However, many companies who have purchased this type of insurance have learned a hard lesson in the past few years – insurers will not pay claims or renew policies unless the policyholder follows the guidelines of what’s required to protect a company’s computer network and data from attacks. 

Simply put, many businesses think that it’s enough to just purchase this type of insurance, receive a claim payment if an intrusion occurs, then return to normal operation.

Unfortunately, a cybersecurity insurance plan on its own is absolutely not enough and must be supplemented with network defense tools, employee education modules, and documented recovery plans.

Your Business’s New Homeowners Insurance

Most people who have homeowner’s insurance understand they may have to perform some preventative maintenance in order to receive a claim for any damages that may result. 

For example, an insurer might warn a policyholder that his or her property requires upgrades to its electrical system. And, if down the line there is an electrical fire, the insurer will not pay out a claim for these damages if the policyholder did not make the necessary upgrades or pull the right permits to show they were made.

It’s no different with cybersecurity insurance. Businesses have to meet certain contingencies in order to say they’ve done all they could to protect themselves from cyber-based crimes. After all, a ransomware attack or data breach is no different than a burglar entering a property and stealing a person’s most valuable possessions.

Insurance companies are not charities, and those that issue cybersecurity policies have had to pay out a lot of money in recent years, with one cybersecurity insurance specialist stating they processed more claims in the first half of 2021 than any other time period. They won’t do so anymore unless a business has done all it can to lock its doors.

Reducing the Attack Surface

Insurance companies want businesses to reduce their attack surface as much as possible – in essence, do all they can to reduce the vulnerabilities that can result in a successful cyber attack.

In the eyes of insurers, this requires companies to implement the following:

• EMAIL PROTECTION. An estimated 96% of cybercrimes happen via a phishing attack generated via email. To retain coverage, businesses must put in place multiple layers of protection to prevent a malicious email from reaching an end-user.
• TRAINING. In the event that a malicious email gets past the organization’s firewall and email filtering, companies are asked to provide frequent training for employees on what they should look out for to prevent a cyberattack, such as how to identify phishing scams.
• NEXTGEN ANTIVIRUS PROTECTION. Older antivirus protections rely on an established, and often out of date, database of known threats. Utilizing traditional antivirus software requires endpoints (ex: the laptops that employees have at home) to make required updates so that they’re referencing the most ‘up-to-date’ data. This causes a severe lag as hackers and those who write malware are often many steps ahead. The most modern antivirus software offers real-time protection and greater intelligence when scanning for malware. NextGen antivirus protection monitors traffic 24/7 for faster, more accurate recognition of potential threats. Instead of reviewing files and traffic to identify if something suspicious happened in the past, NextGen antivirus protection catches attacks as they are attempted.
• MULTI-FACTOR/2-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION. Phishing attacks require someone to give up their unique password. Companies that enable 2FA or MFA have significantly increased protection over their valuable data due to the added layer(s) of authentication needed for login. With 2FA and MFA, even if an attacker obtains a password they likely won’t be able to get the token or extra code needed to cause a successful breach. 

Plugging the Holes

IT security awareness and best practices are not just the responsibility of one person, but instead must be a focal point for an entire company. It is often overwhelming for companies without a dedicated IT team to understand what’s needed to meet the standards of a cybersecurity insurance policy, and even more of a task to deploy the preventative measures needed to stay in compliance.

Thrive’s expert team of cybersecurity professionals can help you review your policy and discuss the wide range of security options, training services, and full supervision of IT software available to keep your data protected. 

Learn more about where your company stands today by scheduling a cybersecurity risk assessment with Thrive. 

The post The Importance of Cybersecurity Insurance appeared first on Thrive.

Thrive’s Year in Review

In 2021, Thrive grew its presence and global protection reach. In the past year, we:

•   Onboarded over 100 new customers
•   Grew NextGen security by over 450%
•   Protected over 60,000 endpoints

Security Statistics

Increased security threats were felt on a global scale. Here is what we saw at Thrive:

•   900 security incidents (investigations) per month
•   30% increase in investigations month-over-month
•   Overall 30% rise in investigations

Top 3 Investigation Types for 2021:

1.   Intrusion Prevention
2.   Intrusion Detection
3.   Client VPN-related alerts

Thrive ended the year with over 1,200 customers across the US and the UK. With the increased number of high-profile cyber attacks that occurred in 2021, more attention than ever is being focused on risk mitigation and damage remediation to preserve businesses’ customer confidence and public image.

