The Hidden Risks of Legacy On-Prem Servers

Security Vulnerabilities
Legacy on-prem servers are vulnerable to a range of threats including outdated software, end-of-life operating systems, and unpatched vulnerabilities. Many businesses struggle to keep up with security patches and updates, leaving their sensitive data exposed for cyber criminals. Hackers often target these security weaknesses, leading to data breaches, ransomware attacks, or complete system failures.

In contrast, cloud providers, like Thrive, implement advanced security mechanisms such as continuous patch management, AI-driven threat detection, and encryption at rest and in transit. Cloud environments are also maintained by teams of security experts who ensure compliance with stringent industry regulations such as DORA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.

High Operational Costs
On-premises infrastructure can be very costly to maintain. The upfront investment is significant, and the ongoing maintenance costs quickly add up too. Organizations also have to allocate resources to IT staff for routine tasks such as updates, troubleshooting, and backups. Plus, mainframe expertise is harder and more expensive to come by because skilled workers are reaching retirement age with no replacements on deck.

Cloud solutions, however, offer better scalability, and there’s no need to invest in hardware or worry about lifecycle management. With cloud-based infrastructure, businesses can focus on innovation and reaching their business goals rather than maintenance.

The Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud

• Enhanced Security Measures: One of the biggest advantages of cloud migration is an improved security posture. Cloud providers continually invest in cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies, offering real-time monitoring, automatic updates, and advanced encryption standards for customers. Most cloud platforms also feature dedicated security tools like firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and security information and event management (SIEM). Migrating to the cloud also significantly reduces the risk of breaches, due to regular patching and updates.
• Long-Term Cost Savings: The shift to the cloud can lead to substantial cost savings for businesses. Moving away from legacy hardware eliminates the need for expensive hardware upgrades, space for servers, energy, and cooling costs associated with maintaining an on-prem server room. Using the cloud reduces maintenance, fewer IT staff for routine updates, and less frequent downtime, leading to lower operational costs.
• Increased Agility: Modern businesses require agility to adapt to fast-changing market conditions. Utilizing the cloud provides businesses with the ability to quickly deploy new services, scale infrastructure quickly, and respond rapidly to ever-changing customer demands.

Migrating Your Legacy Servers to the Cloud

Moving from a legacy infrastructure to the cloud requires a well-planned approach to ensure minimal disruption and maximize long-term benefits. Below are some key steps to help your business migrate to the cloud successfully:

• Assess Your IT Infrastructure: Before starting your cloud migration, assess your current IT stack to understand what applications, services, and data need to be moved. Evaluate which workloads are cloud-ready, which may need modification, and if any should remain on-prem for specific reasons (such as compliance).
• Choose the Right Cloud Model For Your Business: Determine which cloud deployment model fits your business’s needs: public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Public cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure are cost-effective and highly scalable. Private cloud options offer greater control over data and may be more suitable for regulated industries. No matter your choice, Thrive’s team of expert Cloud engineers can help design, build, and support the Cloud solution that best meets your business needs.
• Plan for Migrating Your Data: Data migration can be one of the most challenging aspects of the move to cloud. Businesses must ensure that their data is securely transferred to the cloud without any loss or corruption.
• Implement Strong Security Controls: Security should be a priority during and after cloud migration. Leveraging cloud-native security features such as identity and access management (IAM), data encryption, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) can ensure your data stays safe. Continuous monitoring and regular audits should also be a part of your post-migration plan to maintain a strong security posture.

How Thrive Can Help

Migrating to the cloud can dramatically improve security, reduce costs, and unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation. With Thrive, you have access to a secure hybrid cloud solution that can help keep your data secure, scale with your business, and help you meet your business goals. Don’t wait until it’s too late— contact Thrive today and embrace the cloud and mitigate the risks of outdated infrastructure.

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Enhanced Security and Compliance

One of the greatest advantages of a private Cloud is heightened security and compliance. In a private Cloud environment, all resources and infrastructure are dedicated solely to your business and its needs. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and potential data breaches to your system. Companies may implement customized security measures, stringent access controls, and encryption protocols to further protect sensitive data and adhere to their industry-specific compliance requirements.

