Author Archives: Thrive

Cloud Readiness and Migration

Watch the Full Webinar Presentation!

Thrive expert Dave Sampson, VP, Consulting Services discusses Thrive’s solutions for Cloud Readiness & Migration.

Discussion Topics:  

• Cloud Journey – Discovery and Starting to Plan
• How Cloud Services Can Help
• The Readiness Assessment
• Creating the Roadmap
• Pitching your case

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“It’s critical that you know where your data and end users reside.”

The frequency of news reports about cyber hacks and data breaches demonstrates that the threats to your IT infrastructure are never-ending—and that IT security is a moving target.

When was the last time you took a step back to look at what you and your organization are doing to address IT security today? And how well are you prepared for the future?

Download our white paper on cyber security planning for an overview of the major areas that must be assessed when reviewing your own business plan.

While IT security is never “one size fits all,” you’ll see where you’re most vulnerable—and what you can do.

“It doesn’t take a monumental catastrophe to disrupt daily operations of a business.”

Disasters as the result of cyber security events are constantly on the increase, both in number and magnitude. It’s a trend that’s unlikely to reverse, and that should be a serious wake-up call for any leader responsible and accountable for data protection.

Download our White Paper on CybeRPO and CybeRTO, terms coined by Thrive’s Vice President of Solutions Architecture, Chris Moore, and learn about their importance in a cyber security continuity plan.

Vital business benefits of having such a plan in place in the event of a disaster:

• Minimize the risk of downtime
• Reduce potential revenue loss during downtime
• Avoid having to be reactive and enduring the stressful delay to find a solution
• Evade any financial overlay that may occur

Watch the New Video Case Study

Learn how Thrive has helped the Boston Celtics achieve their technology goals as part of their mission to win championships in this video case study featuring Celtics’ CTO, Jay Wessland, and Thrive’s CTO, Michael Gray.

Challenge

To increase performance during regular and post-season basketball, NBA team, the Boston Celtics, have invested in a high-grade practice facility, the Red Auerbach Center. The 77,000 square foot facility houses two basketball courts with seating for audiences near 200, along with state-of-the-art media and sports medicine rooms. The difficult task facing the Celtics and Thrive was ensuring that the facility’s IT infrastructure would be able to support the various functions of the space, be secure and also perform at peak efficiency by a stringent grand opening deadline. The enormity of the task at hand included complete networking and security of the media room, and meeting strict compliance requirements for the health center.

Solution

Thrive’s consulting and project management teams partnered with the Celtics’ CTO, Jay Wessland, and his IT Team to create a strategic security plan, as well as a roadmap for the implementation of the center’s hosted environment. The solutions included a business continuity plan powered by Veeam, fully managed Meraki Networking Infrastructure and the successful implementation of a Microsoft Office 365 environment. Overall, the project took numerous hours of careful assessment, engineering and implementation, and was successfully completed in time for the grand opening on June 19, 2018.

Result

The solutions provided by Thrive have helped Mr. Wessland maintain a fully operational and secure facility since its opening in 2018 and allow his IT team focus on the daily operational needs that come with managing the technology of a professional sports team. The Red Auerbach Center is equipped to handle the demands that come with its multifaceted use.

“The Boston Celtics have been working with Thrive for over 14 years. We value the technical expertise they bring as an extension of our IT team. With the additional assistance and expertise of Thrive, we were able to open the Auerbach Center on time, despite the complexity of the project. They continue to provide 24×7 NextGen managed services that enable me and my team to focus on the unique elements and needs of a professional sports organization.” ~ Jay Wessland, CTO

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

Outsourcing the IT support role can help solve many issues facing today’s pension funds. IT managers can free-up time for their staff, effectively allowing them to concentrate on more strategic operations, instead of fighting support fires. Outsourcing can also help improve response times and ensure constant vigilance on your systems, 24×7.

A qualified managed service provider can step in to proactively monitor and identify issues before they become a major problem.

Following are five key benefits that you’ll gain from outsourcing IT support through an MSP, especially one who has deep experience serving the alternative finance industry:

1. You’ll Stay Focused on Your Core Business

Pension funds that outsource their IT support services for upgrading infrastructure and core systems can stay focused on higher priorities and have more hours in their day for value creation. In-house pension fund IT teams also gain more time back when they delegate their support function to an outsourced group. This effectively frees-up resources to focus on priority matters including special projects.

