Managing Microsoft 365 can be challenging for mid-market businesses, especially when it comes to security, compliance, and data protection. Without a clear governance strategy, organizations risk inefficiencies, unauthorized access, and compliance violations.

This guide provides practical insights and best practices to help mid-market companies take control of their Microsoft 365 environment. Learn how Thrive can help your business manage access, enforce policies, and safeguard sensitive data while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Download now to strengthen your Microsoft 365 governance strategy.

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Learning and Adoption services include the following:

• Advisory service to assist with developing an adoption plan for your organization
• A Learning Management System (LMS) to serve as the platform to drive adoption in your organization
• Analytics pulled directly from the Microsoft 365 Graph about feature usage and adoption metrics
• Live instructor-led trainings, Q&A sessions, webinars, and recorded short-form content delivered directly to your end-users
• “Right in time” content for when users need help in the moment

Empower Your Microsoft 365 End-Users

Embracing new technology is critical for organizational success. By adopting technology like Microsoft 365, organizations can better streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, and stay competitive in their industry.

But with any user-based solution like Microsoft 365, ensuring successful end-user learning and adoption is crucial for optimizing and driving awareness of critical software features. Accelerating and tracking the adoption of new technologies in your organization will allow for higher productivity and the ability to get new employees started off on the right foot. Having cloud-based learning management in place allows your organization to manage your corporate learning and be able to roll out new technology and monitor its adoption all from one platform.

Learning Management System Highlights

Like with any learning technology, an LMS is only as effective as the content it provides to its end-users and how it’s delivered to them. When implemented properly, there are many benefits to using a modern LMS platform like Thrive’s to create the ideal learning experience:

• Short courses to keep user attention
• Live-moderated webinars
• Automated communications
• Ability to upload and customize content
• LMS application for Microsoft Teams

No matter what industry your organization is in, driving Microsoft 365 adoption through Thrive’s Learning and Adoption service can improve your business’s processes and productivity, and ultimately help achieve your business goals. Utilizing the Thrive’s LMS and Learning and Adoption services allows you to:

• Develop Tailored Content: You can create different skill paths that relate directly to each end-user and the way they work
• Provide Proactive Communication: You can write and schedule automated messages that simplify and scale communications across your organization
• Create Customized Experiences: You have the ability to create different interactive experiences, such as integrated user polls, executive sponsor videos, and more!
• Analyze Graph Data Integration: You can see real-time data reporting on the LMS platform via integration with the Microsoft Graph API
• Content Updates: You can use evergreen content that reflects the latest updates from Microsoft

Contact Thrive today to learn more about how we can provide consulting and best practices around utilizing Learning and Adoption services and improve adoption of Microsoft 365 technology in your organization.

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In the spring of 2007, just before the 2008 financial crisis hit, Nassim Taleb presciently published a widely read book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. As if reading from a crystal ball, Taleb laid out his thesis that as our global economy scales and becomes more and more complex, we begin to see the unforeseen and unpredictable more and more often. He argued that to be competitive and truly profit from these unpredictable “black swan” events, you have to organize your business strategy to be ready for them, even if they seem very unlikely.

Effective Enterprise DR Planning Includes Cybersecurity, Public Health, and Natural Disasters

Since then we have had at least two of these worldwide seismic events. The most recent, the current pandemic, has been a wake-up call for every business worldwide. Disasters on a global scale do happen and, as it turns out, some businesses have been better prepared to meet the needs of their customers during this event. These companies have not only realized a short-term competitive advantage, but they have secured a firm foundation for their future growth.

But if disasters are unpredictable black swans, how do you plan for them? Taleb shows through a series of examples how important it is to think through the worst kind of risks that you might face and take out insurance against those possibilities. If the risk seems low to everyone else, then it will probably turn out that it doesn’t cost that much to insure yourself against it. And a corollary of this principle, if the worst happens, you will also probably be one of the few survivors. Which can put your business in a very strong competitive situation.