For those in regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, or government, remaining in compliance with laws and regulations such as HIPAA, SOX, SOC 2, or PCI DSS is critical. A private Cloud offers a secure platform to ensure compliance with these stringent standards, giving organizations peace of mind.

Customized and Scalable Solutions

Private Clouds can provide flexibility to tailor infrastructure and services based on your business’s specific needs. You have control over resource allocation, storage capacity, and network configurations, allowing for a customized setup that aligns with your business requirements. As your business fluctuates in demand, you can easily scale up or down to accommodate changing workloads, ensuring optimal performance at all times.

Scalability is especially crucial for businesses with unpredictable or agile IT needs, enabling them to quickly adapt without the constraints often associated with public Cloud environments.

Increased Performance and Reliability

In a private Cloud, resources are dedicated solely to your organization, ensuring consistent performance levels. A private Cloud eliminates competing for resources with other tenants, as is often the case in public Clouds. 

Furthermore, a private Cloud typically operates within a company’s on-premises data center or in a dedicated hosting environment. This ensures low network latency and high-speed connectivity, further boosting performance and responsiveness.

Data Privacy and Control

For many businesses, maintaining control over data is a top priority. With a private Cloud, you retain complete control over your organization’s data, its storage, and its processing. This control is vital for sensitive data or intellectual property that cannot be entrusted to third-party providers in a public Cloud setting, or has to meet specific data residency requirements

Private Clouds offer a level of data privacy that’s unparalleled. You can determine the location of your data, how it’s managed, and who has access to it, giving you the confidence to manage critical business operations securely.

Thrive’s NextGen Cloud Services are the perfect match for organizations looking to optimize their resources, workloads, and storage while leveraging the benefits of the Secure-ThriveCloud experience. Thrive’s Cloud engineering team is able to design, build, migrate, and support the Cloud solution that best meets your business needs. We assess your needs, looking at performance, cost, security, and flexibility to determine where your business workloads best belong. Additionally, by leveraging the benefits of Thrive’s Cloud, businesses can effectively manage their operations while maintaining compliance with industry regulations. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a growing business, the advantages of Thrive’s Cloud services can significantly impact your organization’s success and future growth. Contact Thrive today to learn more.

The post Unable to Move to the Public Cloud? Then Bring the Cloud to You. appeared first on Thrive.

The Cloud Is King

At the center of digital-only banks’ operations lies advanced Cloud technology. The Cloud serves as the backbone for their entire infrastructure, enabling the storage, processing, and accessibility of vast amounts of data, all in real-time. It offers them several advantages, including:

• Scalability and Flexibility: The Cloud allows digital-only banks to seamlessly scale their operations based on consumer demand. As their customer base grows, they can effortlessly expand their infrastructure and accommodate increased data storage and additional processing needs.
• Cost-Efficiency: Operating in the Cloud eliminates the need for significant overhead and upfront investments toward physical infrastructure. Digital banks can optimize costs by paying only for resources as they are consumed, making them highly cost-effective.
• Enhanced Performance: Cloud platforms can provide high-speed processing capabilities, ensuring that transactions and other banking operations are executed swiftly to deliver an optimal customer experience.

Prioritizing Cybersecurity

For digital-only banks, safeguarding data and mitigating risks against cyber attacks is paramount. These banks employ a robust set of cybersecurity measures to protect their data and their customers’ data. Key cybersecurity practices digital-only banks typically use include:

• Encryption & Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): All data exchanged between users and the bank’s servers is encrypted, making it unreadable and unusable to unauthorized individuals trying to steal data. Additionally, MFA adds an extra layer of security by requiring all users with access to the banks’ internal system to authenticate their identity through multiple factors, such as passwords, biometrics, or one-time passcodes, enhancing protection against unauthorized access.
• Continuous Monitoring and Threat Detection: Advanced monitoring systems are employed to constantly analyze network traffic and detect unusual activities that may pose a security threat. Automated alerts and real-time responses aid in quickly addressing any suspicious activities.
• Security Audits: Digital-only banks also conduct regular security audits to identify potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems. These audits help to address security concerns and enable them to stay ahead of evolving threats.
• Employee Training and Awareness: Employees are regularly educated about cybersecurity best practices and are kept up-to-date on the latest threats. Training includes identifying phishing attempts and other social engineering tactics.

