41. Solving the massive talent shortage in Security & Tech with Chris Moore

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Hear Chris discuss how his winding path went from restaurants and management to Security and Innovation. Join us as Chris Moore, VP of Solutions Architecture for Thrive lays out the key problems facing customers in the midst of this massive tech talent shortage. Thrive has tons of tools, but more importantly, the talent to manage just about any customer environment while modernizing and augmenting whatever technology they might run up against.

Transcript of episode can be found below.

Josh Lupresto (00:01):

Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hi everybody, welcome back. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, and today we are joined by a good man, Chris Moore, VP of Solution Architecture for Thrive. Chris, thanks for jumping on with me, man.

Chris Moore (00:28):

Josh, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Josh Lupresto (00:31):

So, title today we’re talking about, you know, in this managed services world, but more importantly we’re laying a claim. We’re saying it’s really hard and it’s real, the talent shortage in technology, you know, in security in cloud, all of these things, right? So, so we’re gonna get to that. I’m excited to kind of hear, obviously you guys have a lot of incredible solutions around that, and we’ll get into that as we go. And we’re gonna try to answer this. Now, more importantly, though, I wanna hear about your background. You know, if, look, if you’ve had a, you’ve had a great linear path and you knew exactly what you wanted to be your entire life, kudos to you. But if you took some weird, windy path and you, you know, you used to train goldfish or whatever, that’s okay too. So, first of all, tell me about your background, Chris, let everybody know kind of how you got here.

Chris Moore (01:18):

Absolutely. Thanks Josh. So, as a kid my dad brought home this lovely IBM computer, and I turned on the monitor. I was like, What the heck is this? I’m looking at, And there was a five and a quarter inch floppy sitting next to it, and I plugged it in the 28 discs or whatever it was to get it Lotus 1, 2, 3 loaded up. Then the next evolution came. I was like, Oh, we can put this modem in it and I can get Prodigy loaded up and everything’s good. And then as I progressed through my childhood I didn’t honestly really play that much for the computers. I got sucked into working at restaurants and washing dishes and helping the bartenders and all that good stuff. And then I realized when I went to college, I wanted to go get my restaurant resort management degree.

Chris Moore (02:07):

So that’s what I started off down that path. And then right around that time is right when the the CD writers came out where you could burn your own music onto, yeah, CDs. And they were all running by a parallel port, and you expect hundreds and thousands of dollars on CDs that never burnt correctly, and you threw ’em out. And it was right around that point in time where I decided actually, I want to go do something with computers for a career. So I went down and saw my counselor, said, Hey, I wanna change majors. And she looked at me and she goes, Well, if you wanna be here for three more years, and I had about 18 months left, right? So she goes, If you wanna be here for three more years, then you can change majors. And I looked at her and said, Nope, I’ll get my degree, and then I’ll go do what I want to do. So I did, and ironically, my first job out of college was working at a national restaurant chain on their help desk.

Josh Lupresto (03:05):

Ah.

Chris Moore (03:06):

So from there, I did help desk support. I went out to restaurants, pulled CAT5 cable, redid their POS systems, and kind of terminated everything you know, at two o’clock in the morning after the restaurant had closed, and then came back in the next morning and trained them on the new pos. And then from there, I really just kind kept moving up into IT administration, network administration you know, got my CCNA to cover the networking side, went on to work at an as p so kind of the first evolution of the cloud, the application service providers supporting very large multi-tenant exchange environments back in the exchange five, five days. And then from there really came about right after that job was my first stint at Thrive. Oh. So back in the day at Thrive you know, very early on I was out in the field, a network engineer supporting customer environments, you know, switches, firewalls, backups doing everything on site. And then I started leading a team, moved on to the consulting division doing assessments. And from there moved on various different roles and kind of IT director capacities. And then as I say, then I jumped over to the dark side of sales. Yeah. The solutions architecture side of the world working at a an outsource provider of enterprise E R P systems for a couple years. And I’ve been back now at Thrive for almost seven years heading up the solutions architecture team at Thrive. So, you know, started out playing with computers, got interested in restaurants, and ultimately ended back up working in computers. And the funny thing I always say is, when I was working in restaurants working till 3:00 AM I always used to say, Oh, I’m just gonna go work on computers. I won’t have to work till 3:00 AM. Well, but I quickly realized it’s actually 24/7 when you’re in the operational side of it. So I, I guess I didn’t end up succeeding in that regard.