In-house pension fund IT teams know their business better than anyone. While they concentrate on their business’s strategic functions, as well as ensure that their IT is properly aligned with their business challenges rather than spending valuable resources as a help desk to their users, the MSP can focus on supporting the business and protecting it.

2. Receive ‘Round-the-Clock Attention

As emphasized earlier, IT issues don’t keep regular business hours. It’s important to constantly monitor systems and proactively manage IT issues as they arise. Outsourcing your pension fund’s IT support to a reliable provider means that your business can easily gain access to quality technical support 24x7x365.

Through state-of-the-art monitoring systems, the MSP’s engineers are often able to identify potential problems before they seriously start to impact business operations.

3. Level the Playing Field

Smaller pension funds can’t always afford to match the in-house support services that larger pension plans maintain. Outsourcing can help smaller funds act “big” by giving them access to similar technology and the expertise that large funds enjoy. An independent third-party managed IT cost structure and economy of scale can provide smaller funds a true competitive advantage while also staying on top of the latest cyber threats.

4. Realize Rapid Resolutions

It’s critical to leverage an IT partner who holds themselves accountable. Top MSPs are SLA-driven. Such providers pride themselves on rapid response times, which they continually measure and analyze. A vigilant MSP will develop and utilize proprietary automation of all their alerts which effectively reduces the time to resolve an employee’s technical problem. Their goal is to gain knowledge about an issue before it’s reported by a user.

5. Receive Top-Tier Service

Smart pension plans also know that they’ll receive superior support from an IT provider experienced in serving asset managers. Such a highly-specialized MSP will recruit and retain that rare breed of IT professionals who truly understand the unique environment and requirements of the alternative investment sector, including pension funds. An IT engineer with deep domain expertise in financial services can interpret issues and provide rapid response because they understand the unique issues that can affect financial organizations.

Thrive’s deep experience with hedge funds and other alternative investments positions us well to handle outsourced IT support for pension funds. If you have any questions about Thrive’s outcourced IT support offerings, contact us today.

FOXBOROUGH, MA, October 3, 2019 – Thrive, a premier provider of Next Generation Managed Services, proudly announced today the appointment of Craig Guice as its new Vice President of Business Development in the Mid-Atlantic. The addition of Mr. Guice to Thrive’s leadership team will enable the organization to further expand their footprint farther south down the East Coast from their current Northeast hubs in Massachusetts and New York.

Throughout his twenty-three year career in the technology industry, Mr. Guice has proven himself to be a successful, veteran entrepreneurial leader and is well suited to head Thrive’s customer-facing efforts in the Mid-Atlantic. As Vice President of Business Development, Craig will be utilizing his extensive experience and personal network to deliver Thrive’s comprehensive suite of NextGen products to mid-market and enterprise clientele alike.

“It is an honor to join the Thrive team.  I’m very excited to be a part of such a dynamic and growing company,” said Craig Guice. “Thrive is well known throughout the region and continues to build a strong reputation as a vibrant, customer oriented, NextGen managed services provider. I look forward to bringing my skills and expertise to a company that has become one of the top Managed Services Providers (MSPs) in the world.”

“Thrive is thrilled to welcome Craig Guice aboard,” said Rob Stephenson, Chief Executive Officer of Thrive. “Craig brings an entrepreneurial spirit, a wealth of knowledge and technical leadership experience to Thrive, which will prove invaluable with continued expansion. Over the past three years, Thrive has seen incredible growth in the Northeast and we now look forward to delivering our NextGen Managed Services Platform and exemplary customer service to the Mid-Atlantic.”

Prior to Thrive, Mr. Guice was the founder of outsourceIT, one of the largest MSPs in the Mid-Atlantic region, before recently shifting his focus to M&A consulting.

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 security. For more information, visit https://www.thrivenetworks.com

Follow Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell — Marketing, Thrive | stephanie@youroms.com

Reliable disaster recovery and backup solutions are critical to ensure that consumers have instant access to information and services from your business that they need and have come to expect. Legacy solutions such as offsite tape repositories do not provide the immediate and dependable response needed to meet end user and business demands. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has emerged for businesses that are seeking comprehensive protection of their vital data and applications with multiple failover options at attractive price points.

