One of the largest trends in IT seen over recent years has been public Cloud adoption. Gartner predicts that the market will reach $206.2 billion by the end of 2019. Reasons to cite for the shift from on-prem or private Cloud environments include lower cost, high flexibility, and scalability among others.
Understandably, financial institutions have taken a cautious approach to public Cloud adoption. Security and compliance are at the forefront of IT needs for financial service institutions. With regulations dictating how data is processed and stored, the idea of a multi-tenant environment can raise questions about security. Before heading to a public Cloud, consider using a partner that will create a customized roadmap to address your security concerns.
A reliable partner should be able to assess your current environment, evaluate your compliance needs, and create a secure migration path for your applications. One question to ask a managed service provider is, “who will oversee my environment?” To maximize your business’s security, employ 24x7x365 monitoring and management as resource to block sensitive data from being exposed to threats. Breaches often go undetected for months at a time. Ensure that your IT department or a trusted third party is routinely scanning your network for vulnerabilities to mitigate as soon as they arise. Cyber security is not a one-size-fits-all solution, so be sure that your requirements are being met before making the journey to the Cloud.
Compared to an on-prem solution, Cloud infrastructure’s redundancy is more reliable in the face of disaster. All public Cloud environments are backed up through multiple sources of electricity and generators. Not only does this provide ease when devising a business continuity plan, it can also fulfill any compliance requirements you may have regarding your data storage. Be sure to find out what compliance standards the data centers that host your environment contain. Does it comply with SEC or FINRA requirements? If your auditors require multiple copies of data, third party oversight of your security or incident response planning, a quality Cloud provider will be able to meet your exact expectations.
Many public Cloud environments also provide valuable communication tools that make it seamless for teams within your organization to collaborate effectively. With increased levels of file sharing, plan to implement email security measures such as detection and filtration software that will help spot malware, phishing attempts and illegitimate email. While this detection software is very helpful, one of the best methods to protect your data is end-user training. According to Verizon, email delivers 96% of social attacks. Transitioning to the public Cloud is an opportune time to implement training, testing and phishing simulations into your cyber security plan. Users can identify a bad actor in their inbox is a great line of defense for protecting the entire business.
Thrive is a trusted technology partner in the financial space. With nearly 20 years of dedicated support experience, we understand that each business has unique IT needs. If your institution is considering a transition to the public Cloud, our consulting services team can help create your customized roadmap. Contact Thrive today.
Thrive Announces New Website Launch — Thrive NextGenFOXBOROUGH, MA – January 7, 2020 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, is proud to announce the launch of its newly redesigned website at https://www.thrivenextgen.com/. The new site features a streamlined, modern design, updated content and improved functionality. Our primary goal during the redesign process was to create a more valuable and user-centric resource. We wanted to focus on making it easier for our visitors to learn and locate valuable information about our NextGen technology services for their particular application or industry.
“Thrive’s new website is indicative of our push towards continued growth and advancement as an organization. Our refreshed content contains the Thrive5 methodology which provides each customer with a unique strategy to optimize and protect their business data and applications. This methodology ensures access to the latest Cloud and on-premise technologies, advanced cyber security best practices, advanced networking solutions and compliance & governance assistance,” stated Rob Stephenson, CEO. “We look forward to our visitors interacting with our new website and the resources we offer.”
Thrivenextgen.com will continue to incorporate features of the legacy thrivenetworks.com. Clients will be able to reach online support through the client portal as well as additional support options anchored in the navigation. As always, the website will continue to be updated with the latest blogs and video content from Thrive’s expert engineers and executives.
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 https://www.thrivenextgen.com
Follow Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram
MEDIA CONTACT:
Stephanie Farrell – Director, Corporate Marketing | 774.276.1521 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com
2019: A Year in ReviewThrive has experienced another year of valuable growth and additional capabilities acquisitions in 2019 that will greatly benefit our near 1000 customers. As the final blog post of the year AND the decade, we will review all of the development that has helped shape Thrive and our NextGen Leading Platform.
2019
Thrive Strengthens its FinTech Practice
With the acquisition of Tier1Net of Woburn, MA in July, Thrive dedicated itself to increasing its commitment of service to the financial firms of the Boston area. Former Tier1Net CEO, Marc Capobianco now serves as the Executive Vice President of Financial Technology along with former Tier1Net CTO, Matt Chabot serving as the Vice President of Financial Technology. Since their time with Thrive, they have held multiple Cloud Security panel discussions geared towards educating financial services firms on SEC compliance.
