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Thrive Leading the Next Generation of Managed Service Providers

Sixth-Annual List Reveals Leading MSPs in Healthcare, Legal, Government, Financial Services & More

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – April 29, 2021 –  Thrive has been named to After Nines Inc.’s ChannelE2E Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs list and research for 2021. The annual list and research (hashtag: #MSP100) identify and honor the top 100 managed services providers (MSPs) in healthcare, legal, government, financial services, manufacturing, and additional vertical markets.

Thrive ranked number three for Financial Services among the top vertical market MSPs.  In addition, Thrive earned the number seven ranking overall in the MSP 100. Both of Thrive’s rankings climbed two spots from 2020.

“Thrive is thrilled to be recognized for single-digit rankings by the MSP community and this prestigious list,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive. “These admirable industry rankings reflect Thrive’s growth strategy and commitment to optimize our clients’ business application performance with Thrive’s NextGen Platform of Cloud, Security, Networking, and Business Continuity services, powered by the automation and self-service capabilities of ServiceNow.”

This year’s Top 100 Vertical Market MSP research results are particularly impressive. MSP honorees successfully navigated the coronavirus pandemic and grew their managed annual vertical market revenue 25 percent on average. In stark contrast, total small business revenue in the United States fell 27.5 percent from January 2020 through March 2021, according to TrackTheRecovery.org.

The Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs rankings are based on ChannelE2E’s Q4 2020 and January 2021 readership survey, and ChannelE2E’s vertical market industry coverage. MSPs featured throughout the list and research leverage deep vertical market expertise to drive annual recurring revenues (ARR) in specific market segments.

This year’s research revealed several key MSP market trends, including:

• Honorees generated a combined $1.40 billion in vertical market annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020, up from $1.12 billion million in 2019. The surge involved organic growth combined with continued merger and acquisition (M&A) activity.
• The most successful vertical market MSPs are zeroing in on healthcare and financial services, while MSPs in the legal and not-for-profit sectors also showed particularly strong growth.
• The Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs now manage more than 3.1 million users across their customer sites as of 2020, up from 2.8 million in 2019.
• MSPs consider their top vertical market technology partners to be Microsoft (58%), Dell Technologies (19%), Cisco Systems (17%), ConnectWise (16%), and Amazon Web Services (14%). Datto, Fortinet, Ingram Micro, and Pax8 also earned a strong MSP response.

“After Nines Inc. congratulates Thrive on this honor,” said Amy Katz, CEO of After Nines Inc. “Businesses worldwide depend on the Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs for cybersecurity, automation, and revenue-generating technology services – especially amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

The ChannelE2E Top 100 Vertical Market MSPs list and research are overseen by Content Czar Joe Panettieri (@JoePanettieri). Find the online list and associated report here: www.channelE2E.com/top100

Thrive has experienced monumental growth through ten acquisitions in under five years. The company continues to enhance its technology portfolio with Thrive’s Microsoft Collaboration and Digital Transformation Services and Thrive’s NextGen Platform of Cloud, Security, Networking, and Business Continuity services. For more information about Thrive, please visit www.thrivenextgen.com

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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, thrivenextgen.com.

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell

Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

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).

We are thrilled to announce that Thrive has been named a finalist in the 2021 Excellence in Customer Service Award presented by Business Intelligence Group.

Our Platform was recognized for its innovation and optimization of business performance by equipping customers with highly-secure and adaptable solutions, and guaranteeing continuous application and performance availability while eliminating daily IT concerns regarding security, compliance, governance, reliability, and scalability.

The Thrive Platform has helped enterprises deal with the unexpected shift to a fully-remote workforce caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by allowing customers to address their IT concerns in one place with the ability to access the portal on any device, from anywhere, at any time with overall faster delivery of service.

With The Thrive Platform, our customers experienced a 15% increase in end-user productivity, a 25% faster support resolution on complex cases, a 95% reduction in overall delivery time, and lastly, a 25% reduction in the customers’ time spent on routine IT manual task management.