One of the important pieces in your disaster insurance strategy has to be a good disaster recovery plan for your company’s data. Cybersecurity events fall into that class of newly emerging black swan threats that face every business. As we embrace autonomous technologies built around IoT, AI, and machine learning, we are unleashing tremendous productive potential, but we are also setting ourselves up for a potential perfect digital storm.

Much as public health professionals have been warning us of the possibility of a pandemic for the last few decades, cybersecurity professionals have been trying to alert the world to its precarious state around digital security. No one knows exactly how or what will occur, but most who work in this field are concerned that we have a good chance of seeing a major cybersecurity event in the coming decades. Will your business be ready to survive and potentially even profit from it?

Key Considerations for SMB and Enterprise DR Planning

As gloomy as these threats are to contemplate, effective enterprise DR planning has to start with thinking through the worst-case scenarios that you might face so that you can ensure that resources and processes are in place to prevent or rapidly recover from a disaster.

Here are some key considerations at a glance.

1. Start by looking at what parts of your business systems, applications, and data that you simply cannot afford to lose.
2. Then take it to the next level by asking, “If all of my competitors were knocked down by the same event as me, what kinds of data recovery would give me an immediate advantage?” There could be an easily achievable difference between being minimally operable and able to pounce on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. In developing a good data disaster recovery plan, you need to analyze the vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure and identify the critical components of your operations. This has to be linked to a thorough analysis of your business functions and an assessment of which are the most critical to your ability to not only survive but successfully compete.
4. You must also ensure that your disaster recovery plan is well understood by your teams. Ensure that they are prepared to execute the DR plan when the time comes. This is difficult to do when the threat is a black swan event that is unpredictable and looks to most people consumed in their daily to-dos as highly theoretical, at best.
5. For this reason, it is important to fully script out the responses to a wide variety of emergency scenarios. Training and periodic trial runs — fire drills — are also a good way to ensure that when the moment comes, people will have developed some engrained patterns that they can fall back on when their amygdala has gone into overdrive.
6. To ensure that you have the skill sets and coverage needed during a disaster, also think about engaging the services of a third-party disaster recovery team. We have firefighters and other first responders for a very good reason. Training and constant practice in dealing with disasters is the only good way to be prepared for them when they strike. However, most businesses and organizations want to avoid having ‘constant practice’ with recovering from disasters for obvious reasons.

A Disaster Recovery partner can allow you to focus on your day-to-day operations, while also having access to reliable and specialized backup and recovery support. A DR partner can apply the deep expertise that they have honed with disasters day in and day out to your specific business needs. They can help you think through your business priorities, identify vulnerabilities in your systems, design backup systems and protocols, and provide critical and rapid response support. This will ensure that you cannot only recover gracefully but seize the moment when your competitors cannot.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services and can help to guide as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around data loss prevention and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

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Microsoft Office has long been the preferred communications, collaboration, and productivity application suite for organizations. So, when Microsoft shifted Office to the cloud with Office 365, it was a strong signal to organizations that SaaS was here to stay. All of this was good news to IT departments that are weary of the time and money spent on supporting the old on-premises model.

Now, with automatic updates, employees always have the latest version of the software and can collaborate seamlessly on documents. When integrated with Microsoft’s other powerful cloud platforms like Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, any size organization can have the full benefit of this powerful platform for communicating, sharing, and creating information to help drive their business.

Whether employees are working in the office, remotely or while on the move, they can utilize the Microsoft SaaS suite of applications thanks to support for operating systems ranging from Windows to Mac OS and Linux, including IOS and Android tablets and other mobile devices. With all of their data in the cloud, employees can move from device to device with complete confidence that the latest version of their documents and files are available to work on from anywhere, via any device.

As easy as this all sounds, there are still a bunch of requirements and policies that IT departments need to consider when implementing remote workers and Office 365.

BYOD Security Policies

Employees love the freedom that Office 365 gives them to use their own devices. While it may still be best practice for employees to use only business-supplied equipment, for many organizations, BYOD is here to stay. Thus, it is important to set up the right policies for remote workers. For instance, not sharing work devices with family members or, if that’s not possible, ensuring a separate password-protected account for the remote worker on the family machine.