To compliment the growth efforts in New England, our New York region has welcomed Tim Kennedy, Vice President of FinTech Sales as well as two FinTech focused Senior Principal Consultants, Manny Montero and Sachin Shah. The additions of Tim, Manny and Sachin to the Thrive team has helped our New York financial services clients stay on top of the latest technologies while they reach peak efficiency and compliance.
Thrive Expands South to the Mid-Atlantic
In November, Thrive acquired Ease Technologies, an MSP out of Columbia, Maryland. This marked the first move towards expansion in the Mid-Atlantic. The further geographic footprint will enable Thrive to better service our national client base. EaseTech was a well-respected managed services provider that focused on the legal, education and financial sectors. Former EaseTech CEO, Charles Bubeck has taken on a consulting position with Thrive. Jason Shirdon, EaseTech’s President, will now head the Mid-Atlantic region as Thrive’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Mid-Atlantic.
ThriveNow: One Service Delivery Platform
Marc Pantoni, President, and leader of Thrive’s ServiceNow team has rolled out ThriveNow, our new service delivery platform. After 18 months of diligent planning and testing, our Foxborough, MA; Tewksbury, MA; New York, NY; Portland, ME and Charleston, SC offices have all adopted the platform. ThriveNow will streamline the processes our engineers use to work on client tickets. With Woburn and Columbia migrating to ThriveNow in 2020, all of Thrive’s service delivery teams will be on one platform; allowing us to strengthen our customer service capabilities.
Making the List
We’re honored to be recognized as industry leaders in providing NextGen managed services by multiple publications in 2019.
#11 ChannelE2E Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs
Thrive Overtime
2014: MetTel Acquires Thrive Networks from Staples
2016: Thrive Networks and Corporate IT Solutions Merge
Tewksbury, MA based Thrive Networks merged with Corporate IT Solutions of Norwood, MA under the ownership of M/C Partners. Together, they formed one of the largest managed service providers in Massachusetts, Thrive. Rob Stephenson was named Chief Executive Officer of the newly formed company.
2017: Precision IT Group is Acquired by Thrive
Thrive expanded to New York City with the acquisition of award-winning managed services provider, Precision IT Group. Former CEO and founder, Marc Pantoni stayed on board and was named President of Thrive in 2018.
2018: Thrive Acquires BizCompass and InfoHedge
BizCompass, the MSP responsible for IT services of over 100 Maine-based clients, joined Thrive in April 2018. Shortly after in July, Thrive increased the size of their New York presence with the acquisition of hedge-fund focused managed service provider, InfoHedge.
2019: Thrive Acquires Tier1Net and Ease Technologies
The acquisitions of Tier1Net and EaseTech have helped Thrive become one of the largest managed services providers in the United States. To date, we have 300 employees with upwards of 500 technical certificates, all with a mission to become the most respected and preferred provider of NextGen managed services steering our customers’ journey to the Cloud and beyond.
We look forward to seeing what the new year brings for Thrive.
Healthcare Company is Released From Operation-Stalling Cryptolocker with Solutions Provided by Thrive’s Top-Tier Cybersecurity Forensic Analysts. Download Now
Challenge
Password security and Multi-Factor Authentication are two of the best lines of defense for users to protect themselves against bad actors. After a weak default password without Multi-Factor Authentication allowed a hacker to gain access to the company’s network, a large healthcare provider’s data was encrypted and inaccessible; which halted their operations for nearly twenty-four hours across multiple locations. Ransomware was discovered by the Thrive team on upwards of twenty of the company’s servers.
Solution
Thrive’s Cybersecurity Forensic Analysts took quick action to source the bad actor and work towards remediation. Utilizing best-of-breed tools, they were able to identify the IP addresses in which the attack was originating from and effectively block them from the network. Simultaneously, the Thrive team was able to configure restoration on the servers and perform back up measures. Within twenty-four hours of the original incident the first server was restored, and the remaining were all operational within four days.
Result
The immediate results of the remediation of the servers were that the healthcare provider became operational once again and able to serve their patients. After the event was resolved the organization enlisted Thrive to perform a Security Health Assessment across their environment. Thrive’s cybersecurity team was able to identify vulnerable target areas in the company’s infrastructure and architect customized solutions. All of these being actionable items, the organization has been able to further leverage Thrive’s services to strengthen their security framework to prevent future incidents.
How can Thrive help your business?
Thrive is a leading provider of outsourced IT Infrastructure designed to drive successful business outcomes with our talented engineering teams and suite of Cloud-First, NextGen Managed Services.