We are excited to be recognized by the Business Intelligence Group as we keep striving to ensure your business success!

To learn more, click here.

We’re excited to share our “Thrive Employee Spotlight” blog series!

Our featured Thrive Employee is Meghan O’Keefe. Meghan is the Vice President of Professional Services for Thrive.

Meghan currently manages onboarding new clients onto The Thrive Platform and large-scale implementation projects for strategic accounts. Over the years at Thrive, she has also managed the project managers, customer service groups, dispatch coordinators and project engineers.

Meghan lives just north of Boston with her fiancé and rescue pup. In her spare time, you’ll find Meghan at the park or visiting local breweries. In a pre-COVID world, she enjoyed going to Boston sporting events, concerts and traveling. 

Hi Meghan! Can you tell us about your background and how you came to Thrive?

After graduating college, I started my career in retail operations as a district manager at a major grocery chain in New England. At the time, I was responsible for working with all outside vendors, hiring and training all staff, and procuring product and merchandising for all locations in my district. I found what I enjoyed most were the aspects of project management involved in the opening of new store locations. Therefore, I decided to get more involved in project management within a new and highly dynamic industry. After talking with old friends and alums, I found out about a position at Corporate IT Solutions, which would give me the opportunity to help build out a project management office at a growing IT company of 35 employees. This was back in 2012 prior to the Thrive merger, and the major growth we have seen within the last five years. Since then, I’ve managed hundreds of projects and learned an immense amount about technology.

What do you most enjoy about working for Thrive?

Definitely the people! I have been working with many of my colleagues for nine years, and while the company has changed and grown significantly over the years, the caliber of people that I get to work with every day has not.  Everyone shows up to work hard, and we do our best for our clients. I also get to learn something new every day! Technology is constantly changing, and there is always a new challenge to work through. I always feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day knowing we solved a problem or worked around a tough roadblock for one of our clients.

Any recent exciting projects at Thrive that you can tell us about?

We are currently working on automating a lot of our internal processes within the Project Delivery team, which doesn’t sound too exciting, but it will allow us to spend more time with our customers in strategic conversations, and I’m looking forward to that!

Where did you go to school or get training?

I graduated from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and also have my ITIL and PMP certifications that I completed while at Thrive.

Are you interested in learning more about Thrive? Click here!

And please don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram for the latest news, and continue checking our blog for more in our “Thrive Employee Spotlight” series. Until next time…

The Boston Business Journal has named Thrive to its exclusive 2021 Fast 50 list, which represents the 50 fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts. The Fast 50 companies are selected and ranked based on a formula that counts revenue growth from 2017 to 2020.

“Thrive is honored to be named to Boston Business Journal’s Fast 50 list,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO at Thrive. “We continue to experience strong growth in Boston and throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Thrive is an industry leader that successfully optimizes IT business performance with our NextGen Technology Platform, powered by the automation and self-service capabilities of ServiceNow, for organizations across many industries, including financial, healthcare, life sciences, education and more, making them more productive, profitable, and agile.”

The numbers were crunched and analyzed by the Business Journal’s research department.

“The economic shutdown sent a lot of companies’ strategies and financials into uncharted territory in 2020, but as the Fast 50 illustrates, Greater Boston’s fastest-growth companies pivoted and prospered despite it all,” said Carolyn M. Jones, market president and publisher of the Boston Business Journal.

A Fast 50 special publication is scheduled to run in the May 21 weekly edition of the Business Journal and online that same week. A private virtual honoree celebration to honor this year’s Fast 50 is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, May 19, where the rankings will be released.

Companies on the Fast 50 must have their headquarters in Massachusetts and must have reported revenue of at least $500,000 in 2017 and $1 million in 2020 were considered. (Unlike in past years, due to the pandemic, companies were not disqualified from the ranking if they experienced a net loss during one of the years analyzed, provided growth from 2017 to 2020 was positive.)

