The cloud eliminates the need for expensive and outdated textbooks.

College and university students, who generally need to buy new books each year for each class, spend an average of $1,200 per year on textbooks. Meanwhile, K-12 schools spend $700 per student per year—and because it’s funded through tax dollars, they’ve become a major expense to the public at large. That’s not even the worst of it; on average, textbooks tend to be nearly a decade old, teaching outdated or simply wrong information. Textbooks are often even older in low-income areas, putting these students at a distinct disadvantage.

Cloud-based textbooks can solve both problems. Digital content costs significantly less than printed material. This can save college and university students hundreds per year and help level the playing field between lower and higher-income students. Cloud-based materials can also be easily updated so students always have access to the most current learning resources.

Virtualization in cloud computing eliminates the need and cost of expensive hardware.

It used to be that every school would have a room full of on-premise servers that ran all systems and held all data. This could get expensive whenever capacity was reached and new servers had to be purchased. But with most third-party cloud providers, schools only pay for the capacity they use, much like a utility. That’s not all; in a cloud-based model, schools don’t have the expenses associated with server room cooling, electric, and maintenance, which can get very costly, especially in warm-climate states (not to mention the need to keep them cooled and operational even when not in use during the extended holiday breaks). Finally, with many schools facing overcrowding, eliminating a server room frees up valuable space!

 The cloud offers easy accessibility and mobility.

In the cloud, applications can be run on internet browsers, so schools and students don’t necessarily have to own pricey computers or laptops; an inexpensive smartphone or tablet can allow access to lesson plans, coursework, and digital textbooks. The cloud also gives teachers the ability to work from home in order to finish up their work. Rather than getting to school hours before the first bell rings and staying hours after the last bell, teachers can grade tests and homework assignments, develop course curricula, enter grades, and respond to parents from the comfort of their homes when it’s convenient for them. With the 2021 EducationWeek report revealing that over 60% of teachers are highly stressed out and describing their mental health as “not good,” this could go a long way toward helping relieve their stress, which ultimately creates a better learning environment.

Virtualized data in the cloud offers more collaboration.

The cloud offers seamless integration between schools and university departments through file-sharing across any device, so faculty no longer needs a specific medium in which to collaborate or communicate with others. For students, the power of collaboration is also key when it comes to learning and preparing for the workforce. Students can work within virtual classrooms, communicate with students far away in real-time, and combine the education of people from completely different backgrounds. And because kids frequently get sick, they won’t have to miss assignments or give up participating in classroom discussions. This may also open the door for home-schooled children to participate with other students without attending class.

The cloud eliminates costs associated with paper—while cutting the carbon footprint.

Most educators are concerned about their carbon footprint—and more and more young people are worried about the environment, too. But education is one of the worst offenders when it comes to paper usage (or more appropriately, paper waste). Edutopia did some number crunching and found that on average, a school with 100 teachers uses approximately 250,000 pieces of paper per year. Based on paper costs, that’s $25,000, and printing on that paper would be another $7,500 per year, not to mention costs of copy toner and service agreements. Through the cloud, these schools can significantly reduce their carbon footprint and put over $30,000 back into the budget each year. (It’s worth noting that eliminating individual server rooms in schools can also significantly cut back on CO2 emissions and energy consumption, also making the school greener!)

How Thrive can help

Schools, colleges, and universities can greatly benefit from virtualization in cloud computing. They can reduce costs (and when funding is constantly being cut, this is huge), promote a better learning environment for students, and create a better working environment for educators. Thrive can help K-12 schools or post-secondary institutions move to a public cloud, hybrid cloud, or virtual private cloud with ease. Contact Thrive to learn more.

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How Can Today’s Small Businesses Use Artificial Intelligence?