The Perfect Partnership

Digital-only banks are playing an increasingly significant role in the financial industry. As they continue to innovate and grow, they need an expert partner to rely on that is agile and reliable. Thrive’s team of dedicated experts can help these banks continuously monitor for threats and vulnerabilities, 24/7. Additionally, these banks can take advantage of Thrive’s secure Cloud solutions, which can enable them to complete data transfers and transactions at lightning speed and store sensitive customer data safely.  

Contact Thrive to learn more about how we can transform the security and storage infrastructure of your digital-only bank, today. 

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The integration of ServiceNow into Thrive’s solutions revolutionized the platform, removing manual error from the equation entirely. By harnessing the robust capabilities of ServiceNow, the Thrive Platform empowers clients with enhanced service accessibility and precise insights into their environments. Simultaneously, it revolutionizes the way IT is consumed, putting a strong emphasis on self-service solutions.

Overall, ServiceNow allows for a structured approach to designing, delivering, managing, and improving the way IT is used, ensuring that it meets business goals and delivers value. Here are 10 key aspects of the power of IT service management (ITSM) for businesses:

1. Improved Service Quality: Implementing a proven ITSM platform, like ServiceNow, standardizes processes and procedures; leading to increased efficiency, cost savings, and an overall enhancement of the employee and client experience. With streamlined processes and reduced manual efforts, employees can focus more on core business activities, improving productivity.
2. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: ServiceNow places a strong emphasis on aligning IT services with business needs and objectives of its customers. This alignment ensures that services are delivered in a way that not only meets, but often exceeds customer expectations. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers and provide positive referrals, contributing to business growth and success.
3. Business-IT Alignment: ServiceNow’s ability to align IT services with customers’ business objectives is a game-changer. They ensure that technology supports the business strategy effectively, leading to more informed decision-making and better prioritization of IT investments based on business needs.
4. Better Decision-Making: Data-driven insights and reporting are at the core of ServiceNow’s capabilities. By providing valuable information to business leaders, ServiceNow enables informed decision-making. It helps organizations understand trends, optimize resource utilization, and identify areas for improvement, driving smarter, more strategic choices.
5. Standardization and Consistency: ServiceNow establishes standardized processes and procedures for managing IT services. This consistency ensures that services are delivered uniformly across the organization, maintaining a high level of quality and reliability. It reduces the risk of errors and ensures that IT operations run smoothly.
6. Innovation Enablement: Innovation is the lifeblood of any successful organization. ServiceNow lays the groundwork for that innovation by optimizing resource management. This efficiency frees up valuable resources, allowing businesses to focus on strategic initiatives and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
7. Improved Communication and Collaboration: ServiceNow’s collaborative features facilitate better communication and teamwork among various departments and teams within an organization. This promotes a more cohesive and efficient work environment, where employees can collaborate seamlessly to achieve common goals.
8. Integration Capabilities: ServiceNow offers robust integration capabilities with other enterprise systems, ensuring seamless connectivity and data exchange between different applications and tools within an organization. This enhances efficiency and data consistency across the board.
9. Real-Time Analytics and Reporting: ServiceNow empowers organizations with real-time analytics and reporting capabilities. This allows businesses to gain valuable insights into trends and performance metrics, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that can drive continuous improvement.
10. Asset Lifecycle Management: From procurement to retirement, ServiceNow offers comprehensive tracking and management of assets. This capability ensures that organizations have full control over their assets, optimizing their lifecycle and maximizing value.

At Thrive, we understand the transformative power of strong ITSM. ServiceNow has emerged as a game-changing solution for businesses seeking to elevate their IT service management and, by extension, their overall performance. With its emphasis on improving service quality, enhancing customer satisfaction, aligning business and IT, and enabling innovation, ServiceNow empowers organizations to truly excel in the digital age.