For the complete list of 2021 Fast 50 companies, visit the Boston Business Journal’s website here.

The FBI recently released a warning on hackers using a trio of vulnerabilities that are present on some Fortinet Firewalls. Attackers are leveraging these three distinct vulnerabilities to gain access to the networks.   

The first vulnerability, CVE-2018-13379, allows an attacker to download firewall system files under the SSL VPN web portal using HTTP.  Attackers scan ports 4443, 8443, and 10443 to see if this is available. If so, they utilize vulnerability CVE-2020-12812 to allow an attacker to log in without using a second factor authentication. Finally, the attackers utilize CVE-2019-5591 to sniff traffic going to a legitimate LDAP server internally. 

Utilizing all three of these attacks allows the attacker to gain more access into the network. Each one of these vulnerabilities is present in different versions of code. If the device runs an earlier version of code then it may require it may require multiple upgrades. 

This is a sophisticated attack, that requires multiple exploitable vulnerabilities to work. Only a select number of firewalls are vulnerable to this attack. Thrive observed that less than 1% of its customer deployments are on the firmware versions contained in this notification. 

In general, our engineering team recommends all Fortinet firewall be upgraded to 6.4.4 if possible. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

The  RCP 350 list represents the best Microsoft partners in the United States

Redmond Channel Partner magazine (RCP) has named Thrive to its Microsoft Top 350 U.S. Partners list. RCP has been exclusively covering the Microsoft channel community for more than 16 years and has compiled a list of 350 top Microsoft partners operating in the U.S. RCP’s list serves as the industry’s benchmark for recognizing the top-performing partners that reach across Microsoft’s technology stack and provide powerful solutions for their customers.

Thrive received recognition as a leading national provider for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Systems Integrator (SI) categories. The company successfully optimizes clients’ business performance with Thrive’s NextGen Platform of Cloud, Security, Networking, and Business Continuity services, powered by the automation and self-service capabilities of ServiceNow.

Additionally, Thrive continues to expand and enhance its technology portfolio with Microsoft tools. Thrive’s Microsoft Collaboration and Digital Transformation efforts enable companies to maximize Microsoft’s technology utilization, which increases employee adoption and productivity.

“We are thrilled to be recognized as one of the best Microsoft technology partners in the U.S.,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO of Thrive. Thrive brings the full power of Microsoft’s technology stack to each customer, making them more productive, profitable, and agile. Our company’s innovation is driven by a surge in demand for businesses to optimize their data and applications with maximum efficiency, speed, security, and insight.”

Click here to see RCP’s complete Top 250 list of Microsoft partners in the U.S.

If you have been using Power Apps in your organization, you have likely run into the consent prompt a user receives when accessing an app for the first time. While it is not a bad practice to let users know what has access to their account, admins are aware that these prompts can be intimidating for users and lead to an increase in requests for assistance during the rollout of a new app or customized form.

The Power Apps Administration PowerShell Module provides functionality that allows suppression of the consent prompt for end users by instead providing admin consent, essentially pre-approving the necessary access before it would normally be requested of users.

This can be even more beneficial for SharePoint Forms that are customized with Power Apps as the consent prompts feel more inconsistent as not all sites or lists will have these customized forms.

The cmdlet, Set-AdminPowerAppApisToBypassConsent, can be used for this configuration.

The documented example incorrectly identifies the Power App Identifier parameter as -PowerAppName (as of 3/13/21) while the list of parameters includes -AppName. We can quickly check the available parameters using the Get-Command cmdlet, as illustrated below, to confirm the appropriate parameter is -AppName as there is no -PowerAppName parameter.

Shown here are samples of what a user would see with and without the admin consent process. The user will be prompted for permission (A), listing any connectors used with the form or app. When prompted, they must choose to allow the permissions if they intend to use the form. Should they choose not to do so, they will be dropped into an unhelpful blank form (B).

