Author Archives: Thrive

In today’s digital world, technology disruption for even a few hours can result in significant financial consequences to your business. It’s crucial for businesses of all sizes to practice IT Disaster Recovery Planning so that they have procedures and solutions in place in case of an emergency. In fact, according to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 USD per minute or more than $300,000 per hour. For large organizations, that number tops half a million dollars.

Ensuring that your assets, data and hardware are protected is only part of a disaster recovery plan – the rest is determining a process for how quickly you can be back up and running. Rather than scrambling to put the pieces back together after a major storm or cyber-attack, smart businesses put a plan in place well before a disaster occurs. Here are the five key elements to think about when creating your business disaster recovery plan:

1. Data continuity: Explore exactly what data your business requires in order to run, including what your organization needs to ensure successful operations, financial processing, availability of supplies, and communications. Grade each element in order of criticality, and identify the systems, staffing, and other factors that it depends on and influences.
2. Communication plan and role assignments: When it comes to mitigating and surviving a disaster, communication is of the essence. A plan is essential because it puts all employees on the same page with clear procedures and contact information for key stakeholders and vendors.
3. Detailed asset inventory: When it comes to a disaster and insurance, it’s crucial to have a detailed inventory of workstations, their components, servers, printers, scanners, phones, tablets, and other technologies that your organization uses. This will give you a quick reference for insurance claims after a major disaster by providing your adjuster with a simple list (with photos) of any inventory you have.
4. Plan for your equipment: It’s important that you have a plan for how to protect your equipment when a disaster happens. In case of a flood, what equipment do you need to get off the floor? During a ransomware attack, where are your backups? Do you have a secondary backup?
5. Backup testing: Regularly test to make sure that your backup is running as scheduled, and include running additional local and offsite backups on all servers and data in your disaster preparation plan. Run them as far in advance as possible, and make sure that they’re backed up to a location that will not be impacted by the disaster. If you are using a third party, are you doing regular backup testing with them? Do you know who to reach out to?

The Thrive Experience

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services. We have been a long-standing Veeam partner and are excited to make these latest enhancements available to our customers to further strengthen their solutions.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our world-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.

Have questions about IT Disaster Recovery Planning? Contact us today!

COVID-19

• Every day more and more people recover, as the pandemic sweeps throughout the world. 158,000+ have recovered to date.
• Abbott Labs launches five minute Molecular Point-of-Care test for Coronavirus diagnostics.
• In a New England Journal of Medicine article, Dr. Fauci states the Coronavirus mortality rate may be much lower than originally depicted.
• The new US death count and new case count BOTH dropped yesterday for the first time since 3/28. Saturday was also the first day new US cases have NOT increased by more than 20% in nearly one month.  (See Graph 1 and Graph 2)
• The US Navy Floating Hospital Arrived in NY this morning, 3 weeks early. The LA one arrived last week, both with roughly 10000 hospital beds.
• Apple launched a website and app dedicated to COVID-19 screening in collaboration with FEMA, the CDC, and the White House.

Economy

• On Friday, President Trump signed the largest economic relief bill in the history of the US, a $2.2 trillion assistance package. Highlights include short-term extensions and increases in unemployment benefits, temporary employee furlough programs, SBA business loans and hospital relief.
• Despite heavy losses on Friday, the major indexes posted historic weekly gains. The Dow had its best week since 1938.
• As of mid-day on Monday, March 30, the Dow is up again over 22,000 (up 1.81%) from Friday’s close.

Thrive Customer Testimonial

“Everyone we have worked with has been very helpful in making this happen. I would like to specifically recognize [the engineer] who we worked with to get the ball rolling.  She quickly got everyone set up with VPN credentials and she created very specific directions for staff to use to get connected to the VPN. In addition, her directions included how to then connect to their remote desktop. Several of our staff have commented about how easy it was to get connected from home. So, if you have a WOW box, please add this to your WOWs!  [She] did an awesome job for us.” Insurance Industry Executive

COVID-19

• The UK Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson whose March 16^th COVID-19 model shocked the world with estimates of up to 2 million American casualties and 500,000 UK casualties has “dramatically” decreased his forecast. This new research is showing that the virus is “much faster moving” and “vastly-under-reported”.
• Elon Musk has acquired 1,255 ventilators and will be donating to the US effort. He also joined other large American car manufacturers in proclaiming Tesla will manufacture ventilators soon, likely in their Buffalo, NY “Giga Factory”.

• Scientists are readying antibody tests for people to see if they may have already been exposed to COVID-19. Because they feel the actual number of cases may be 10 to 12 times higher than the reported cases, this will help calculate a better mortality rate and provide hope that future recurrences won’t be as extreme while we wait for a vaccine to be mass-produced.

• Multiple existing anti-viral drugs in use are being fast-tracked in European clinical trials such as Remdesivir (used to treat Ebola), Lopinavir/Ritonavir (used to treat HIV/AIDS) and hydroxychloroquine (used to treat malaria) to combat the symptoms of COVID-19.

Economic

• The stock market entered a new “Bull Period” just 3 days after dipping to a four-year low at 18,591. The Dow closed at 22,552, up 6.38% for the day on Thursday, March 26^th.
• Massachusetts pushed the tax filing deadline to July 15 to match the IRS as well as the state of New York.
• The Senate and House of Representatives have formally approved the $2 trillion COVID-19 Relief Bill.
• Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, echoed former Fed Chief Ben Bernanke’s comments from earlier this week by saying, “We may very well already be in a recession, but there can be a good rebound on the other side of this.”

