Author Archives: Tori Pazda

CHALLENGE

Aspen Surgical, a leading worldwide manufacturer of surgical disposable products based in Caledonia, Michigan, needed to separate their IT infrastructure from their parent company with a new technology environment that allowed for scaling quickly. Not only did they require new servers, there were also the tasks of migrating approved data, replacing firewalls and implementing security services. Aspen Surgical sought out a partner that could help it’s internal IT team establish this new IT infrastructure, and provide ongoing support and planning services for acquisition activity. The answer: Thrive.

SOLUTION

Thrive’s engineering team met with Aspen Surgical’s internal IT department to develop a highly-detailed plan for the transition to the new IT environment. In addition to migrating servers and data, the plan also included migrating from one Office 365 tenant to a new one – all of which was complete with minimal downtime for the end users. To meet the needs of the organization and the expectations of its clients, Thrive deployed new computers and put into place a wide variety of security features and services including SIEM/SOC, NextGen End Point Security (EDR), Vulnerability Scanning and End User Security Training and Phishing simulation.

RESULT

Aspen Surgical’s newly-deployed IT infrastructure utilizes multiple NextGen services from Thrive, including ThriveCloud, Thrive’s best-in-class Cloud solution, as a scalable solution that it can rely on as the company grows through acquisitions. From advanced endpoint security to 3rd party patching and more, Aspen Surgical takes advantage of Thrive’s comprehensive list of security services to provide thorough coverage against cybersecurity threats. And if ever Aspen Surgical experiences a catastrophic event, the company will be ready with Thrive’s data backup and disaster recovery services to minimize downtime and get up-and-running quickly. Support didn’t end with the deployment of the new servers. Thrive’s team continues to provide Aspen Surgical with multi-site on-premise infrastructure support for the ISP, firewall and switching. When the company’s end users need assistance, Thrive is there via a helpdesk and to provide ongoing Office 365 management. And when Aspen Surgical’s internal IT team needs support, they have full access to The Thrive Platform, powered by ServiceNow to allow Aspen IT and Thrive to ensure fast communication, case sharing, and resolution of any IT issues.

“Our team was faced with a significant migration project and we sought out an experienced partner to help us make the process seamless and be available as an extension of our internal team for support when needed. Thrive ended up being the partner we were looking for – and more.” ~ Christopher Dukes, Vice President of Information Technology, Aspen Surgical

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

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – February 16, 2021 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services announces today that CRN^®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Thrive to its 2021 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Managed Security 100 category. The list, released annually, recognizes the leading North American solution providers that have demonstrated innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services. These services guide the end user in improving operational efficiencies and navigating the ongoing complexities of their IT infrastructure, while also maximizing their IT management and return on investment.

Combining both industry-leading solutions and proven technical knowledge, Thrive enables organizations to meet and exceed their digital IT demands. The company’s Managed Security Services empowers its clients to maintain a secure and compliant IT infrastructure with our team of technology experts who address regulatory mandates, including SEC, FINRA, PCI, DSS and HIPAA. Additionally, Thrive implements up-to-date cyber security measures to safeguard its clients’ business applications and keep its data safe from cyber criminals.

“In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s now more important than ever to integrate a comprehensive cyber security plan. At Thrive, we have a deep understanding of how to mitigate complex IT security challenges and focus on advancing our clients’ capabilities, by consistently improving both efficiency and security,” said Rob Stephenson, CEO at Thrive. “Being recognized in CRN’s 2021 Managed Security 100 category on the MSP 500 list cements us an industry leader, providing best-in-class security solutions across all industry verticals. Moving ahead, we plan to continue to play a vital role in our client’s IT infrastructure as we revolutionize traditional managed services with our expanded NextGen technology, including ServiceNow, Automation and AI.”

“Effective MSPs enable companies to focus on their core objectives while improving the quality and reliability of their Cloud computing capabilities,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “The solution providers on CRN’s 2021 MSP 500 list deserve recognition for their innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services, and the ability to optimize operational efficiencies and systems to maximize return on investments.”

With cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services, MSPs have become an integral part of the success of businesses worldwide. They help empower organizations to leverage complex technologies, keeping a strict focus on their core business without straining their budgets. CRN’s 2021 MSP 500 list identifies the market’s key managed services players who are setting themselves apart with best-of-breed solutions that provide the business outcomes customers need.