Learn how your business can leverage the ServiceNow-powered Thrive Platform’s comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities to revolutionize your IT service delivery. Contact Thrive today and schedule a Thrive Platform demo.

The post The Top 10 Advantages of Thrive’s ServiceNow-Powered Platform appeared first on Thrive.

Amidst this transformation, managed Cloud services emerged as an opportunity for innovation, securely revolutionizing the way organizations harness the power of the Cloud. The question is, how can these organizations take advantage of their Cloud investments in order to meet the needs of their business and employees? 

Managed Cloud services are a popular choice for businesses looking to optimize where exactly their funding is going, and how it is being used. Specifically for businesses looking to:

• Scale Cloud services without IT infrastructure expenses
• Manage their customer databases and update records remotely using the Software as a Service model
• Utilize cloud backup and disaster recovery services to manage and maintain data in Cloud storage
• Access big data analytics using Cloud computing services
• Develop applications for web and mobile
• Test and development for launching apps
• Manage social networking with large volumes of data

Today’s digital landscape is irrefutably dynamic, rendering the concept of a one-size-fits-all Cloud solution obsolete. Thrive’s managed Cloud services are tailored to satisfy the demands of modern businesses while balancing factors such as performance, cost, security, and flexibility. Enterprises benefit from a range of NextGen Cloud solutions, from the robustness of VMware-based private Cloud platforms tailored for the most demanding workloads to Microsoft Azure and AWS public Cloud offerings. To make it work harmoniously, Thrive’s Hybrid Cloud Director delivers unparalleled visibility and control for companies across all of their Cloud systems.

For businesses looking to optimize and scale their enterprise, the benefits of managed Cloud services like Thrive’s are obvious: 

1. Cost savings. Save on the operational expenses needed to maintain your Cloud network infrastructure. In addition, you no longer have to hire and train people with the hard-to-find skill sets required to secure and support your Cloud.
2. Automatic updates. With Cloud technology constantly evolving, an MSP can keep your network updated and stay on top of advances and upgrades for your network infrastructure.
3. Disaster recovery. If a disaster takes place, it’s important to safeguard and retrieve your data as soon as possible. MSPs with 24x7x365 multi-location support can manage your disaster recovery process so that there is minimal downtime in the event of a disaster.
4. Rapid response. Round-the-clock support and remediation from a team of experts ready to respond to your Cloud concerns or issues.
5. Better Cloud and network security. Keeping your network secure is a top priority when using the Cloud, but security can be a complicated process. Managed service providers have the knowledge to keep your Cloud secure from unauthorized access.
6. Centralized control. Simplify your Cloud administration with all of your controls in one location to easily make any changes or upgrades to your network.
7. Flexible Scaling. Keep pace with the increasing volume of web traffic and the proliferation of devices while managing the growth of cyber threats.

It’s imperative your Cloud investment be optimized to its fullest potential. As a managed Cloud service provider, Thrive offers technical excellence that provides a trusted consulting partner, securely guiding businesses through the world of the Cloud. Thrive’s commitment to tailored services and an array of benefits underscore effectiveness in investment optimization, creating the ideal partnership to ensure your business excels in this digital age. To learn more about how Thrive can optimize your operations, contact us today.

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Using data-driven insights has allowed traders to quickly analyze potential investments. New algorithmic trading systems are able to analyze large quantities of data in just seconds, allowing investors to react to fast-paced market events and take advantage of short-term opportunities. 

Another aspect in which technology has improved the investment process is with financial planning software which allows companies to monitor and analyze their financial data and look at cash flows with a click of a button. Simplifying how we can access our financial data has also allowed financial firms to work outside the office, especially post-pandemic.

Research from Deloitte suggests that 92% of investment management firms are implementing, or are planning to implement technologies that enable their people to work from anywhere. Social distancing and remote working environments increase the need for seamless two-way communication across multiple digital channels. 

Having your financial data uploaded and readily available does come at a significant cost to your private data security.