Josh Lupresto (05:29):

Fair. All right. So then you’re the the second was a bartender and changed to do something else kind of, right? So you would stein have something in common. Maybe you weren’t intending to be a practicing theologian, but alright, you guys have that bond then that’s, that’s for you guys to talk about. I love it. I, I love a good windy path. I think that’s what makes it, you know, makes us really figure out what it is that we wanna do and what we like and what we’re passionate about. So. Awesome, awesome story. So, so let’s talk a little bit about, alright, now you’re, you’re heading up solution architecture, right? So, so a tell me what that means, but you know, this is where we’re gonna have to boil it down because you guys, it’s been really cool to see you guys grow over the years, and it just seems like the, the myriad of technology that you can support. Sometimes you’re supporting existing, sometimes you’re using some of your tool sets for new because what the customer doesn’t have is adequate. So talk to me for anybody that’s not familiar with Thrive, you know, fill us in on kind of thrive, what the how, how wide that, that role goes and really what you all do and then, you know, fill us in on your role there specific.

Chris Moore (06:32):

Perfect. Absolutely. So in my particular role and what my team does, I like to say we ultimately try to understand the technical and the business requirements that any customer may have. So we can get as technical as we need to, but the bulk of the time we’re actually solving some sort of a business problem. So, at Thrive, as I said before, we started out as an msp so we can manage infrastructure, you know, firewall, servers, routers, switches, and then we really evolved into being able to support cloud environments. So we have our own multi-tenant private cloud. We can support customer environments, OnPrem, we can support them in Azure, aws. And then really the next evolution of Thrive was providing security services as managed services. So while we’ve always supported firewalls and we’ve always supported any virus that no longer is sufficient, so we have a whole suite of different security solutions that we can come in and help customers with. The bulk of what we’re coming in to help with these days is ultimately what you talked about at the start and the topic of this conversation, There aren’t enough humans that are trained to carry out the tasks in both IT and security. So the customers are looking for outside help and manage service providers to come in and provide really that augmented workforce a lot of the time along with the actual technical solution.

Josh Lupresto (08:22):

And I think augment is key in that, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re both in our teams that are both very customer facing, and when our partners are bringing us into opportunity, we’re doing these discoveries. And, you know, there’s a little bit of ego there on the customer side, rightfully so, right? We’re in their you know, we’re playing in their sandbox, right? There’s just like, ah, who is this person? What are they going to? And it’s, it’s not that. It’s, it’s, look, your job is really hard. We want to help you focus on the things that you wanna get done. There’s not enough of your time to go around. There’s only so many hours in the day. And to your point, I just think when we use that word augment, I think it kind of clicks of, listen, we’re not, we don’t wanna replace you. We, we need you for this whole thing to work. So we want to enable you and make you look like the hero.

Chris Moore (09:06):

Yeah. Augment. And another way I like to say is like, we want ultimately to be an extension of your team. Yeah, right? We want to be able to pick up the phone and call you and tell you what’s going on and, and vice versa. And then at the same time, get together on a personal level and feel like you’re an employee and vice versa. Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (09:27):

Can we talk about some of the tools, some of the OEMs, and we’re gonna get to an example in a little bit, and we’re gonna talk about R&D and stuff like that, but kind of current state. You know, I know we, we’ve talked about how you guys have evolved so much as a business and you know, you, you said, Look, we’re gonna manage existing tech, but for people that don’t have tech, we’ve got our own big stack that it takes to manage this. So maybe throw me out, throw everybody out, you know, if, if partners are listening and they’re hearing some of these OEMs, who were some of the OEMs that you guys engage with? And really what are some of these tools?

Chris Moore (09:59):

Yeah, absolutely. So I think our two biggest OEMs that we partner with and probably our longest standing partner is Microsoft. So we’ve always been a very heavy Microsoft shop. So a lot of expertise in house back when we were supporting servers on Prem, now in the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, as well as in the Azure ecosystem. So we can bring lots of technical D depth in lots of different areas to the table to help with those things. Simple things like server administration, patching to, I need to build out a SharePoint site and move, you know, SharePoint online and move the on-prem SharePoint up to SharePoint online to, Hey, I need a Power BI deployment or custom app that gets built within teams. And then the, also the ability to, you know, back up and do disaster recovery services of all of those things. So Microsoft is probably one of the biggest things that we hit every single day. And then one of our other larger partners is Fortnite. So for anybody that’s familiar with Fortnite, they have all their product names are 40 something. We don’t support 40 everything. But we do use a lot of their security stack in our solutions that we deliver to customers.