Collaboration and Communication Policies

If the remote employee is using equipment provided by the business, the policy should be to disallow any sharing or personal computer use on the office-supplied laptop — or, at the very least, personal email and social media communications must have a separate account on the device. Email best practices are the same for all employees, and they should be well-trained to spot phishing attacks. Documents of importance to the organization should be worked on in SharePoint with proper version control and access controls implemented.

Configuration and Remote Access

Remote updating of laptop configurations is not so different for remote and office workers if remote desktop software is installed. OS updates have to be scheduled with the employee but are easily managed with an internet-facing WSUS server. Management of Office 365 licenses is also similar. Don’t forget that with more workers accessing internal servers remotely, you have to have enough certificates on hand to support NSA multi-factor authentication for those times when remote working volume spikes.

Office 365 Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery

Finally, the need for regular data backup and disaster recovery planning does not go away just because the data is in Microsoft’s cloud. It is true that with cloud services, hard drive failures and lost laptops do not pose the same level of concern regarding data loss as they once did. But these are by no means the only ways to lose precious data.

The most common cause of data loss is user errors. Unfortunately, businesses often learn the hard way that many SaaS applications, including Office 365, lack comprehensive support to remedy these issues. Many SaaS providers specifically exclude covering user error issues in their terms and conditions. Users can overwrite files by mistake, accounts get deleted, folders disappear, and malicious emails are opened. In addition to the applications themselves, you need to have a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery policy and workstation backup services that allow you to recover previous versions of a file, folder, or even an account.

There are other serious considerations around archiving and searching records. If you delete a user license when an employee leaves, Microsoft Office 365 will only keep a backup of an employee’s email, contacts and calendar for 30 days. OneDrive files are kept for longer, but not forever. Thus, when employees leave the organization, it is critical to have a full backup of their files and protection of historical email in case you need them later to maintain continuity with suppliers or customers. You may also need those long-term backups and archives because of legal actions and compliance with audit regulations such as GDPR, PIPEDA, and HIPPA, which require businesses to maintain intact records for multiple years.

On the disaster recovery front, remote worker’s devices are more vulnerable to loss, damage and theft because of the public nature of the places they may work and their frequent mobility. They are just as exposed as any other part of the business to ransomware attacks, which are on the rise. Office 365 and other Microsoft services are often a primary target of such attacks.

Thus, it is crucial to maintain endpoint security for remote devices, managing the remote user’s anti-virus and spam protection. Given the vulnerabilities associated with Wi-Fi, especially public Wi-Fi services, employees should use a VPN to access the enterprise intranet, as well as for connections to cloud-based applications like Office 365. Despite the higher risks that are associated with remote work, a comprehensive offsite or cloud data backup service is your ultimate backstop should they experience difficulties.

The need for these precautions shouldn’t outweigh the advantages of remote work, and there are ways to avoid the extra overhead associated with managing your remote workforce. Look for a partner who can help you get the most out of the Microsoft productivity platform with cloud-based data backup and disaster recovery, as well as management of Office 365 licenses, user account management, end-point security, training and set-up assistance.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Experts

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection and security services. Office 365 Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery are some of our top rated services.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability and support that your business demands.

Office 365 Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery Services

Contact us today to discover your options around Office 365 Cloud to Cloud Backup services, and about other Thrive services that can help you to meet your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data. 

The post Remote Workers and Office 365 Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery appeared first on Thrive.

For IT managers needing to set up cloud services for remote workers, there are several things to consider. These include services for cloud, security, backups, and disaster recovery. Additionally, there are HR policies that need to change, extended employee training, new equipment and software licenses, and configuration of network access and permissions for these more mobile employees.