The MSP 500 list is divided into three sections: the MSP Pioneer 250, recognizing companies with business models weighted toward managed services and largely focused on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, recognizing large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premises and off-premises services; and the Managed Security 100, recognizing MSPs focused primarily on off-premises and Cloud-based security services.

The MSP 500 list will be featured in the February 2021 issue of CRN and online at www.CRN.com/msp500.

For more information about Thrive, click here.

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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, visit thrivenextgen.com

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram 

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell

Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

Why use it?

The Channel Calendar App is a new way of organizing your team within Microsoft Teams. Once the Channel Calendar App has been added to a Team’s Channel, your group can organize scheduled meetings that Channel participants can join directly from the Channel. This way, conversation about the meeting, meeting notes, any documents shared, and the meeting information will all be contained in a relevant area.

The app can be added multiple times to the same Channel or on different Channels for the Team. When meetings are added, they also show up in that Channel’s messages. Anyone in your organization who has access to the Channel can add meetings, making it a good way to schedule group sessions and optional events.

The Channel Calendar meeting is flexible enough to allow individuals, Microsoft 365 Groups, or distribution groups as attendees. Additionally, Team members that have access to the Channel can opt-in to the meeting even if they are not one of the attendees listed by the meeting creator.

Adding the Channel Calendar App

The Channel Calendar App is similar in look and feel to the Team Calendar app.

You can see targeted messages relating to the Calendar in the message thread to the right.

To add the Channel Calendar App, navigate to the Team and click the channel where you’d like to place a channel calendar. Click the + to the right of the existing tabs to add a new one. Select or search for “Channel Calendar”.

You’ll need to enter a tab name for the Calendar. Be sure to make it unique since you can add this app multiple times to a Channel or Team. As a way of notifying your Channel participants, keep “Post to the Channel about this tab” selected and click Add.

Editing a Channel Meeting

Only the person who created the meeting can change meeting details.

Joining a Channel Meeting

When a Channel meeting has started, you will see a video icon next to that Channel’s name:

In addition, within the Channel Posts tab, potential attendees will see a Meeting banner with a Join button.

And that’s it! Attendees can join via the Channel Calendar meeting, their personal invite, or from the Channel Posts tab.

Limitations & Preconditions

All members except guests can add events to the Calendar. In addition, guests cannot see the app or its contents, so its current use case is for the tenant’s organization only. However, guests can join via the Channel notification once the event has started (and you can always add them as recipients as needed).

Currently, Channel meetings will not automatically be added to your team’s personal Outlook calendars nor sent an invite unless they have been added as recipients. Microsoft 365 Groups can be added as attendees; however, the group settings will dictate whether members get meeting invitations. Distribution groups will send invites; however, meeting creators may not have visibility into who is in a distribution group and unintentionally send the invite to a larger group than intended. Microsoft is likely working to improve this particular frustration, but until then, workarounds include creating workflow notifications or scripting a solution.

Digital Transformation within your organization can occur and evolve in many ways, starting with very tactical reactionary changes with burning problems like data loss, error-prone manual processes, and time consuming “old school” efforts that get more difficult in the modern era (like trying use the “copier” and “send a fax”, etc.)  Remember, there are still plenty of people that perform their daily tasks that way for many reasons.

The other side of digital transformation is when organizations take a lot of time to plan out the approach and spend significant effort figuring out what they need, planning years down the road, interviewing, reviewing, discussing, gaining consensus, etc.  It’s hard for me to knock anyone who plans things out, so it’s difficult to be a critic here, however I will say this:  We have seen instances where paralysis occurs when you try to “boil the ocean” in your upfront efforts.  As someone who has seen hundreds of attempts at these with our customers, I’d like to think I’ve pulled a little wisdom out of the experiences and feedback.  I think it falls into these camps of the why elements to watch out for:

1. You get so deep in planning that the plan becomes the project and there is so much investment that it’s hard to get your head out of it and get started on something meaningful without getting pulled back into the road map. Your time is spent in the plan, not the results.
2. The participants required to make decisions, define guidelines, or modify policies that the plan depends on are either not positioned to execute, not ready, or not available.
3. The changes being sought in the name of security or compliance may reduce the flexibility and ease of use of the platform / tools and therefore create friction with the end user community.
4. The platform / tools / technology you are using have meaningful changes and updates by the time you get to the implementation. The capabilities have improved enough that you must revisit your intended implementation.
5. Your employees have changed enough via new hires, attrition and their projects / goals have adjusted, that the requirements you intended to meet have moved enough to warrant revisiting your implementation goals.
6. The strategic needs of the organization change – new strategic initiatives, business challenges, a number of top-down elements that make planning down to the tactical level difficult to maintain

I call it the moving targets that we face while trying to make a meaningful impact helping the business transform over a period of time.  These essential drivers are constantly in motion, and I think this ends up being one of the big reasons many digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their expectations.  Keep in mind that It’s only in recent times that these targets move so quickly due to the changing technology and business landscape.  The big waterfall project that worked 20 years ago is much less effective now.