Building a cyber readiness plan that adheres to best practices can be difficult. Thrive’s managed cybersecurity solutions are deployed on its industry-leading cybersecurity platform for comprehensive support that empowers Thrive’s CISSP-certified experts to not only identify problems, but also solve them.

With an Active Remediation approach, Thrive’s security experts are empowered with the access, know-how, and trust to directly mitigate and remediate issues, keeping critical business systems and staff operational. Contact us to help you in 2022.

The post Thrive’s 2021 Year in Review appeared first on Thrive.

Joe Peppard makes some compelling arguments in his article “It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT Department” in The Wall Street Journal. His primary suggestion throughout the piece is to decentralize IT and embed technology experts within business units because the traditional siloing of IT hinders its ability to add business value. But in the move to align with the new reality that “the business is the technology and the technology is the business”, companies still need centrally managed IT support to make sure their infrastructure is performing and secure.

Creating Common Threads
Although IT has in the past functioned on its own island of intelligence, this obsolete model no longer functions in today’s dynamic business environment.

Now, business problems more often than not require a technology-based solution. If a company’s brightest technologists are either siloed or too busy with mundane tasks like employee onboarding, password resets, or software patching, they’re not available to help where they are most needed. Having a common thread of technology expertise in every department to alleviate some of those tasks can power the elusive digital transformation many are striving for.

What Happens Without Centralized IT
Distributing an IT department to the four corners of the enterprise could leave a very big gap in service, which Peppard does acknowledge. There needs to be someone making the company-wide decisions and enforcing corporate policies, so there are not a dozen IT fiefdoms with their own management, support, and security challenges.

If one team manages tasks and tickets using Zendesk while another uses HubSpot or Excel, collaboration time and efficiency are lost by cross-referencing databases or trying to merge data. On top of functionality headaches, the organization is most likely paying for two different solutions for the same problem. Imagine differing security protocols across departments – you would not want one group implementing one vendor’s multi-factor authentication solution while the next group picks their favorite MFA provider. There needs to be someone taking a 10,000-foot view of the entire company’s IT and cyber security needs.

Filling the Void
The question becomes, how does an organization both place its technical know-how directly into business units and support a functional IT infrastructure when it is more than likely short-staffed and lacking critical skills?

The managed services approach enables companies to shift away from the traditional centralized IT organization that services the entire company. By going above and beyond what most internal IT teams can deliver in terms of 24/7/365 monitoring and support, multi-vendor expertise, and strategic thinking from virtual CIOs and CISOs, MSPs such as Thrive hold the key to a successful, secure digital transformation for organizations of all levels of technical ability.

Empowering IT to Drive Transformation
Today’s IT teams are not only reactive; they are critically proactive. They can bring some much-needed problem-solving muscle across the organization, but they just need to be unleashed from the monotony of routine IT tasks.

Not everyone has the capacity to dedicate heads in their organization to manage IT internally and drive digital transformation. Regardless of where your IT lives, they must exist to help move your organization forward. Whether your team needs a little extra support or you’d like to migrate those responsibilities fully remote, Thrive’s Managed IT Solutions or vCISO service are here to help you stay up-to-date and protected. All while you do what you do best – serve your customers.

The post Time to Get Rid of the IT Department? Not Exactly. appeared first on Thrive.

To ensure client success, Thrive brings together the people, processes, and platforms that businesses need to succeed, making us valuable partners for our clients up and down the East Coast.

Our Customer Account Management Model

Our Customer Account Management, or “pod” model, includes virtual CIOs, Principal Consultants (PCs), Client Engagement Managers (CEMs), and Account Executives (AEs). When clients call, they speak to a well-versed team member assigned specifically to the account. There’s no need to wait around for a response, as we provide managed services coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Industry-Specific Knowledge

We’re proud to assist organizations across the business spectrum, to strategically implement IT infrastructure that meets industry-specific demands.

We serve leaders in several sectors, including:

• Financial services
• Life sciences
• Healthcare
• Education
• Retail
• Legal

Most importantly, we track the latest government, security, and related regulations to ensure clients have comprehensive protection and a tailored cyber security plan.

The Thrive Platform

Powered by ServiceNow, the Thrive Platform is a comprehensive IT service management resource. Not only does this platform automate previously manual tasks, but it also informs decisions and educates an entire workforce. When logging in to the platform, clients can see the latest system news and status reports, access product sheets, and learn about the latest trends in IT through our blog posts.

The platform also includes a full training library, which helps align an entire organization’s IT and cybersecurity operations, limiting end user downtime and business disruption.