On the hosting front, the cloud solves one of the biggest issues — scaling. As employees become more mobile and move in and out of the office, the need for remote access infrastructure can become quite unpredictable. For instance, if a snowstorm closes schools, most of your staff may suddenly want to work from home. Fortunately, the cloud’s ability to scale on demand means that you can accommodate them.

Managed Cloud Services are based on multi-tenant virtual machines running environments such as VMWare, Hyper-V, and Nutanix. Because virtual machines can be spun up at a moment’s notice, you should have on-demand access to these resources with no practical limits. They are perfect environments for supporting business operations that are unpredictable such as remote work.

You may also want the option to use cloud infrastructure for more sensitive and predictable operations. The option may also be available to co-locate some of your own compute and storage hardware in the same facility alongside cloud infrastructure to create a hybrid cloud setup for added flexibility and security. Ideally, the two services can be bundled together in a single cost-effective offer.

On the most basic level, you will need your cloud supplier to provide the networking and data infrastructure to support remote workers. This includes remote access servers, data storage, and operating software. This is known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Your remote workers will need fully redundant private networking with direct, secure connectivity including VPNs and firewalls. If your operations are widely distributed, the cloud provider should be able to offer you multiple certified data center options along with clear service level agreements (SLAs).

One of the most challenging aspects of working from home is ensuring that data backups are running regularly and are error-free. Unlike the in-office desktop PC, home PCs and laptops are not connected to the LAN 24/7; this can make running and managing backups difficult. Fortunately, cloud-based backup services are always connected to the user’s machine. Thus, it is possible to run continuous or scheduled backups of the contents of the remote machine throughout the day. A good backup service should also offer an internal backup system for the machine as well.

SaaS applications, like Salesforce, Microsoft 365 or G Suite help to ensure that remote workers are keeping their data in the cloud, but these SaaS services also need to be included in the backup service landscape. Most SaaS providers do back up their servers, but these backups are often limited in scope and have few recovery points to restore from. Many SaaS providers won’t take responsibility for partially or fully restoring your data, especially in the common scenario where user error has caused a failure, corruption, or breach.

Without strict enforcement and training, many end users tend to save their files on their PCs in local folders like “My Documents” rather than on company servers. These machines are often turned off during normal backup windows which complicates data protection. To prevent data loss, IT managers should search for a workstation backup solution that offers resume and cache functionalities, along with the ability to back up locally saved workstation data.

With remote work, risks around email phishing and other security concerns increase. Thus, it is critical to have continuous backups of user data so that it is possible to restore previous versions of files and roll back user error or outside threats such as ransomware or crypto-type attacks.

Finally, it is critical to have a disaster recovery service (DRaaS). There are, after all, worse things than snow days. Flooding, fire, disgruntled employees and outside cyberattacks can shut down your business, sometimes costing you days and weeks to recover. As businesses and organizations pursue their digital transformation, the stakes are only mounting.

Remote workers and their data have to be included in the recovery plan. The disaster may be something that occurs in their home or co-working space and yet not affect any of your offices. To complicate matters, if you have a BYOD policy, they may be working off of their machines. You will have to quickly replace non-standard laptops, tablets, or other devices and restore their data.

DRaaS providers can not only protect your data assets; they can also provide an entire disaster recovery service. Your IT department will obviously want to take the lead on recovery efforts, but they probably won’t have a lot of experience doing it and might also be feeling the pressure.

A DRaaS provider should be able to help. After all, it is their day-to-day business to help businesses and organizations of all kinds and sizes to recover from these kinds of events. They should consult with you beforehand to put a disaster recovery process in place, and they can help save you many hours and days by guiding the IT team in the right direction when you need to recover.

Working remotely is becoming increasingly popular and for younger generations of workers, it is often viewed as essential. The good news is that supporting these new, more flexible work patterns is much easier and cost-effective with the cloud and managed services. This is not only making the workplace more flexible and attractive, it also enables you to on-board workers faster, accommodate partners and suppliers that are collaborating with you and, generally, make your business or organization more agile — as well as safe and secure.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Experts

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to learn more about how Thrive can help you to meet your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.

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