You might think this is a good thing, we didn’t implement something that wouldn’t be valuable by the time we got to implementing it.  This is why we plan, gather requirements, think about the specifics of delivery, etc.  We avoided something that wouldn’t have helped us anyway.  I challenge that notion as old-school thinking.  My approach is actually more of a hybrid or meeting in the middle of the two extremes.  You need to plan, but don’t plan yourself beyond current understood needs. Create agility in delivery within your strategic planning.  Transformation occurs incrementally over time, not at the end of a project.

Second, don’t even refer to it as a plan, it’s a process.  It will never end because the moving targets never stop moving.  If you shorten your strategic cycles, you get smaller iterations of implementation that meet current understood needs BUT allow for feedback to incorporate into the process moving forward.  However, they can’t be so short as to essentially be one-off tactical responses with no cohesive thought behind the big picture.  You are going to help guide the process, and a guide has pretty good of where he or she is going but knows there are multiple roads to get there.

A wise man once told me:  “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there”.  This is the reason why strategy and planning are still critical.

So, what does the right strategic plan look like?  With the usual disclaimers that every organization is different, your mileage may vary, etc., there are still some elements the make sense in every organization.  The following are elements of your strategic approach the need careful consideration:

Vision

Stakeholder ownership.  What are we doing, why are we doing it, and how will it help us increase our business objectives?  Where do we want to be?  A stakeholder driving the 30k foot view of what the organization is trying to achieve across the business as a whole.

Goals

Goals are the logical next step below the vision, let’s break them down into some discreet items so we know when we have completed the goal.  For example, one goal may be to “Increase our ability to securely collaborate with out external partners “because you know you are falling behind, wasting resources, or at risk for data security issues using your current methods for working with parties outside your organization on documents and data (customers, vendors, contractors, etc.)

You will develop and nurture these goals over time, they will change, adapt, and move around in order of priority if you continue your ongoing strategic planning correctly.  Build, maintain, and continue to challenge your list of goals.

Needs

Sometimes this gets lost in the vision and goals, but the end-users are where all the magic happens.  If one of your goals is external collaboration using Teams, then this is where you meet and discuss how to implement this in a way to hits the target.  The daily interaction and usability of your implementation is pivotal, you are doing all of this provide value for your users.  Continue to discuss, document, and deliberate on how to make their lives better as you achieve these goals.  Be flexible, jamming a solution onto someone is rarely the answer.  Be prepared to adapt and modify “post go-live” based on lessons learned in production.  You need to know needs to be configured to provide value for their specific use cases.

Holistic View

When you understand the targets at multiple levels, you start to see how it all fits together.  This is one of the most difficult items to visualize if you don’t undertake some strategic initiatives.  Seeing all the initiatives across the wider audience will give you great opportunity to identify both gaps and opportunities to get economies of scale and additional solutions that help tie your goals into the whole vision.  See the forest, not just the trees.

Road Map

One of the most critical elements of strategic planning is your road map.  All this really entails is a time-based visual diagram representing when you plan to start & complete various initiatives you have defined via your goals & needs.  This map does a lot of good things:  It holds you accountable for getting things done, even if it’s not perfect.  It provides visibility to the end users making requests, so they understand why their needs are or are not the top priority.  People get to see when certain initiatives will impact and be available for them.  It makes you do some architectural work so you can define and understand dependencies.  Example:  You can’t hit the goal defined above if you haven’t built a governance plan for Teams yet?  No external sharing without governance / guidance / security property setup, right?  This includes your organization as part of the process.

Small Projects to implement

The road map helps define the small chunks of discernable work that allow you to hit the goals.  This is where the true project planning work is done.  Resources, timelines, tasks, etc.  If I am a project manager or subject matter expert, the road map helps me understand in advance where my skills and time will be needed to help achieve the goals.