DRaaS benefits businesses of all sizes with:

Immediate Recovery

When a disaster strikes, every second of downtime translates into huge productivity, reputation, and financial losses for your business. Businesses can rapidly recover with an immediate system failover to a secondary infrastructure within minutes, returning the business to normal operations.

Increased Flexibility

DRaaS offers one unified solution to recover from all types of disasters, from malware and ransomware to hurricanes and wildfires.

Businesses can customize their required recovery scope depending on their needs, resources, and RPO and RTO recovery objectives, and choose how their most critical applications are protected.

Options span from continuous replication and hot site recovery to time-based backup and warm site recovery.

Improved Security

DRaaS providers utilize state-of-the-art infrastructure with seamless redundancy and no single point of failure to keep your data securely backed up in the cloud and protected away from your primary site. DRaaS solutions can also be customized to meet your business’s security and compliance requirements such as GDPR.

Lowered Cost

Businesses can rapidly recover from disasters without incurring the major capital costs of additional and redundant hardware. Flexible pay-as-you-grow models and a variety of options to meet RPO and RTO objectives enable businesses to satisfy their requirements with room to adjust as needed.

Specialized Support

DRaaS offers a practical solution for companies of all sizes, especially those with more limited IT personnel resources and capital to handle unpredictable disasters and emergency events. Leveraging specialized DRaaS services enables businesses to focus their IT teams on core business needs while providing stand-by supportive resources when they need a helping hand the most.

An experienced service provider can also provide advice and guidance, to improve the compliance and security readiness of your business.

Need DRaaS Solutions? Thrive Can Help

At Thrive, we’re working hard to make cloud solutions even more secure. Our Veeam-based Backup and Recovery and Disaster Recovery Services include local and offsite backup as well as encryption in transit and at rest to protect data. Encryption of data using enterprise-grade 256-bit AES ensures privacy and also protects data from exposure. We have also introduced Insider Protection for cloud recycling bin capability to protect against accidental or malicious deletion of backups and archives.

Combining these protections with our added air-gapped data archival services provides additional layers of protection for both short-term and long-term protection and compliance. Our Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings protect mission-critical systems and data from downtime and ransomware attacks with full system replication and failover. Learn more today!

Third Annual List Honors Leading MSSPs, MDR Service Providers & Cybersecurity Companies

FOXBOROUGH, MA, September 23, 2019 – MSSP Alert, published by After Nines Inc., has named Thrive #55 on the Top 200 MSSPs list for 2019. The highly researched list identifies and honors the top 200 managed security services providers (MSSPs) that specialize in comprehensive, outsourced cybersecurity services.

The Top 200 MSSP rankings are based on MSSP Alert’s 2019 readership survey combined with aggregated third-party research. MSSPs featured throughout the list and research proactively monitor, manage and mitigate cyber threats for businesses, government agencies, educational institutions and nonprofit organizations of all sizes.

“Thrive has focused on growing our managed security service practice under the leadership of Michael Gray, CTO, and Chip Gibbons, Thrive’s Cybersecurity Vice President.”, said Rob Stephenson, CEO.  “Michael and Chip have sourced top security talent and forged strategic partnerships with best in breed technology vendors to protect our clients’ IT infrastructure and business applications via Thrive’s Security Platform and 24x7x365 Security Operation Center (SOC). We’re honored to be named to the 2019 Top 200 MSSPs list by MSSP Alert along with such industry giants such as IBM, AT&T, Accenture, NTT, Verizon & others.”

“After Nines Inc. and MSSP Alert congratulate Thrive on this year’s honor,” said Amy Katz, CEO of After Nines Inc. “Amid the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage, thousands of MSPs and IT consulting firms are striving to move into the managed security market. The Top 200 list honors the MSSP market’s true pioneers.”

MSSP Alert: Top 200 MSSPs 2019 – Research Highlights

The MSSP Alert readership survey revealed several major trends in the managed security services provider market. Chief among them:

• The Top 5 business drivers for managed security services are talent shortages; regulatory compliance needs; the availability of cloud services; ransomware attacks; and SMB customers demanding security guidance from partners.
• 69% of MSSPs now run full-blown security operations centers (SOCs) in-house, with 19% leveraging hybrid models, 8% completely outsourcing SOC services and 4% still formulating strategies.
• The Top 10 cybersecurity vendors assisting MSSPs, in order of reader preference, are Fortinet, AT&T Cybersecurity, Cisco Systems, BlackBerry Cylance, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, SonicWall, Carbon Black, Tenable and Webroot (a Carbonite company).
• Although the overall MSSP market enjoys double-digit percentage growth rates, many of the Top 200 MSSPs have single-digit growth rates because they are busy investing in next-generation services – including managed detection and response (MDR), SOC as a Service, and automated penetration testing.