Josh Lupresto (11:34):

Can you, can you drill down on the ones that you do find yourself using and maybe where yeah. Where you see that fitting, just real quick on each one of those?

Chris Moore (11:42):

Yeah, absolutely. So the one that we’ve used the most of are the, their firewalls. So the Fortinet 48 firewalls which get deployed at, you know, customer offices and sometimes these days even at homes with the pandemic. And then probably the next few ones are the 40 sim, which is ultimately what our security operations center uses to pull all of the logs from a customer’s environment into a single place to look for anomalies and bad things that are happening with their environment. And then probably the next biggest one is their endpoint detection and response tool. So we use 40 edr for one version of our managed service. And then we also have a Sentinel One managed service for the edr. So we generally pick best of read products mm-hmm. , so we don’t write or generate any product ourselves. We’ll go out and partner up with a vendor, and then we wrap our managed services around it. So the one other thing we always hear is, Yeah, we can go buy this product, but we don’t have anybody to manage it, Right? So therefore come to Thrive, we can provide that product as the monthly cost, but in that monthly cost, you’re also getting full 24 by seven management with it.

Josh Lupresto (13:09):

Yeah. Yeah. You bring up a good point. And I mean, that’s the whole reason of why I felt this was such an important podcast to get out there, is that, you know, five years ago the idea of pushing managed services over doing the, the i, the the equipment management yourself, people had people, people had teams, The world wasn’t as scary of a place, right? You could, you could knock your perimeter out, maybe a couple other pieces of security, and that was good enough. Now it’s different. Now the, the bad guys are really, really smart and they’re 17 steps ahead and people can’t find people to, to do anything . And so I, I think that’s a good point that you bring up, and that’s why I, I think you guys have been a good fit in a lot of things because we don’t know what we’re always gonna walk into. Sometimes people have sunk recent investment into technology and they have to keep it, It’s too hard of a sell to go try and replace it, versus where I’m on this ancient endpoint or this ancient you know, edge security device that’s stopped getting updates six years ago. And, but I need help. What, what do I replace that rate? Put a 40, put a for at the edge, you know, that kind of thing. We’ll manage it, we’ll support it. You don’t have to worry about it.

Chris Moore (14:12):

Yeah, absolutely. And we can come in and really be ala cart per the customer needs, right? So we might get on the phone with you and another customer who says I’m having issues patching my servers, That’s all I need help with. They, you know, you can run down the list with them. They say, Yep, fine, fine, fine, but I’m gonna lose half my staff if I can’t find somebody to patch servers for me. Yeah, We can do that. We get on the next call, customer could say, I really need a vulnerability management and a 24 by seven sock. We can come in and deliver those two things so we don’t have to come in and deliver the same thing to every single customer. We have a very large, I’m just gonna say menu of things mm-hmm. that we can listen to the requirements and then come back to the customer with how we can solve that for them without having to add any additional staff.

Josh Lupresto (15:06):

Yeah. Don’t you find though too that, you know, it never ends up the way that it started. I mean, it was, we’re gonna bring you in because we think this is the need. And then, you know, sometimes we don’t even, we take the sales hat off and other needs, they go like, Okay, well you sound at least partially competent in this, I’m gonna start asking you of can you do all these other things? And like, Yeah, we can do, Yeah, we can do, Yeah. So yeah, this idea, this value of consolidation of, geez, look at all these other things we just weren’t getting to. Yeah, that’s what I like about this in this space is that one, there’s a lot of, a lot of different areas that we can help, but two, the, the initial bill doesn’t, you know, what we thought it might be, it tends to be much larger because they just need help.

Chris Moore (15:44):

Yeah. And it might, it, and it, yeah, I think you’re absolutely spot on there, but I can also say whatever it changes with, Right? And it signs, it’s not stopping there, right? It’s not like putting in a, a circuit or signing up for a, you know, A a U C where there’s not too many other things you can add on. Sure. There’s features that come down the road that you can add on. Yeah. Yeah. But when you sell a security solution with Thrive, it doesn’t end at one security solution. Right? Then there’s then another need lurking that they didn’t know about at the time that we can come in and help. So the, the, the revenue just keeps increasing quarter over quarter.

Josh Lupresto (16:28):

All right. So wrapping up maybe from a product perspective, we’ve talked about security on the endpoint with edr. We’ve talked about security appliances that can go on site. We’ve talked about the sim, the log collection, the correlation to feed all of this data from all of the different endpoints, PCs, whatever firewalls, all, all of those in we’ve talked about the Microsoft ecosystem from pro serve, SharePoint, Azure management, build out all of that stuff. Any, any other products or any things that that, that you want the partners to be aware of that you’re having success in, that we should be thinking about that, that you also do in addition to that? I know there’s a long list, but if you had to pick any other, is there a cover that you’d put?