NextGen and Traditional IT Services

Thrive’s NextGen managed services accelerate any IT program, optimizing business performance and future-proofing digital infrastructure in the process. Managed Cloud, cyber security, and disaster recovery offerings bring clients into the 21st century and help them prepare for future growth.

Of course, our traditional IT services, which include hardware and software, server infrastructure, and office firewalls, also provide a level of customization for clients. With each service, we leverage the latest technology to deliver the most beneficial solution for each client’s needs.

Our Mission – Serving Clients Every Day

Over the years, we’ve built a corporate culture around client success, which drives us every day. We are constantly evaluating, building, and delivering the best IT solutions to our clients, and staying up to date with the latest trends in the marketplace.

The dedicated engineers and team members on our staff are committed to serving the needs of Thrive’s clients and have a passion for knowledge that informs their decision-making.

We strive to deliver an engaging and welcoming client experience every day. Get in touch with us to learn more about our services and see how we can transform your IT infrastructure.

The post How Thrive Ensures Client Success appeared first on Thrive.

Our consultative approach takes a deep dive into multiple segments of IT operations and infrastructure to understand business requirements and provide solutions. At Thrive, we’re well-positioned to provide solutions to existing IT issues while working to prevent potential emerging threats.

The Thrive Technology Assessment

Does your organization need someone to lift up the hood and take a closer look at your IT operations? There’s a good chance the answer to that question is, “Yes.” During the initial phase of the Thrive5 Methodology, we perform a technology assessment that includes an in-depth review of your:

• Servers
• Networking
• Cybersecurity
• Governance
• Messaging

Looking at the existing solutions, we compare them against IT best practices to identify gaps that can be eliminated to mitigate risk and deliver greater efficiency for the business.

We all know that in 2020, IT departments were thrown a significant curveball. More specifically, backup and disaster recovery became a critical piece of our assessment process as many Americans worked from home. Just last month, a large-scale Google outage struck, affecting end users and their ability to access e-mail, YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Classroom, among other things. We help organizations plan for these types of scenarios, among others, to mitigate downtime.

We evaluate business processes as well as technology to ensure you’re meeting your company’s uptime requirements. What is your business willing to tolerate from a downtime or data loss perspective when unexpected events occur? Typically, that tolerance is low. We peel the layers back to understand your current technology stack and make specific recommendations to fill in the gaps and provide perspective on cost and priorities.

Solutions that Meet Your Specific Needs

Nine times out of ten, a company is missing critical tools that enable them to understand the current state of their environment on a real-time basis. That makes it nearly impossible to know how to deploy upgrades and new solutions.

For example, we have seen several organizations using on-premise hardware when it makes more sense to be in the cloud. Part of our assessment process maps out how our clients will migrate to the cloud. Some customers require a full overhaul, while some may only need minor updates. What the majority, if not all of our customers need, is the latest generation of security products, including our fully-developed SIEM/SOC solution, EDR-based protection for workstations, next generation firewalls, and disaster recovery.

As many of our services are standardized and consistent across the board with best practices, we have built out our service delivery and account management structure with the flexibility to align with our clients’ specific needs. Our service delivery teams also have vertical alignments, enabling them to provide additional value and expertise in both their recommendations as well as implementation and a best-in-class customer service experience.

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No matter where your employees are currently working, the team at Thrive is here to answer the call and provide solutions through our Thrive5 Methodology. To learn more about creating an IT roadmap for your organization, get in touch with us today!

The post How the Thrive5 Methodology Delivers IT Best Practices appeared first on Thrive.

Finding the right framework fit for your organization’s IT approach is easy when working with a team that understands the current landscape and requirements of your business. With Thrive, you can have a customized IT framework that provides transparency, security and performance.

Thrive’s Top IT Frameworks: ITIL & CIS

There are two frameworks we tend to use here at Thrive: ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)-based and CIS (Center for Internet Security)-based. ITIL-based frameworks govern things like efficiency, capacity planning, liability planning, and end user requests. Lately, my focus has been on CIS-based frameworks, which give insight into what is being done well within an organization and where improvements can be made.

Oftentimes, we identify areas in which there may be framework gaps. This can be anything from comprehensive asset management and discovery to software packages. One big challenge organizations currently face is the concept of “shadow IT.” With different business units utilizing the cloud, there’s no need for employees to request permission to install applications or contact IT to perform a basic action, like using Google Drive. However, this can raise its own set of problems.

Staying On Top of Security

By going through CIS software discovery controls, we help raise awareness to ensure that a business is aware of all applications, both cloud and internal, and account for them.

