.

Understanding the risk your company faces is critical to keeping your business safe and out of the news.

If you want to learn more or need help securing your systems, please contact Thrive.

Thrive made strides in the MSP space in 2019, most significantly marked by the expansion of our offices and data centers from the Northeast into the Mid-Atlantic.

FOXBOROUGH, MA, March 3, 2020 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, proudly announced today that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Thrive to its 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Security 100 category. This marks the fourth consecutive year that Thrive has been named to the MSP 500.

This popular list identifies North American solution providers that deliver operational efficiencies, IT system improvements, and a higher rate of return on investments for their customers. These accomplished MSPs work tirelessly to guide their customers and create solutions for complex IT issues. This annual list is divided into three categories: the MSP Pioneer 250 who are focused primarily on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, large data center-focused on- and off-premises, and the Managed Security 100 made up of off-premises-focused, cloud-based IT security services.

Thrive made strides in the MSP space in 2019, most significantly marked by the expansion of our offices and data centers from the Northeast into the Mid-Atlantic. The consultative approach that Thrive takes with each client means delivering unique and comprehensive NextGen solutions that keep businesses operating at peak efficiency while remaining secure.

“MSPs are the critical bridge for customers looking to assess, implement and migrate their IT and cloud solutions to drive efficiencies, lower costs and secure your environment,” said Bob Skelley, CEO of the Channel Company. “On behalf of our team at The Channel Company, I want to congratulate the accomplished companies on CRN’s 2020 MSP 500 list and thank them for their commitment to finding innovative solutions that move the IT channel forward.”

“We’re proud that CRN continues to recognize our services. The demand for NextGen Cloud and security continues to grow rapidly and we’re well equipped with the highest levels of security, technical expertise and industry leading customer service for our clients.” stated Rob Stephenson, Thrive CEO.

The MSP500 list is featured in the February 2020 issue of CRN and online at www.crn.com/msp500.

About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, visit thrivenextgen.com

Follow Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell – Director of Corporate Marketing

774.276.1521 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

John Holland, Chief Revenue Officer, and Erik Young, Vice President of Channel Sales, sit down to recap Thrive’s Channel performance in 2019 and introduce strategies for working in the Channel in 2020. Thrive’s key mission when working in the Channel is to enable our partners to become the trusted technology advisor their clients are looking for.

To learn more about our Channel Partner Program, email channelteam@thrivenextgen.com.

At some point in time, everything will fail — Simply acknowledging the possibility of a failure is never going to be enough. The real winners are the ones that have not only acknowledged the most remote possibility of a failure, but have set up a plan to address such a failure. This is the plan that eventually will help run businesses when everything else has failed. In the world of Information Technology, the failures of systems that incapacitate businesses or lead to massive financial loss due to their inability to perform revenue-generating or revenue-affecting functions is termed as a Disaster. The plan to address these scenarios is coined as the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan.

Every IT organization’s goal is to ultimately design an architecture that “never fails” or can gracefully respond to, any failure. Many organizations often confuse or misuse three core IT Disaster Recovery concepts:

1. HA = High Availability
2. FT = Fault Tolerant
3. DR = Disaster Recovery

The concept of HA means that you have more than one system for a business critical application available to use either in an active-active configuration where both systems are utilized during normal business operations or active-passive where only one of the two systems is available for use during normal business operations. In both configurations the key is to design each system such that it can function by itself, even if the other system or its “mirror” is not available. With such an architecture you would think that you have planned for a disaster, yes? No… you have planned for an outage that is not expected to last an extended period. Disasters are typically defined as instances in time when systems are not expected to be available for an extended period. This is when you plan to run your business-critical applications from a pre-built and sometimes, highly available “stand-by” platform that offers the same level of service and enables business continuity.

FT systems are usually classified as a component of HA designs, meaning that you have a separate system that is fully configured and available to be used in the event that the primary system goes down for any reason whatsoever. It is key to remember that your architecture for HA, FT and DR needs to be failure reason indifferent.

DR strategies are incognizant to the actual reason for the failure; they are designed to take over service. The actual reason for why they are being used cannot be a factor in a decision to activate the DR service components.

DR is a component of IT, but BCP = Business Continuity Planning is the umbrella over the 3 pillars of business governance despite disruptive events; namely people, processes and technology. You may have the greatest IT plans to activate in a disaster situation, but the plan is useless if you have not planned for how people and processes will be governed to continue running the business in the event of disasters. In the simplest sense, you can think about how your staff will connect to these systems if they are not able to come to their actual work location, need to work from home or operate remotely. If organizations don’t plan their people and processes around DR, they should expect a bit of chaos from their users and as a result, lost productivity. Declaring a disaster is stressful enough; make sure your DR plan is complete and thorough.

Protect your business from possible failure. Thrive has a team of Subject Matter Experts with expertise in the areas of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Cloud (Public/Private), Cyber Security, and Compliance.

To solidify your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning, CONTACT US today!