Chris Moore (17:08):

Absolutely. I’d say the, the other place I’m having a lot of success is, and the, you know, VCSO, VCIO and then kind of cyber risk as assessments. So all of those are delivered by the same professional service team are all very tenured folks that can come in and really help a company understand where they are, where they need to go, and set out really a program and framework to help the customer get there. So very, very high growth in those particular lines of business.

Josh Lupresto (17:49):

What do you find right off the cuff here? What do you find when you ask the question? What framework are you following? What program are you following? What’s your most common answer that you give.

Chris Moore (18:10):

I do feel like in the last year, that people are hearing framework Yeah. Either through, you know, sessions like this, or they’re just in the news N or cis or, you know, high trust. I feel like there’s at least in the IT world and the su the security world, people are starting to at least know they should be doing something. Yeah.

Chris Moore (18:36):

But they’re also now being honest with the fact that they’re not

Josh Lupresto (18:40):

Sure. All right. Let’s let’s talk R&D for a second. You know, you guys, it, I mean, we’ve just, we’ve seen the laundry list of things that you guys can support, expand that our team loves and appreciates over the years. But I’m kinda curious, how does, how does Thrive look at innovation or what’s next? Or R&D? You know, maybe, maybe talk to me about that a little bit.

Chris Moore (19:01):

Yeah. Honestly, the R&D part of it comes straight from customer feedback or partner feedback. Hey, we’re being pushed this way for, you know, regulatory reasons. We need XYZ solution that Thrive doesn’t have today, but we need it managed. We’re not doing it in-house to spending a lot of time at trade shows, looking at the myriad of different security and IT solutions that exist today. That’s the one thing that there is no shortage of is security vendors. Yeah. So picking, picking the vendors that fit nicely into a managed service model. And there’s sometimes the best vendor out there, and the space doesn’t have the things we need to be able to efficiently deliver it to a wide set of customers in a repeatable, successful way.

Josh Lupresto (19:59):

Yeah, good point.

Chris Moore (20:02):

So, spend a lot of time in it have a whole team dedicated to it. And because we hit so many different things, it’s hard to kind of pick any one little sector. But I will tell you, just like a lot of other companies, a lot of the time being spent over on the, the s the security side of the world today.

Josh Lupresto (20:24):

Yeah, makes sense. There’s so much room for innovation there. And it’s just so hard. There’s so much to cover. I love it. All right. Let’s talk about you switching gears. I mean, you, you get to work with a lot of technology. I mean, you get to see a lot of things. You get to see a lot of customer environments. You get to be on that front end of innovation, the bad stuff, the problems people are having. What, what do you like most about this? What’s the thing that gets you most excited about all this?

Chris Moore (20:50):

The thing that gets me most excited is there’s, there’s so many people that need so much help that every single environment is different. So even if you look at environment A and environment B and you say, Okay, they’re using all the same technologies, when you look at how the business are actually running, they’re completely different. And they might be con, the technologies might be configured completely different. So you could say Environment A, environment B, I wanna move ’em both to Azure and put all the security stuff around them. Well, the path for those two companies may be completely different. So that’s what I love about it, because even though I’m looking at two environments that have the same exact technologies, figuring out how the business operates and how you can get them to that next phase without completely disrupting the business, which nobody wants in a, in a transition is ultimately what I find the most fun.

Chris Moore (21:50):

And outside of that, every single call I get on is talking about something different, right. Security’s in every conversation these days, but I might talk about cloud migration on one call, and then I get to the next call and I’m just talking about security, and then the next call, I’m talking about disaster recovery. So, and I think that’s why my team loves what they do as well, because we’re not talking about the same thing all day long. We’re able to kinda switch and hit literally all of security and it, and cloud in a single day. And it’s just fun because it keeps things different.

Josh Lupresto (22:28):

Right, right. Good. I love it. Let’s, let’s talk differentiation. I think that that’s a big question that we get from our partners. You know, I’m, I’m not gonna put words in your mouth, but I think some of your differentiation is that you support a lot of different technologies, but I, I’m curious from your perspective where you’re seeing yourselves in a deal, a competitor, a competitor b in a deal, when, when a customer asks you, Hey, you know, Chris, I’m, I’m kind of at the finish line here, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve gotta talk to my boss about these, you and this other solution that we’re looking at. What, what’s your, your feedback back to them about here’s, here’s why we would be different in that, and here’s why we would be better solution for you?

