Delivering seamless connectivity is vital to ensure that your communications strategy is effective. Despite the concerns of legacy technology, intuitive intelligent solutions can alleviate collaboration complexity and provide seamless interoperability to give the workforce an enriched and enduring experience.
The workforce dynamic is changing dramatically. More people are working remotely and integrated, easy to use communications are crucial to improving communications. The demand for intelligent solutions is on the increase. Video conferencing, instant messaging, and meeting room systems are essential tools to create an environment that can quickly bring stakeholders together and to interact efficiently.
Enterprises have the opportunity to rethink how they can empower employees to work more effectively and move with market trends to stay relevant and competitive. So, how can you change the mindset of ‘it’s good enough’ and develop a collaborative strategy to future-proof your communications?
The world is becoming more digitally and socially connected. People’s growing collaboration expectations are to be able to meet virtually in an instant and connect intelligently in real-time from any device.
According to global consulting firm Deloitte in their Global Human Capital Trends Report 2018, “The hyper-connected nature of the workplace means that interactions between and among workers and the outside world can be a tremendous source for analysis if managed appropriately.” However, does hyper-connected mean hyper-productive? New communication solutions are constantly being introduced into the market. Deloitte also highlights, “70% of respondents believe workers will spend more time on collaboration platforms in the future, 67% see growth in ‘work-based social media,’ and 62% predict an increase in instant messaging.”
Another emerging trend is the intelligent ‘workforce ecosystem’ or ‘managing beyond the enterprise’. Respondents to the Deloitte report were asked to forecast what their workforce would look like in 2020 and 98% predicted an increase in part-time or contract workers. This underlines the importance for organisations to implement policies and resources that enable remote or agile working from any location. The benefits include unleashing flexible skills without the need for expensive on-site overheads, reduced resource pools that drive down costs, and the avoidance of lost hours due to unnecessary travel times.
A less than welcome trend has been the rise of cybercrime with denial of service and ransomware attacks being commonplace. Security stakeholders need the reassurance that collaboration systems are as secure as possible, whether that is data security or eliminating toll fraud. Your security leadership, such as the CIO or CISO, needs to be confident that the network is secure and that any connection to the outside world will not be hacked. Encryption is essential to protect any form of messaging or communication, as well as the physical security of where the data is stored. Data jurisdiction is an important consideration, especially when using any cloud-based solution.
If a solution is not intuitive it lessens the ability to gain deep insights. Without utilisation there is no gain in the investment and IT may spend unproductive time maintaining equipment or software that adds no value to the enterprise. Fundamentally, systems must be secure whether they are installed on-premises or in the cloud. Every meeting needs a safe environment to get the best from the attendees. Employees using consumer social collaboration platforms, such as WhatsApp, SnapChat, Instagram, and FaceTime, open themselves up to cybersecurity issues, which have been widely documented to have ‘back-door’ vulnerabilities and targets for hackers to exploit data.
Those organisations that are working with vendors that provide secure integrated cloud-based technology and solutions stay ahead of the cybercriminal. When the workforce uses collaboration tools and video meeting room solutions, people want the reassurance that their connections are completely safeguarded. A robust global data centre network will encrypt all data traffic to and from dedicated meeting rooms, as well as third-party systems that support encryption. This open intelligent approach to interoperability ensures that your organisation is safe and will not get ‘locked-in’ to one specific infrastructure platform or communication standard. An effective architecture protects your existing assets and enables a low total cost of ownership (TCO), allowing you to further finance collaboration technology with confidence.
Data intelligence is imperative to understanding productivity performance of the solution to show the return on investment. A secure cloud vendor should allow you to retrieve a wealth of insightful usage statistics, including checking the status of all active meeting rooms and having instant access to call detail records, analytics and reporting, as well as advanced firmware management.
All these considerations combine to create an environment where your employees will expect robust enterprise tools that remove the friction from outdated technology to keep them secure and ahead of the competition – and all at the click of a button. The more agile a company, the more responsive it is to market forces and the more likely it is to succeed. It’s time to get intuitive with the intelligent future.
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.