This helps answer important questions like:

• How is a member of the organization authenticating themselves?
• What’s the nature of the data that’s being stored?
• When someone leaves an organization, is HR aware that files can be transferred, putting company information at risk?
• Are unauthorized users accessing sensitive or proprietary information?

We help organizations understand hardware and software controls, who should manage authentication for systems, what level of encryption is present, and whether endpoint patching and endpoint detection and response systems are in place.

If something happens, how do you respond if there is suspicious activity? How are employees notified of a potential incident, and who should be contacted for the next steps? We go through these controls with IT leaders and key members and stakeholders at the executive team level to enlighten organizations.

Using Frameworks to Set Priorities

Within the CIS framework, there are benchmarked levels that a company can strive to reach, and we often help clients evaluate which level is the right fit for them. This helps keep an IT organization aligned on which actions can efficiently produce the best outcome (or reduce the risk of bad outcomes) instead of sinking resources into something beyond their needs.

Security training goes a long way, and bringing your workforce up to speed can have several benefits. A SIEM service can identify and respond to security anomalies, but if you can educate your user community for a relatively low cost, you now have more eyes trained to identify anomalies or limit the likelihood of a phishing attack.

DNS filtering should be another standard. How does your company figure out what cloud applications employees are using? With DNS filtering across all devices, you’re opening the lines of communication with employees, with the ability to add controls to account for who is logging into the system. This allows you to track how data is flowing and how to protect it.

By laying out a framework in phases, we can show the steps that should be taken, including the basics, to make sure your users are educated and endpoint devices are protected. Typically, in a first phase, we focus on security awareness training, to show executive teams how many employees have failed when it comes to a phishing-type attempt.

When putting in something like EDR (endpoint detection and response), we can show visibility into the types of issues that can happen. It’s not just about protecting trade secrets – it’s about protecting business uptime and minimizing downtime.

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The Thrive team is here to adopt the framework that will be the best fit for your organization.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

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Thrive has worked over the past year to build an account ownership element to our Channel Program to provide added value to our Partners and enhance their user experience. As a part of this new approach, when a partner reaches out to us in any form, they are assigned to a Thrive Sales Representative who then becomes the dedicated POC for that Partner moving forward. We also set up introductory calls that focus solely on understanding each Partners’ business, expertise, and client base to form a high-level partnership strategy and maximize efficiency.  Our goal is simply to provide a user friendly, relationship-driven experience for our partners as we continue to help guide them toward finding the right solutions for their clients.

Yes, the goal is always to put ourselves in a position to receive opportunities that fit our core services and then work with our partners to win that business.  However, for us it goes one step further.  Regardless of whether the given opportunity is even a fit, we want to ultimately form a lasting relationship with that partner, one that generates repeat business, and gives us a chance to most effectively align with them by understanding the key elements of their business.  This added cadence also enables us to be available for guidance and to exhibit our consultative approach to their customers. This approach has resulted in an ever-growing group of partners that understand exactly when to bring Thrive into an opportunity, as well as a dramatically increasing win rate.

We look forward to continued Channel success, and want all of our partners to know that we are always available.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

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While partners receive enhanced educational benefits from an industry and general service perspective, one thing I have noticed is the push for suppliers to not only educate partners on their assorted services and products, but to go a step beyond. Yes, understanding the product suite is vital, but the true value is in understanding HOW to sell these services to your existing account base once you learn them. This is not a one size fits all approach and must be addressed uniquely. Thrive is making a push to provide more education to our partners beyond what we offer and how we differentiate in the marketplace. We aim to dive deeper into how to take this knowledge and position it through the right line of conversation with the goal being to find direct opportunity alignment.

A big piece of this additional education is helping our partners identify key market trends and build business cases around them, specifically as they relate to Thrive and our strengths. For example, organizations with a new IT Director or C-Level executive have proven to be the perfect candidates for a Network Health Assessment; a commissionable engagement run by our consulting team that helps businesses drive value by understanding where they need to invest from an IT perspective. In a broader example, we have seen more and more first time SIEM adopters. With our partners asking the right questions, a need was identified for smaller SIEM/SOC deals with under 100 devices that had previously not been a focus of ours. Partners now know to leverage Thrive on these opportunities as we have a strong SIEM offering.

While this is already about a paragraph too long, I think it’s important to emphasize the main takeaway here. Partners are becoming more educated and bringing better opportunities to the table. There needs to be a push to go beyond the ABCs of our services as suppliers and continue to build the deal positioning aspect.  This requires a tailored approach that focuses directly on what we do best and helping partners leverage that.