Chris Moore (23:11):

Yeah. So like I’ve been saying, all every deal’s a little bit different, but if you put all of that aside for a second, there’s a, there’s a, a shortage of talent. There’s a myriad of vendors you could work with. So do you want to go out and pick five different vendors to get one thing done? Or you, Mr. It director, cfo, whoever we’re dealing with, do you want to be able to go to one vendor to get those five things? And that’s ultimately where we feel Thrive differentiates, along with some of the, the platform and the technology we have behind the scenes you know, we’re using ServiceNow, so every single service line and offering that we have is ultimately talking back into ServiceNow. So even if the customer can’t call, I mean, we’re open 24 7, right? But let’s just say, Hey, I want to call my sales person to talk about something. But they can’t do that for whatever reason. They can go to our customer portal and see everything that’s going on within those five things that they’ve signed up for us with. And it could be, again, it could be all security, it could be some security, dr, it could be cloud, really could be anything. But you know, this, the part of being short staffed and having to manage multiple vendors isn’t fun either.

Josh Lupresto (24:41):

Fair, good, Great points. All right. Let’s talk you know I wanna get into an example. I guess you know, you, you see a lot of things, you, you run into these environments. I mean, what I want to like, to help the partners with on this part is what are the kind of things that they’re gonna walk into? What are the kind of technologies they should be looking for, the kind of questions they should be asking, and when they do those things, it brings them into this. So we’ll, we’ll talk in a second here about what, what partners should be doing to talk about that. But if we go into an example of, let’s say they’re talking, they’re asking these questions, they’re getting engaged. Walk me through an example. We can leave the customer name out of this if you have to. Mm-Hmm. , but how did you get brought in? What was it like, Was, was it, you know, what was the technology that was there and really, was it what you were told it would be? Or was it different? And, you know, just maybe break down for me and how it ended.

Chris Moore (25:32):

Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a, it’s a perfect example for the, the, you know, the shortage of talent. So this particular company that just been through some sort of a breach or ransomware event, they actually wouldn’t disclose to us what it was.

Chris Moore (25:51):

But when that happened, their cyber insurance company came in and said, You have to put solution. I’m not gonna say vendor names, right? You have to put solution A on all of your endpoints because you were running an old antivirus program and that’s why you ultimately are on this state. So I said, Okay, great. They put it on all 700 endpoints, 200 servers, put it on all of ’em. Cyber insurance company is getting ready to walk out the door. They say, Okay, here’s the invoice for said solution. You are running on a trial. Customer says, this is great, but if I couldn’t manage my old antivirus solution, how do you expect me to manage it today? And you’re telling me I need to watch it 24 7, what solution do you have for that? Well, this is just provider a’s product. There’s no monitoring with it. So partner came to us, said, Can you guys help here? They also need 24 by seven sock across their entire environment. So we went in, pitched them, it, it was actually one of the shorter sales cycles pitched them the, the for net 40 edr along with our, SO services they signed, we went in, we uninstalled mm-hmm. , the endpoint protection that the cyber insurance company had put in and put ours in. And now they have 24 by seven coverage across all their endpoints as well as the rest of their environment.

Josh Lupresto (27:31):

Love it, love it. And that, I mean, that’s common. I, I don’t know that we go a, a day or two without insurance coming up in some way, shape, or form. So that, that idea that I think originally people thought was a little bit of a fear tactic is so real, it’s not even funny. And, you know, we get it. The prices of insurance are going up and that, that was the little bit of the scare. But really it’s just the reality now, if you don’t have this right stuff, they’re not gonna insure you because they can’t afford to. So it’s, it’s an interesting way. Maybe that brings us to our next topic, or one of our last questions here is, you know, what if we have a partner that’s never done this before, they’ve sold c has or sold SD WAN or sold network or, or, you know, something else. How do I, how do I step into these conversations at a deeper level? Where do you, where do you say that they should step in and where do you say that they should stop and kind of, what’s that talk track?

Chris Moore (28:29):

I’d say there’s, there’s really two different paths that a partner who sees, sees the potential out there, but doesn’t have any idea how to begin. We have a couple partners that are very, very, very successful when selling all of our cybersecurity stack, but they only start by selling one thing, and that’s an assessment. So they know what to look for, you know, a a turnover of staff a newly acquired company, a recently divested company. Those are, you know, or somebody that you’re talking to that doesn’t seem to have an idea about what they have, right? And that, that’s very, very, very common. We get on a lot of calls where small, very large companies and very small companies where you would think they would have some idea of where things are and how they’re protected, They have no idea. So the assessments come in and really unravel that for them.