AI is flexible in its design, intending to mimic the cognitive processes of the human brain. Essentially, it is software that can follow patterns and establish its own learning and reasoning processes to solve problems. This is why it’s so useful for small businesses. Here are some ways it can improve operations for SMBs:

Enhancing Cybersecurity

Your employees likely have a routine that they follow, and this routine is what makes their work responsibilities consistent. AI can use data to make predictions, a process which aids in cybersecurity and productivity. AI can take note of a user’s account and showcase when it’s doing something out of the ordinary, like logins at times when the office should be closed or from strange locations around the world. It can also tell if employee behavior is at odds with your security efforts.

Optimizing Customer Service

Businesses prioritize customer service, but the unfortunate fact is that it can be time-consuming. This time is often better spent on other processes and needs. AI systems can aid in customer service through the use of automated chatbots, providing customers ways to get the answers they need, when they need them. This removes some of the burden off your workforce and might just give them time to perform other tasks. Furthermore, it’s a great way to collect data about what your customers want and need.

Finessing Customer Relationships and Marketing Efforts

It takes a lot of effort to sift through the data and insights gathered during the customer relations and marketing aspects of your business and digging through this data can be an incredibly time-consuming and resource-intensive process without the use of AI. AI can examine this data and make conclusions based on it. You can then use these conclusions to make the most educated decisions possible for your organization moving forward.

Artificial Intelligence is More Accessible Than Ever

If you want to learn more about machine learning and other ways technology can make your business’ operations better, contact us. 

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In Microsoft’s FAQ for this, it defines Intelligent Communication Vision as:

What is Microsoft’s new vision for Intelligent Communications?

We’ve enjoyed great success across Office 365 with over 100M monthly commercial active users counting on Office 365 every day to get their work done. We are now aiming to bring the capabilities of Skype for Business in the cloud into Teams to deliver a single hub for teamwork, with built-in, fully integrated voice and video. By tightly weaving communications into the apps teams use to collaborate every day, alongside AI, Microsoft Graph, LinkedIn, and other data and cognitive services, we will enable Intelligent Communications, revolutionizing calling and meeting experiences.

Teams will eventually replace Microsoft Skype for Business.  For the uninitiated, Teams is Microsoft’s competitor to the highly successful and popular chat app, Slack.  It’s reported that Microsoft offered Slack $4b for acquisition, but the offer was turned down.  So what’s the big deal with Teams and Slack?  It’s simple, less email in your inbox.

If you haven’t used Slack or Teams, you are missing out.  The amount of informal and internal emails grow by the minute in my inbox.  Even better are the threads that start about where to have lunch that turn into strategies conversation. The truth is that they aren’t electronic mail any more, they are free flowing conversations.

These group chat applications take these conversational trends and greatly enhance them.  You can now have better, more efficient communication with more people who are actually paying attention.  For some of our internal teams, what used to be a volume of a couple hundred emails a week has turn into maybe 1 or 2 reference emails.

Teams is available in most Office365 suites at this point and Slack is free to try for as long as you like.  I highly recommend deploying either application to get a feel for how it works.  You’ll be surprised on how quickly the user adoption will take off.

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With the rise in application development over the past decade, the need for developers has increased at an exponential pace.  In most cases, we simply cannot train developers fast enough to meet the needs of the business world.  In reaction to this, many software companies have attempted take the highly trained developer out of the equation.  PowerApps is Microsoft’s strategy on how to solve this problem.

PowerApps is a cloud-native, low code/no code, application development environment.  That description alone may scare you away but it’s not as hard to learn as it sounds.  It’s also included in the majority of Office365 service offerings.  By the way, get used to hearing the term “low-code/no-code”, as its becoming quite popular.

To dive in on an example of how this can be used, we wanted to build an app that we could use for visitor sign-in at our front desk.  This is a perfect use-case for PowerApps.  So, we built a couple of screens in PowerApps, which was surprisingly simple.

The 4 screens we built were:

• Welcome Screen – 2 buttons, one for signing in and one for signing out.
• Sign-in Screen – a simple form with contact information
• Sign-out Screen – A simple list of signed in visitors
• Thank You Screen

After building out these 4 screens in PowerApps, we then connected the data to a SharePoint list which was also in the cloud.  The great advantage to PowerApps is that you can build it up and tear it down without breaking anything in your existing environment.  After the app has been created and published, you can then launch from any device.