Choosing to allow the permission request, or if the form has been configured with admin consent, the customized form will instead load as expected no surprise prompt. Configuring admin consent changes the experience, so users get what they expect the very first time they load up the form or app.

Aside from access and the appropriate PowerShell module, the App Id of the customized form is all the information necessary to run the bypass PowerShell command. It can be found in either the Power App Service (GUI) or PowerShell Module (CLI).

Within the Power App service, the form details are found by first navigating to a list with a customized form (or create a new one) and selecting Customize forms from the Power Apps drop down menu. After the Edit screen has loaded, move to the File menu, then click the See all versions button. To the left of Versions is the Details pane, which is where we will find the App ID.

The Power Apps Administration PowerShell Module is needed to identify the App ID from the command-line. With the module installed, we can run Add-PowerAppsAccount and complete authentication via login prompt. The account used must be able to grant admin consent and view all Power Apps in an environment, I will use a Global Administrator, other roles may be reviewed for Azure AD and the Power Platform using these resources:

Azure AD built-in roles – Azure Active Directory | Microsoft Docs

Use service admin roles to manage your tenant – Power Platform | Microsoft Docs

Running Get-AdminPowerApp lists all Power Apps in the default or selected environment. With the command-line method, we do not currently know the name nor the App Id. Fortunately, there is a default naming structure for customized SharePoint forms:

ListName on SiteName forms

In the example below, I have created a site, IntegrationForm, and a list, SampleList. The AppName is the identifier needed to grant Admin Consent.

Site: /sites/IntegrationForm

List: /sites/IntegrationForm/SampleList

Using the default naming scheme then identifies SampleList on IntegrationForm forms as the appropriate Power App.

Having identified the App ID through either method, we can now execute the Set-AdminPowerAppApisToBypassConsent command. Ideally, a Code of 200 will be returned, indicating success. Other codes which may be commonly encountered are 403 and 409 noting a lack of permissions or that the app or form has a session locked for editing, respectively. If the session is locked, it should clear up in a few minutes, so long as there is not any active editing. There is also a -ForceLease parameter that could be added to the Set-AdminPowerAppApisToBypassConsent command, though, this doesn’t appear reliable as of version 2.0.110 of the Power Apps Administration PowerShell Module.

Granting admin consent smooths the first-time experience for users but could cause issues for developers. If admin consent has been granted, users who do not access to run Set-AdminPowerAppApisToBypassConsent will not be able to restore past versions of the app or form. Interestingly, it is still possible to save and publish new versions.

The restore failure can be reproduced in both the browser and PowerShell, neither offer a very clear picture without some digging. Starting with the browser, go to your customized form or a canvas app and navigate to the version history as we did when identifying the App Id. Select a previous version and choose to restore it. For testing, I have used an account which is a Co-Owner of an app and a user which has access to edit forms, otherwise, no administrative roles are assigned.

With customized forms, I have only been able to reproduce an error regarding locked sessions. This may be due to a difference in how a customized form and an app are handled on the back end or may simply be tied to the timing of session releases.

Most browsers have developer tools which can be used to debug and investigate what is happening under the hood of a website. The overview for the developer tools available in Microsoft’s Edge browser can be found here. Two invoke entries can be found using the Network dev tool; they contain the error above about a locked session but another and more informative error as well.

This is message is much clearer; the account does not have the appropriate level of access to perform the restore now that admin consent has been configured.

If we instead try to perform the restore using PowerShell, we get the same message, though, only if the -Verbose parameter is included when attempting the restore. Without it, the command will complete silently and we may be led to believe it was successful when nothing has changed.

The Set-AdminPowerAppApisToBypassConsent command suppresses the first-time user prompt for both Power Apps and customized SharePoint forms, making for an expected and consistent user experience. If you choose to configure admin consent in this way, ensure your development team has the necessary permission to handle version restores or that your procedures detail the separation of responsibilities.