We don’t expect to be picked for every given opportunity, but want to make sure that when we are, everyone wins.

For more information on Thrive’s Channel Program, CONTACT US TODAY!

The post Trusted Advisors – Beyond Service Understanding and into Deal Positioning appeared first on Thrive.

The Path to the Cloud – Where to Start?

As hybrid IT and multi-cloud strategies become more common, the need to manage cloud services and providers as a portfolio, rather than as stand-alone purchases, becomes obvious.  Organizations need to evaluate their cloud service as cross-functional efficiency investments with a holistic approach to risk mitigation and regulatory compliance.

Microsoft conducted a cloud survey January 2018, polling more than 1,700 respondents:

• Hybrid is common, with a total of 67 percent of respondents now using or planning to deploy a hybrid cloud. Many of those hybrid users have made the move recently, 54 percent of users in the past two years.

• Cost drivers, a consistent IT experience, and the ability to scale quickly were all given as important reasons for moving to hybrid cloud.

• Using the cloud for backup and disaster recovery was a key factor for 69 percent of respondents.

According to the survey, 49% of respondents did their first hybrid cloud deployment in the past year.   Unfortunately, many of these organizations are also adopting cloud services ad hoc, department by department, rather than through a coordinated company-wide strategy. One reason for the ad hoc nature of cloud adoption may be the popularity of Software-as-a-Service applications that are easy to consume individually. Many IT departments are under pressure to migrate all of their organization’s IT applications and infrastructure to the cloud, but other departments are often not considered or don’t want to wait for the larger, bureaucratic process.  We find impatient executives have opted to move forward with their own SaaS and Cloud projects without involving IT.

Without a larger strategy and compliance framework, many departments are wasting resources or putting critical data in a precarious position.  Organizations need to take that critical first step when planning a cloud migration: the cloud readiness assessment.

Cloud Readiness and the Enterprise Assessment

In the frequently labeled ‘journey to the cloud’ IT leaders need to assess:

• Where are we now
  • Holistic and complete view of applications, integrations, platforms, and processes required for business operations
  • How many of these are already SaaS or Cloud-based?
  • Which applications or platforms are our current biggest datacenter operating costs?
• Where are we headed
  • Corporate growth plans (organic and acquisitive) and scalability demands
  • Business efficiency demands (integrations and cross-functional software standardization)
  • Enterprise Application roadmap

It’s critical to start with a frank conversation on these topics with every functional team leader or business stakeholder.  Sometimes these can even be suppliers, vendors, or even customers that have integrations for just-in-time shipping or other logistics integrations.  This allows us to form a good understanding of the systems involved, any operations or regulatory requirements, and the tolerance for risk (business continuity, security, or data residency).

The ‘Readiness’ Assessment

Without a larger strategy and compliance framework, many departments are likely to be wasting resources or putting critical data in a precarious position whether it be from a cybersecurity or regulatory perspective.

Within the Thrive Cloud Readiness consulting advisory, we:

• Rapidly assess your current cloud operational maturity (people, process, and technology)
• Validate business cases for applications and services that can provide financial and operational benefits from migrating to private-cloud, Azure, and other cloud platform services
• Develop a cloud service management roadmap for getting to your desired state
• Provide stack-ranked recommendations on procurement strategies, capacity optimization, vendor management, and cloud operating models

Some of the other elements of a cloud assessment include understanding and evaluating:

• Existing IT applications and infrastructure
• Security and compliance requirements
• Current and projected computing workloads
• Business processes
• Internal IT human resources (and required trainings/skills)
• IT budget forecasting inclusive of future business goals
• Estimated cloud costs

With the result including a migration plan with options for different cloud platforms or possible hybrid deployments.

Based on our conversations, we group the applications and datasets in to groups based on a number of factors (data residency, disaster recovery strategy, performance requirements, etc.) From there our advisory practice helps our clients to build a table that then builds a very tactical migration plan for all applications and services that meets the business requirements for scalability, reliability, and security.

Planning ‘The Move’

If you’re like most businesses, you’ll have discovered a handful of on-premise systems, cloud-based systems, and SaaS applications all with different backup platforms.  From here, the Thrive technical team typically assists our clients to build the all-encompassing cloud strategy and roadmap.  We find that the companies that simply ‘Lift and Shift’ their systems from their on-premise datacenters to the cloud often lose all cost synergies and frequently have a higher monthly bill.