Thrive Customer Testimonials

“We appreciate all the Thrive team has done for us during this difficult time. It’s been very challenging to transition to a fully remote workforce and I know we have hit you guys with a lot of requests, but it’s all gone incredibly well in my opinion.”  COO, FinTech Wealth Management

“At this time, the help Wayne and your team and have provided since we began working remote has been fantastic.”  Technology Manager, Electrical Distribution

“Thank you for all the support from you and your team.  We appreciate everything that Thrive is doing for us.  It’s very reassuring in a tough time.”, CTO, Private Equity Firm

COVID-19

• The US Surgeon General recently said 90% of COVID-19 tests have come back negative and only those with exposure or symptoms are being tested, which projects well moving forward.
• The US has done more testing in the past 8 days than South Korea did in 8 weeks. 27 Million tests are estimated to be available by the end of March in the US.
• The FDA just approved Plasma Treatment for COVID-19 patients, which has been showing positive results.
• The US remains 2^nd in the world in survival rate at 98.6% among those testing positive with COVID-19. Germany currently leads at 99.45%.
• Italy reported new cases have dropped 20% on average over the past 3 days after reaching its peak since the 1^st reported case roughly 35 days ago.
• Germany has dropped by 27% on average over the past 4 days after peaking in new cases per day.
• South Korea has averaged less than 100 new cases per day for the past 2 weeks, after reaching nearly 1,000 per day.
• Many of China’s businesses are reopening after months of closure.

Economic

• The US Senate agreed upon a $2 Trillion Economic Stimulus Package.
• The Stock Market had its single best day on Monday, March 24 since 1933. As of 3:55PM on Wednesday, 3/25, the Dow is at 21,249, which is up 16.9% from its three-year low of 18,266 on Monday.
• Former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, who steered America through our last Economic Crisis in 2008, sees a “Sharp, SHORT Recession in the near term (Q2), FOLLOWED by a quick rebound.” He’s also optimistic about the US Long-Term Economic picture.  His sentiments were echoed by St. Louis Fed President, James Bullard.

Thrive Customer Testimonials

“Your support team has been nothing short of amazing.  We’re now all working 100% remote without a hitch.  On the rare occasion I have had to call in, they do a great job not only fixing the problem, but also patiently walking me through how to prevent it or fix it myself in the future. What a difference from our previous provider.”  FinTech, CEO

“Thank you!!  We appreciate all your great service.”  FinTech, Managing Partner

“Thank goodness we converted to the Cloud allowing us robust remote access with our staff working from home.  Timing couldn’t have been better.  Thank you for making this as smooth as possible.” Managing Partner, Financial Services Firm

“Your support desk has been great at addressing issues and getting fixes installed. Our 100% remote productivity is pretty close to normal. Your effort to convince us to move to the Cloud environment now looks prescient. If we were still using our onsite servers and VPN, our ability to work remotely like this would be severely limited.” CTO, Consulting Firm

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Data Archiving is a perfect solution for any organization that is required to store data for an extended or unlimited amount of time. It is also ideal for companies with information compliance requirements. This data needs to be protected against cybersecurity risks, natural disasters, and user error.

Tape and Disk Data Archiving

Despite its long tenure, tape is still relevant for some use cases, and remains widely utilized as a method for backup and archiving processes at many Fortune 500 companies today.

Tape is an incredibly simple storage media, where the reading mechanism is kept completely separate from the primary storage medium. This reduces the chance of breakage over time, making it an excellent option for long-term backup and archival storage.

Backup tapes also have the ability for “Write Once, Read Many” (WORM) locking, which helps to prevent data tampering, which is a critical requirement for storing and accessing sensitive information preserved for legal or compliance reasons. Tape is also used as a security barrier to provide physical storage which is “air-gapped” from production systems.

However, hard drives are much faster than tape and more suitable to situations where fast disaster recovery is necessary. Unlike tape, they are mechanically complex and have a higher risk of breakage over time.

Because of these trade-offs between speed and long-term reliability, many companies will use tape for off-site long-term data storage, and hard drives for local backups or at secondary failover facilities where rapid recovery is required.

Cloud Data Archiving

While tape has been utilized for archival storage for many years, this method poses several challenges:

• Over time, the tape will physically degrade, leading to the potential risk of data loss.
• Recovering data is difficult because you have to sort through a large collection of tapes to find what you’re looking for.
• Tape archives require expensive hardware and software. Tape archives are labor-intensive.

Cloud archiving eliminates all of the problems associated with conventional tape-based archives, and it does so in a way that’s fast, convenient, and inexpensive. Innovations in the delivery of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions provide many significant advantages over tape and disk, such as:

• Cloud solutions don’t require significant hardware investments.
• Recovering deleted data from cloud archival storage is fast and simple.
• Cloud-based archiving solutions provide more efficient data search and retrieval, enabling IT to quickly fulfill recovery requests.
• Cloud archiving can provide a mix of short-term and long-term archiving with a hybrid of disk and tape options for various retention and air-gaps requirements.
• Cloud archiving automatically rotates disk and media-based archives without customer involvement ensuring that archives never become obsolete or inaccessible like many old on-premise systems.

The Thrive Experience

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services. We have been a long-standing Veeam partner and are excited to make these latest enhancements available to our customers to further strengthen their solutions.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our world-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.

Have questions about data archiving? Contact us today!

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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