Insight & Visibility

Communicating the efforts using the methodology above gives a lot of transparency to everyone in your organization.  That is a good thing.  It helps ensure everyone is aligned with your approach and timing.  It also allows them to ask questions and get on your list of people to talk to about needs and ideation.  It helps ensure they are a value asset to the success – you are not doing this TO them, you are doing this FOR them with their input.

Iterations

If you can only take one thing from this list to remember, I have to admit this is it — I believe the highest chance of failure for true digital transformation is to treat it like a project and not and ongoing evolution.  Instead, digital transformation can be organized as an on-going program made up of small projects.

For your transformation process to continue, you absolutely must revisit your goals, road map, and the moving targets on a regular basis.  This is how you prevent getting out of alignment and straying too far down a path that is no longer valid.  The good news is this is the easiest part if you are committed to it, the hard part is the commitment.

Why is it so easy?  Because all the elements you work on the beginning simply get revisited on a regular cadence.  It’s like going to the gym – I sat on the couch for most of 2020 during the pandemic and gained a bunch of weight.  Going back to the gym was very difficult to build the routine and work up to a decent amount of exercise, but after I got back into some reasonable shape, going regularly becomes less painful and it’s somewhat predictable.  When you build your recurring mechanisms to reviewing feedback, talking to end users, adjusting your goals, road map, associated projects accordingly, and communicating it to the end users becomes easy and anticipated.

User Experience

My final words will be to remember your users are the name of the game. To get momentum they need to be kept at the forefront, solicited for effective feedback, and supported with training and skilled helpdesk personnel that truly understand how to solve their issues.  Getting user adoption and true engagement will allow the ongoing efforts take on real momentum.  Get feedback, incorporate it, design for it, implement it, train/support it, and do it all over again at a pace your team and organization can sustain and you will look back and say “wow, look at all the positive change we facilitated”.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

Over the last year, more and more organizations have opted to migrate their data to the Cloud to make working remote easier for their workers.  One of the most popular migrations has been to Microsoft’s Office 365 stack.  This platform offers a one stop shop for organizations who are looking to collaborate and work smarter.  However, I continuously run into this idea that Cloud services, such as Office 365, include backups of customer data.  While some services provide a level of backup, the truth is most spell it out for you in their service agreements, that you should backup your data via a 3^rd party mechanism.

Microsoft’s Office 365 is no different, and they spell this out in there their service agreement below:

Like a traditional on-premise email or file server there are some built-in retention settings in the service.  For example, if you delete an email, OneDrive file, or SharePoint item you can use the Office 365 version of a recycle bin to retrieve it.  This location stores deleted items for set period of time.  In the scenario where you need to locate that item you deleted, chances are if you realized it is gone quickly enough, and you can locate it you are probably fine.  But let us talk about the more common scenario where you realize you need something that was deleted last month and the recycle bin has already been purged.  In this more real-world example, not even a call to Microsoft support will help.  Your data is now permanently deleted, and you have no way to retrieve it.  While Microsoft Office 365 may have started as an email service, it has grown into an entire ecosystem for personal files using OneDrive and company shared data in Teams / SharePoint sites.  Using a backup solution, you would be able to quickly locate and restore your lost data.  Another often overlooked item, is that many companies had a business requirement to have their data backed up before they moved to the Cloud.  This same business requirement should also apply once you have migrated that data into the Office 365 ecosystem.

In addition to the examples I described earlier, there is a much scarier situation. This past year several of my colleagues wrote about ransomware attacks that have crippled organizations of all sizes, from small businesses, entire hospital systems, and even municipalities.  Organizations that have adopted a backup solution that covers their Cloud data, are able to either roll back all their affected data, or in some cases selectively based on the damage caused by a ransomware attack.

Take it from someone who has had to help restore everything from email data, to complex SharePoint permissions for a company site.  Having a 3^rd party backup solution for your Office 365 not only protects your organization but could also save money in the long run when compared to cost of dealing with situations where there is no back up of the data.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

Erik Young is responsible for the success of Thrive’s Partner Program from onboarding, client engagement and overall management and success of the channel partner sales and support team.

Thrive acquires Apex IT Group to establish the former’s presence in the Mid-Atlantic corridor.

New research on 2021 cybersecurity trends points to opportunities for managed service providers that are equipped with the right tools and skills; more IT channel news.