Now, more than ever, financial institutions have to ensure that their IT infrastructure can handle the changing requirements and regulations for the industry, but also bolster their systems with proactive and agile platforms that can respond to threats quickly and efficiently. Having a trusted managed service provider (MSP), like Thrive, can help keep all of your data secure and keep your firm up to date with ongoing training and compliance.  

Thrive’s Financial Operations Platform manages the full investment lifecycle through front, middle, and back office via our single custody private Cloud. Our Financial Operations Platform enables organizations to put investors at ease, as well as serves as a comprehensive tool during a potential regulatory or registration process with the SEC, FINRA, SIPC, MSRB and NFA.

Implementing robust cybersecurity practices, staying informed about emerging threats and creating a risk mitigation plan, and fostering a culture of security awareness amongst your firm, are essential for navigating this evolving tech landscape safely. Striking a delicate balance between technological innovation and a safeguarded cybersecurity plan, the financial industry can continue to thrive in this digital era.

The post Cybersecurity for Hedge Funds: Safeguarding the Technology Stack appeared first on Thrive.

This attack by a notorious ransomware group on the major UK outsourcing company Capita continues to impact hundreds of thousands of people three to four weeks after being first reported.

This blog details the attack and its consequences and offers thoughts on how smaller businesses can prepare for these risks.

What happened?

In March, Capita publicly admitted that it had become another large organisation that was the victim of a targeted ransomware attack. Capita is a business that runs core services worth billions of pounds for government and high-profile private industry, including local councils, the NHS, the military, the BBC and pension funds. It operates the UK’s largest pension fund and private schemes for many large organisations. This cyber attack compromised Capita’s most profound IT systems and threatened the personal details of hundreds of thousands of pensioners whose data was stolen.

More than 90 large organisations have reported breaches of personal information from this attack. The victims include companies such as the Royal Mail and Axa, which have millions of policyholders, and the UK’s largest pension fund, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). The USS alone has gone on record to publicly confirm that the cyber breach has affected over 470,000 individual policyholders, with serious data breaches of their names, birthdates, and National Insurance Numbers. This type of personal data breach can result in identity theft or at least enormous inconvenience and concern.

The nature of Capita’s business support structure means that by accessing Capita’s systems, hackers potentially could access many of their suppliers, business customers and individual consumers whose data is processed daily by the company. As the impact continued, The Pensions Regulator (TPR) advised over 300 of its pension funds of this potential data theft and then other pension schemes administered by Capita. This included hundreds of private sector pension schemes belonging to employees of Marks and Spencer, Diageo, Unilever and Rothesay, who had to step in and take preventive and emergency action in warning their members that their data was likely to have been stolen.

Rumour of a £15million ransom

After being made aware of the attack, Capita decided that the best course of action was to pay the hackers a ransom fee to protect the data, which the company needs daily access to so they could carry out business.

Creating a responsible business repatriation plan must have been a significant risk for the business, whose core business is the processing of other companies’ personal and private data relating to individuals. This took longer than hoped with many people feeling angry that there was a lack of speed and transparency. Capita did not publicly acknowledge the extent of the attack until April, having initially denied that any customer data had been compromised. The magnitude of the impact caused the Times to call Capita’s response a “crisis.” The CEO of Capita, Jon Lewis, then confirmed it was “a sophisticated cyber attack.”

Who was behind this?

Responsibility for the attack was publicly claimed by a known cyber threat group called Black Basta, who started to sell Capita’s data via the dark web. This included the bank account details of 152 businesses, scanned images of passports, application forms from individuals for teaching positions and security vetting data. By proving they had this type of data, Black Basta clarified how much valuable information they had managed to steal. Other data allegedly listed for sale included a Capita Nuclear document, the internal drawings of building floor plans and documents marked confidential.

This data implies that the cyber attack had penetrated deep into Capita’s internal IT systems. With customers that include the NHS and the Department for Work & Pensions, the data breach will likely have included highly sensitive data that would greatly benefit criminals.

Black Basta/ BlackBasta

These cybercriminals are a known ransomware group that has only been around since 2022 but have rapidly become one of the most active threat groups, targeting 19 large businesses with over 100 confirmed victims. Targeting companies in multiple countries, but typically in the US, Japan, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, they use a double extortion technique. This means that once stolen, they encrypt the stolen data before threatening to publish or sell the data for a ransom of millions of pounds.