To learn more about our services, CONTACT US
Vulnerability Scanning & Assessment – Financial Services SIEMaaS – Financial Services Hybrid Cloud – Financial Services DRaaS – Financial Services Benefits of Managed FirewallsThrive’s Michael Gray and Chip Gibbons sit down for a Cybersecurity Conversation on managed firewalls. Managed firewalls provide companies with the extra bandwidth to monitor logs and activities for irregularities in their network.
Cloud Backups for Ransomware Attack Protection and Recovery
As technology becomes more sophisticated, so do cyber criminals and the tactics that they employ. As a result, the frequency of ransomware is becoming more prevalent and increasingly expensive for businesses to prevent, mitigate, and recover from when they don’t have cloud backups. The need for ransomware attack protection is becoming non-negotiable.
The question of how to best achieve ransomware attack protection is rapidly gaining urgency in organizations of all shapes and sizes. Keeping recent, reliable, and ready-to-deploy local backups of your systems and files is one of the preferred ways to recover from attacks that make it through traditional security defenses. Unfortunately, this standalone tactic is rapidly becoming insufficient.
The new challenge facing IT and security industries is the arrival of insidious forms of ransomware that in addition to attacking the live production environment, also target and infect backups. This type of ransomware comes in a variety of deployments and entry points and can corrupt or infect the backup environment in such a way that malware is still present when the backup is used for recovery. As a result, the live production environment is re-infected, and the attacker can attempt to re-ransom the victimized company.
The very real possibility that you will never actually recover your compromised data or return to business as usual is driving businesses to identify the best way to secure their entire backup process and systems.
Best-of-breed cloud backup solutions have adapted to include additional security processes to protect against sophisticated ransomware, identify intrusions, and recover data despite attackers’ best efforts to corrupt your information and hold you hostage in perpetuity.
How is Your Data Protected?
Investing some time in understanding how your data is currently protected will pay you back in dividends. Knowing the current state of your security and backup protection will help you identify the gaps and develop practical strategies for fighting ransomware threats.
When evaluating, find out:
How often is my data backed up?
Recognize that a ransomware attack will usually result in the loss of all of your data dating back to your last clean backup. What is the value of the data generated by your business during the delta between that last backup point, and the moment of malware infection? How would the loss of that data affect your business?
How much would it cost to restore my system in the event of a Crypto-type attack?
How long would my office be down for? What data would we likely lose? What would it cost to restore our systems? How could we make our data more resistant to attack or loss?
Have the computer users in my office received any type of computer security training?
Can they recognize the difference between valid and malicious email attachments or web links? Most computer infections are brought into an office by poorly trained users who click on a malicious attachment or install a “freeware” program onto their system.
General Recommendations for Data Backup and Protection
Run two forms of backup, ideally a cloud-based and internal backup system, and then add archiving for air-gapped protection to media such as tape.
It is critical to run two forms of backup, especially if one backup method fails temporarily – you must have an additional solution in place to maintain protection for your data.
Run some form of continuous backup or replication that works to protect your data throughout the day, as your files or databases change and are updated.
Examples of this type of protection include frequent storage drive snapshots, SQL database replicas, and periodic backup or replication to the cloud with Veeam.
Avoid storing data on your end-user computers unless they are also backed up.
Typically, files saved to your ‘My Documents’ and similar local folders on your workstation aren’t included in cloud backups, procedures, or anti-fraud protections.
Advantages of Cloud-Based Backup and Recovery
- Most cloud-based backup solutions have versioning capabilities that allow for multiple cloud backups, effectively allowing the rollback of ransomware-encrypted files to the pre-encrypted version.
- These solutions may also provide data protection that automatically monitors for indicators of ransomware activity. For example, a massive number of file extension writes and renames can be a great clue that something is amiss.
- As an added countermeasure, these solutions are not linked to the local network and don’t show up as another drive or shared folder – which are often targeted by ransomware attacks.
For more information and insights, read our Disaster Recovery Guide now to learn what you need to be prepared.
Cloud Backups and Ransomware Attack Protection with Thrive
With ransomware, what you don’t know or aren’t prepared for really can hurt you. The good news is that with a little extra preparation and a nominal investment of time, you can successfully assess and manage this risk.
Working with an experienced backup and disaster recovery cloud provider is one key way to ensure that your data is secure in the face of malicious activities and attempts to hold your valuable business data hostage.
Thrive has over 15 years of experience in data protection. We are continually advancing our solution portfolio to combat emerging threats. New features and enhancements from Veeam and Thrive such as “Insider Protection” and “Cloud Recycle Bins” are leading the way today in restricting data access and ensuring recoverability from ransomware and other types of sophisticated cyberattacks.
Speak with a Thrive data protection expert today to learn how we can help you safeguard your business with cloud backups and recovery.