The Top 200 MSSPs list and research are overseen by Content Czar Joe Panettieri (@JoePanettieri). Find the online list and associated report here: http://www.msspalert.com/top200.

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 trusted security. For more information, visit https://www.thrivenetworks.com

Follow Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

About After Nines Inc.

After Nines Inc. provides timeless IT guidance for strategic partners and IT security professionals across ChannelE2E (www.ChannelE2E.com) and MSSP Alert (www.MSSPAlert.com).  ChannelE2E tracks every stage of the IT service provider journey — from entrepreneur to exit. MSSP Alert is the global voice for Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs).

• For sponsorship information contact After Nines Inc. CEO Amy Katz, Amy@AfterNines.com
• For content and editorial questions contact After Nines Inc. Content Czar Joe Panettieri, Joe@AfterNines.com

For this spotlight, we interviewed Thrive CEO Rob Stephenson to better understand the company’s addressable market, growth opportunity, and overall strategy.

The Capital One data breach that compromised the personal information of more than 100 million people in the US and 6 million in Canada may have been preventable had the credit card issuer taken more care in configuring the firewall used to protect the system from intrusions. The incident only proves how important data protection mechanisms are in the digital world.

According to the FBI, Paige Thompson was allegedly able to break into data stored in the cloud, or remote servers maintained by their third-party provider Amazon, because the firewall was not configured properly to the specifications of the server. That enabled her to access folders of data in Capital One’s storage space. It is still unknown if while she worked at Amazon, she left an opening to penetrate the system or if she knew the configurations enough to enable her to breach the system.

Although they do not believe she used any of the information fraudulently, the issue of security misconfigurations remains top of mind for those utilizing cloud-based services and the relationship between IT and third-party providers.

Provider Security Breaches

It’s hard to tell how well cloud providers are protecting your data. Reading the terms of service will let you know if a company might intentionally use or disclose your data, but it won’t reveal sloppy internal security and a failure to follow security best practices.

Unfortunately, if your organization’s data is compromised, you could be held responsible, even if the provider is at fault. Businesses are required to safeguard sensitive personal information, particularly information governed by compliance regimes such as HIPAA, PCI or GDPR. Even if your cloud provider claims to be “HIPAA compliant,” that doesn’t necessarily protect you or make you compliant.

Lack of Data Encryption

Part of what made it so easy for Thompson to access the information was that the data was not encrypted. Encrypted data storage provides an extra layer of security for your information. If a hacker gains access through an alternate means like in the Capital One case where she claimed to use a special command to extract files in a Capital One directory stored on Amazon’s servers, they won’t be able to read it.

Encrypted cloud storage doesn’t come standard with most SaaS business software such as Dropbox, Office 365, and Google Apps (now known as G Suite). Many services encrypt data in transit — the information flowing between your computer and the cloud service — which is a great start. However, this protection is usually based on SSL/TLS encryption, which is vulnerable to attacks.

The cloud has changed IT security forever. You can’t just wall in your data with firewalls when your data is scattered all over the planet. You need a combination of layered security for your primary, secondary, and archival data including strong data protection with encryption. Those layers will also include protections from both external and internal intrusions or malicious actors.

Thrive Can Help

At Thrive, we’re working hard to make cloud solutions even more secure. Our Veeam-based backup and recovery and DR services include local and offsite backup as well as data protection with encryption in transit and at rest to protect data. Data encryption using enterprise-grade 256-bit AES ensures privacy and also protects data from exposure. We have also introduced Insider Protection for cloud recycling bin capability to protect against accidental or malicious deletion of backups and archives.

Combining these protections with our added air-gapped data archival services provides additional layers of protection for both short-term and long-term data protection and compliance. Our DR as a Service (DRaaS) offerings protect mission-critical systems and data from downtime and ransomware attacks with full system replication and failover.

Whether systems and data are in the cloud or on-premise, it does not change the fundamental needs to protect information and ensure availability for your business. Contact us to learn more!