The implications of the Capita cyber attack highlight the urgency for organisations to prioritise robust cybersecurity practices to safeguard sensitive information and mitigate the damaging consequences of data breaches.

Businesses holding personal data, mainly where they conduct processing on behalf of their clients, must have a clear cyber assurance strategy. Planning and rehearsing against such attacks in real-life simulated cyber attack training, using real-world examples and multimedia inputs to create a real sense of urgency, is something that businesses in the critical national infrastructure have been doing for years.

It is now time for small to medium businesses to take the risks of cyber attacks seriously and to plan and protect against them. Thrive can help design, plan, rehearse, and test your cyber attack strategy and make sure that your staff are put to the test. Hence, they are as prepared as possible for a cyber attack that might look insidious on the surface but could have a material, significant impact on your business.

Talk to Thrive. We are a trusted cybersecurity expert and an accredited Managed Service Provider and can offer your business the Next Generation of Managed Services.

Contact Thrive today to learn how we can help your business stay secure in today’s digital age.

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Computer systems in schools have been the target of cyberattacks, which delay access and interrupt digital and remote learning. In other cases, ransomware threatened to steal and leak private student information unless schools paid a ransom. As schools implement more technology in classrooms, the threat landscape is ever increasing.

The cost of most ransomware losses is downtime, which can be even more expensive than the settlements. Cyberattacks can also ruin an organization’s reputation. Since private schools and other educational institutions compete for student applications, this can have a greater impact.

If a school fails to protect critical data and practice effective cybersecurity, it will reflect poorly on that organization.

The following are the main risks to educational institutions:

• Cyberattack: A person, group, or entity that generates all or some of an incident with the intent to compromise the security of a person or an organization.
• Domain Spoofing: Establishing web domains that resemble trustworthy websites to deceive users who input URLs incorrectly or click on similar URLs.
• Doxing: The act of gathering or disseminating personally identifiable information about a person online, usually with malevolent intent.
• End-of-life Software: Outdated programs and devices that no longer receive patches, security upgrades, technical assistance, or bug fixes leave users open to assaults.
• Phishing Emails: When someone poses as a reliable entity in an electronic contact in an attempt to steal sensitive information or data, such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, or bank account information.

Because educational systems have limited people, funds, and resources, and as cyber threats get more sophisticated, these IT infrastructures are at serious risk.

Here are several ways that Thrive can contribute to the digital security of educational organizations.

• Thrive has a committed staff of cybersecurity engineers working around the clock to safeguard your mission-critical infrastructure.
• To avoid data loss, Thrive advises your facility to back up its data to an impartial third party.
• To reduce susceptibility, Thrive collaborates with your organization to detect security flaws.
• To identify cybersecurity threats, Thrive builds a long-term strategy by learning about your organizational goals, people, procedures, and technologies.
• Thrive delivers tailored security-managed services to safeguard your institution while reducing cyberattacks.

At Thrive, we have 700+ technical resources and IT experts with a cumulative 3,000+ years of experience managing security for educational institutions of all sizes, using the best technology to safeguard your network from online threats.

Don’t wait, contact us to learn more.

The post Vulnerability in SLED: How to Navigate Threats Targeting Education appeared first on Thrive.

After sounding an alarm for live exploitation of the Outlook security flaw, Microsoft said it traced the exploit to a Russian APT targeting a limited number of organizations in government, transportation, energy, and military sectors in Europe. Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC) did publish mitigation guidance and offered a CVE-2023-23397 script to help with audit and cleanup in response to the severity of the issue. “We strongly recommend all customers update Microsoft Outlook for Windows to remain secure,” Microsoft said.

A zero-day vulnerability means that the issue was detected while it was already live and potentially exploitable, meaning there are “zero days” for an organization to find a solution because it is already a real threat. As with most cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the impact is rarely isolated to one continent. Though Europe may have been targeted initially, local and state governments in the U.S. and Canada warned that the “critical zero-day vulnerability” recently discovered in Outlook could allow hackers to access email accounts and exfiltrate sensitive government data such as emails, attachments, and other confidential information if not addressed urgently. 