Chris Moore (29:30):

And ultimately most of the time then turn into recurring revenue. And when that turns into recurring revenue the partners are listening to what’s happening and learning about selling those particular solutions. And then the next time they hear it after that, in a completely separate call with a, a potential customer, they know that they can start asking questions cuz they feel confident in it. The other path is to pick a few security things, right? So the, the really hot button things with the cyber security companies right now are two factor authentication or multifactor authentication. So learning what that is. And it’s ultimately probably you use it in your own personal life when you’re doing banking or trying to get into your healthcare provider. So you’re starting to see a trend here, right? All the highly regulated industries now are starting to push it even onto personal users.

Chris Moore (30:36):

You may even have to have turned it on in your Gmail calendar, getting to your Apple iCloud account, right? Or maybe your kid turned it on by accident and didn’t know what they were doing and then you had to go figure it out. But two factor authentication as well as we’ve talked about it a couple times, right? Nextgen antivirus and edr on the endpoints. So understanding two of those things, really, when you start asking questions, they’ll start unloading information on you, right? So don’t feel like you have to know everything about security because I have a security certification, Josh has a certification. And both of us will tell you we don’t know it all either, right? There’s absolutely no way. So pick a few things to learn about and start asking, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly people start telling you stuff that they’re actually teaching you when they’re telling you. And now you know that when you hear Sentinel One, it’s an EDR product, and when you hear Carbon black, it’s in that same bucket. And when you hear silence, it’s in that same bucket. And then when you hear tenable on Qs, you know, they’re vulnerability scanners. So it’s not something you’re gonna learn overnight, but it’s something you can very easily chip away at over time.

Josh Lupresto (32:01):

Great advice. All right. Final segment. I was thinking about, I’m gonna title this and you can you can trademark this later, and I’m not gonna ask for the royalties cause I wanna be a nice friend and see you do. Well, Chris’s crystal ball if you look into this crystal ball and you think about as we wrap this up, where the future of this goes, Are we riding this itto thing for a while? Is there a million new products coming out? What’s, I mean, I know we can’t look out too far, but let’s just look the next 12 to 18 months. What, what, what do you think are the focus points? Anything new that we need to be thinking about?

Chris Moore (32:36):

I think the focus points in the next 12 to 18 months are protecting your data in the cloud, right? There’s myriads of applications that are going to the cloud and people think that when they move to the cloud, it’s protected. So if you go back a couple, I guess one really good example is the Kronos Group outage from, oh, I think it may have been last year at this point. Mm-Hmm. , but tons of municipalities and private companies had their payroll data up in that platform. Well, when that platform went down, nobody could pay anybody and there was no really backup plan to that because all my data’s up in that cloud. So as you start thinking about moving more and more of a cloud, you have to be thinking about how you’re protecting it, how you’re backing it up. And ultimately what we always get back to, right, what’s the business impact of moving these things?

Chris Moore (33:38):

So I think protecting those two things, and I don’t think it’s gonna happen in the next 12 to 18 months, but I think in order to stay, stay ahead of these bad guys and all they’re doing, we’re gonna have to have more and more of these security solutions from different vendors talking to each other intelligently to shut things down faster. Cuz there’s just, it, the the rate at which things happen. And even when you start talking about, you know, the evolution of 5g and as it gets more widespread and there’s more bandwidth, the bad guys are now gonna be able to do this stuff from their phones.

Josh Lupresto (34:16):

Yeah.

Chris Moore (34:16):

Right? So having all these security solutions from all these different vendors somehow communicating, and I think there’s, there’s gonna have to be a lot of cooperation in the security arena in terms of, you know, opening up APIs for this stuff to happen. So Good. I hope it happens that way. Yeah. But we’ll see, I guess in time.

Josh Lupresto (34:40):

Fair. Okay, Chris I think that wraps us up for today, my man, I really appreciate you coming on and doing this with me.

Chris Moore (34:47):

Thanks Josh, Appreciate having me on the show today.

Josh Lupresto (34:57):

Awesome, man. All right, everybody. Chris Moore, VP of Solution Architecture for Thrive, that wraps us up on part of our Managed Security Week. Again, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Until next time. Thanks everybody.