This example only scratches the surface on what’s possible within PowerApps.  You can also connect it to other applications via another Microsoft product, called Microsoft Flow.  With these components together, you can now build workflows and chains of events to complete very complex tasks.  Even if you took one basic programming course in college or high school, a lot of the same basic concepts will help you learn how to take advantage of PowerApps.

Microsoft has also published some excellent training to get you started that can be found here.

To learn more about this and other Microsoft products Thrive offers contact us today!

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New data backup and recovery technologies eliminate failure risks while increasing efficiency and promoting faster recovery time.  Additionally the newer technologies and services reduce network risks that often go undetected and provide solutions that reduce storage management and maintenance costs.

Every company has different data storage requirements that depend upon the type of industry.  In order to choose the best data protection solution it is important to know what your options are and why these options are the better choice for information security management.

Hosted Cloud Services

 Cloud-based data protection is an option that many companies are using due to its accessibility, reliability, and security.  Data storage in the cloud represents an affordable solution for many businesses because it has the capability to provide the best of both worlds which is immediate access to data while enjoying the reliability and security of offsite storage. Also, most cloud service providers offer different levels of vaulting solutions to meet industry compliance and regulatory standards.

In terms of protecting your servers and workstations, a quality cloud hosting provider is capable of backing up your servers in the cloud and data which is relevant to your workstations.  If your company experiences a hardware failure or natural disaster you can quickly recover by tapping into your resources with the cloud hosting service.

Onsite Data Storage and Backup

 Some companies deploy onsite data storage  to provide easy access to data.  By storing and backing up data onsite recovery time is faster than offsite storage and you can add storage as needed.

A few of the drawbacks of onsite data storage  is your company can suffer a complete loss in the event of a fire or flood if you are not using multiple backup methods.  Also, it is necessary for someone to monitor the system and perform backups on a routine basis.  Depending upon the data workload, onsite storage can also be costly in terms of hardware and maintenance.

 Offsite Storage and Backup

 Offsite storage is offered in a variety of different methods which include tape storage, data warehousing, or data storage strategies which are configured by the company.   Offsite data storage utilizes redundant data storage which provides multiple backup copies and can be designed for storage in multiple locations.

 Although offsite data storage eliminates the possibility of human error it can be costly and bandwidth intensive when it comes to ongoing backup.  The recovery process is significantly slower than onsite storage depending upon the methods that are used for recovery.

What we have described here are the primary options that companies consider for data protection and storage.  It is important to mention that multiple backup and storage methods are commonly deployed for added reassurance in the event of a disaster.

Data protection and backup  does not have to be complex.  To discover cost effective options for data protection, contact Thrive Networks for assistance with setting up a data protection and backup strategy.

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The answer to this dilemma is the incorporation of new technologies into your IT infrastructure.  Although this may sound like you are increasing IT capital expenditures you are actually cutting costs while increasing productivity in response to the ever changing market.  Here are some thoughts on how to reduce costs while still maintaining the competitive advantage.

IT Lifecycle

 It is a well known fact that IT infrastructures which are older are much more expensive to maintain and present many challenges in terms of working with hardware and software that is no longer compatible with new applications.  In many cases the older IT infrastructures tend to remain in operation because they serve as a comfort zone, so to speak, for the IT department and management despite the fact that the system is very costly to maintain.  If one were to analyze the exact cost of retaining the older infrastructure chances are the results would show exorbitant maintenance and operating costs in addition to high energy consumption.  So what is the answer?

Let’s consider the virtualization model.  Virtualization is a methodology that provides a solution for companies to consolidate older infrastructures.  This is accomplished by combining servers which can then be controlled through single point access.  This type of system increases the utilization of hardware by as much as 85 percent where the older infrastructures may use as little as 20 percent.