While Microsoft has released patches to address the vulnerability, local and state governments that have not yet applied these patches remain at risk. With limited resources to devote to cybersecurity and lagging internal response times compared to the private sector, Thrive is seeing more public sector interest in cloud adoption, where municipalities are looking to store sensitive data on a private cloud server, while using public for more routine communications like email. 

• A 2020 survey conducted by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO), 49% of state CIOs reported that their state government had adopted a cloud-first strategy for IT service delivery. 
• In addition, the survey found that 77% of state CIOs reported that their state government had moved at least some of their IT services to the cloud. 
• According to a 2019 email security report, Microsoft Exchange Server was the most commonly used email system among U.S. government organizations. The report found that 68% of all government organizations surveyed used Exchange Server, while 21% used Office 365 (which includes Exchange Online). 

Shifting to cloud-based email is particularly appealing for state and local governments –  cost savings, improved scalability and flexibility, reduced maintenance requirements, are all attractive incentives. However, in light of the bombardment of cyber attacks and an ever-expanding attack surface as government organizations embrace more and more IT modernization tools, cloud offers cybersecurity features like multi-factor authentication, data encryption, and advanced threat detection capabilities.

Thrive has dedicated 24/7 security teams that monitor email systems for potential threats and is equipped to respond in real-time; versus having to reassign internal teams to troubleshoot the latest vulnerability. With a trusted partner that takes responsibility for security, maintenance and updates (like adding or removing users since local and state governments experience frequent fluctuations in staffing needs), the latest cyber “Exploit” to make headlines quickly becomes yesterday’s news.

The post State & Local Governments Respond to ‘Live’ Outlook Security Flaw appeared first on Thrive.

As technology evolves, we generate more and more data, and the management of that data becomes more critical. With around 4.66 billion active Internet users worldwide, the data produced daily surpasses the imagination: 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day in 2020. That is equivalent to 10 million blu-ray discs, which when stacked would be as tall as two Eiffel Towers combined. (Dihuni, 2020). 

Stored data grows 5x faster than the world economy. Yet, many of us neglect the very premise of data management, whether it’s family photos from a trip taken seven years ago or enterprise data like confidential emails and databases, 21% of people have never made a backup. Technological innovation has made it so data is the currency that runs the world. 

Data loss can occur in many different ways, from hardware failures to cyber-attacks. The fact is, this data loss can have a devastating impact on both individuals and businesses. Personal data loss can lead to the loss of precious memories, while business data loss can lead to significant financial loss, reputational damage, and even legal consequences. That’s why backing up your data is so important.

Regardless, people still need a reminder. World Backup Day, celebrated annually on March 31st, is a day dedicated to raising awareness about the need for data backup and protection. It’s a day for us to stop and think about our data, where it is stored, who has access to it, and what would happen if it were lost.

In celebration of this day, we could all use a refresher – back up your data by creating a duplicate copy and storing it in a separate location, so that if the original data is lost, you can recover it. There are different ways to backup your data, from cloud-based storage solutions to external hard drives. 

A data backup is just one part of the equation. It’s also essential to ensure that your data is protected from hackers and breaches to the best of your ability. This means using strong passwords, regularly changing those passwords, and limiting access to sensitive information.

On World Backup Day, take the time to review your data backup strategy and make sure that your data is protected. Ask yourself:

• Do you have a backup plan in place?
• How often do you back up your data?
• Where do you store your backup data?
• Who has access to your data?
• Do you use strong passwords to protect your data?

If the first bullet above seems daunting, there’s no need to fear. Thrive can help with solutions to take care of your data so you don’t have to. Thrive’s implementation of hybrid cloud solutions, cybersecurity data protection, and when all else fails, Disaster Recovery as a Service, ensures your business’ data is locked up 24x7x365 rather than just on this one important day. 

So, a Happy World Backup Day! And contact Thrive so we can help identify where the gaps are in your current security posture and put you on a path to better data management.

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