The Thrive’s consulting practice builds a custom migration roadmap for each customer’s unique application, data, and business processes specifically to minimize waste and realize their cloud-migration thesis.  No one wants to pay more than they have to for cloud services, yet roughly 30% of businesses admit they’re over committing resources and spending more than they need to.  Our recommendation is to build a roadmap that encompasses all business units and creates a ‘shared services’ approach to cloud computing that enables both the business leaders as well as IT leaders to feel more comfortable knowing their systems are secure, scalable, and reliably backed up with all of the resiliency of the cloud.

Are there compliance or regulatory requirements that management care deeply about?

If you have a firm understanding of the regulatory or compliance landscape you’re operating in, the Thrive can help create a roadmap that helps leverage all of the benefits of the cloud with the security and regulatory requirements your business needs.  “The Cloud” is not any more or less secure than your on-premise datacenters – if anything it might be more secure because there are huge teams monitoring infrastructure security that you may not have on staff currently.

External Validation

Sometimes you can put together a compelling business case with important KPIs and measurables the executive team should care about, but they hear IT project and don’t want to spend the money.  This is often the case where Thrive comes in and validates your cloud migration strategy and helps present to management.  This can help give a second set of eyes to the plan, but also add external validation that what you’re saying is correct from trusted experts.

Cloud adoption is surging, and the cost, reliability, and security benefits are very real.  Please reach out – we’d love to hear your challenges and tell you where we can help!

The post The ‘Real’ Cloud Migration Journey Starts with Readiness appeared first on Thrive.

Meeting compliance requirements for your specific industry can occupy a significant amount of your IT professional’s time. Additionally, it can be difficult to find an IT expert with the appropriate industry experience to ensure all of your compliance requirements are met and your network is protected against unauthorized access.

When you choose to manage firewalls in-house, this requires a resource-intensive effort since it involves device deployment and configuration, constant upgrades and security patching, in addition, to monitoring upgrades to ensure the appropriate controls are installed to meet necessary changes in business processes. Then the network traffic must be continually monitored for threats so these can be acted upon in a timely manner to avoid costly breaches.

How a Managed Firewall Service Can Help

The above concerns we mentioned are the primary reason why many businesses are opting to choose managed firewall services in order to save on costs, eliminate time-consuming tasks, and meet compliance standards in an affordable manner. When you use a quality firewall management service that employs a team of experts, firewalls can easily be managed while meeting specific compliance requirements and protecting your organization.

A managed firewall service can help you with the following requirements:

• 24/7 Monitoring and Protection: It can be very costly to employ IT personnel around the clock to ensure your network is properly monitored and protected from threats. By using a firewall management service, you have access to the expertise you need to ensure security is monitored across your network and potential threats are responded to in a timely fashion. A reputable firewall management service deploys the intelligence tools you need to quickly identify security threats, as well as analyze firewall logs and improve policies and procedures.
• Appliance Management: Firewall appliances must be continually maintained and monitored to meet security standards and compliance requirements. A managed firewall service can help you to reduce overhead costs by providing you with access to a team of certified experts that are capable of performing specific tasks which assist with optimizing a firewall infrastructure.
• Access Control and Log Analysis: Depending upon the size of your IT infrastructure, reviewing logs and monitoring access control can consume a lot of resources. It can also make meeting compliance requirements such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), ISO, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) standards. A managed firewall service can provide you with on-demand reporting which helps your organization to demonstrate control efficiency and compliance to security auditors and upper-level management.
• Performance Optimization: Firewall architecture requires an investment of time and resources to be certain the appliances are performing at their optimal level. Managed firewall services provide you with access to a team of experts which are skilled with end-to-end firewall management. This provides businesses with the piece of mind that they are getting the most out of the firewall infrastructure and it is always running at maximum level.
• Risk Management: When a firewall is not managed and maintained properly, this can end up being costly in terms of security breaches and service disruptions. When you use a managed firewall provider, their team of engineers continually perform real-time security and health checks, daily backups, peer reviews, device upgrades and patch management, as well as other tasks which reduce downtime and security risks.

Firewall management is a primary network defense for all businesses and typically demands more time from IT managers than other infrastructure responsibilities. It is also easy to perform firewall tasks incorrectly since many IT administrators are burdened with multiple IT tasks and responsibilities. This is why many businesses are turning to managed firewall services to ensure compliance gaps are filled and the network is secure against unauthorized access.

To learn more about managed firewall services, contact Thrive to speak with one of our experts.

The post Fulfill Compliance Requirements with a Managed Firewall appeared first on Thrive.