Transitioning to virtualization means cutting operating costs significantly while improving reliability and reducing downtime.  Server consolidation is also scalable so you can deliver IT services on-demand. Plus fewer servers mean lower energy consumption and reduced cooling requirements.

Information Lifecycle Management and Data Storage

 Without a doubt, the growth of data and information is a major contributor to the increase in IT costs. The older infrastructures are unable to meet the demand for more affordable solutions that help to reduce the data storage footprint.  Older methods such as tape storage can increase downtime in the event of a disaster plus offsite storage is typically more expensive compared to the newer methods for data storage and backup.

When you consider a cloud hosted model, virtualization is the channel to a solid data storage and backup system in the cloud.  This means that your IT resources are consolidated into logical steps for storage, network, and servers which create a virtual datacenter.  This is known as a holistic approach to information lifecycle management and data storage requirements. The result is the reduction of IT capital expenditures in terms of maintenance and administration while improving the level of service.

Virtualization and cloud hosted services are being considered by more companies for the reasons we have discussed in the article.  Hopefully these thoughts will help to spur some ideas and options as to how your company can save on IT capital expenditures.  When it comes to remaining competitive in today’s marketplace most companies should not be asking, “Why should we consider virtualization and cloud hosting?”  Instead, the question should be, “Why are we not already using virtualization and cloud services?”

If you are trying to find ways to reduce the cost of IT capital expenditures, contact Thrive Networks today for assistance with designing a strategy for reducing IT costs over the next one to three years.

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In the last few years small businesses have become the target for network intrusions because hackers are aware that most small businesses do not implement security practices.  The perception is that network security is only important for large companies, government organizations, and financial institutions.  This perception is rapidly changing with the increased number of small businesses. So, what does network monitoring typically involve?  Let’s start by defining network monitoring.

What is Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring involves multiple methods which are deployed for the purpose of maintaining the security and integrity of an internal network.  The internal network is also known as a Local Area Network (LAN) and monitoring encompasses hardware, software, viruses, spyware, vulnerabilities such as backdoors and security holes, and other aspects that can compromise the integrity of a network.

Network Monitoring Methods

There is a wide variety of network monitoring methods which are implemented by IT professionals.  The techniques are deployed via network monitoring solutions that automatically detect and respond to security and performance problems.

• Intrusion Detection: Intrusion detection monitors local area networks for unauthorized access by hackers.  This method can be implemented manually however, most IT professionals prefer to use an intrusion detection program which automatically detects viruses and malware, network vulnerabilities such as backdoors, logic bombs and other security threats, individual PCs which are connected to the network and file settings.  intrusion detection programs generate reports following a system check so any issues can be addressed.
• Packet Sniffing: A packet sniffer is a program that inspects every packet of information that passes through the network.  The purpose of a packet sniffer is to detect unauthorized network monitoring software which may be installed by hackers for spying on business activity and information processes.
• Vulnerability Scanning: A vulnerability scanner will periodically scan the network for vulnerabilities and weaknesses which open up the potential for an exploit.  This method varies from intrusion detection because it detects a weakness before the attack has taken place.  Intrusion detection identifies unauthorized access after the hacker has breached the network.
• Firewall Monitoring: Firewalls monitor the traffic that is coming in and out of the network.  Firewall monitoring tracks the activities of a firewall to ensure the screening process for incoming and outgoing connections is functioning properly and securely.
• Penetration Testing: Penetration testing is carried out by IT professionals by using methods that hackers use to breach a network.  The purpose of this process is to take network security to another level by discovering vulnerabilities that hackers may have knowledge of but have not yet been detected via other monitoring methods.

If you have a small business you may want to consider network monitoring as an essential part of your data security strategy.  As you can see there is a lot involved with keeping a local area network secure which can result in increased network maintenance costs.

The other alternative is to consider using a network monitoring service that will oversee the important security aspects of your underlying infrastructure.  If you would like to learn more about network monitoring contact Thrive Networks to discover ways to reduce costs while maintaining network integrity.

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