Misconceptions About Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS)

Recently, I was asked to speak about Public Cloud Services, and specifically, CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) during a training call. It was actually really good timing, because this has been a hot topic with vendors, partners, and customers. In those discussions, I find that there’s a lot of misconceptions about what CPaaS actually is. As mentioned, CPaaS stands for Communication Platform as a Service, but even that term can mislead you into thinking that it’s a much broader and more inclusive thing than it actually is.

We cannot go back to normal, and even if we could, we shouldn’t. Why? The normal we knew was not sustainable. Too huge of a carbon footprint, too slow to meet the demands of the “fast fashion” economy, too stressful for associates, and too high of a cost to support.

The hot pieces of legislation currently affecting the communications industry are Kari’s Law and the Ray Baum’s Act. At a high level, these two items deal with 911. Kari’s Law is about a company’s responsibility and requirement to ensure that users can dial 911 without needing to dial a code to get an outside line first. The Ray Baum Act is about making sure the system can identify and communicate the dispatchable location of that person who dialed 911.

One of our Lead Solutions Architects at ConvergeOne (and a long-time member of the Ski Patrol), Leif Haslund, has told me that the most important piece of information to ask in an emergency is, “Where are you?” When an emergency happens and his team gets called, they must know where to go in order to give assistance.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the most chaotic year of our lifetime, and changes we have experienced this year are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future—if not indefinitely. The way that we collaborate with each other at work, the way our children are educated at school, and even how we spend our personal time with clubs, family, and church have changed.

Has your organization realized the full potential of your Microsoft Office 365 subscription by adopting Microsoft Teams?

It’s an irrefutable truth: COVID-19 has quickly changed the modern workplace. At the onset of the pandemic, many businesses rushed to put temporary solutions in place to protect their employees and keep up their operations. Because these solutions were only meant to be short-term, they are now starting to show their weaknesses and concerns around their reliability and security are beginning to arise. The result: Obstacles are looming everywhere for CIOs.

When employees were first sent to work from home, organizations scrambled to provide work-from-home software, devices, and infrastructure. As we transition to a new normal, it’s now important to reevaluate the initial infrastructure laid to support remote workers against a lasting, best-practice architecture. In the last entry, I shared the first three pillars for a thriving remote workforce. Let’s now explore the final three pillars.

Operating a remote workforce is no longer just a remote possibility. A work-from-home war is being quietly waged across many organizations throughout the country, as workers who were forced to quickly establish home office environments now wish to remain in their home rather than return to commuting to an office. This tipping point has deep and wide ramifications for organizations attempting to return to pre-COVID-19 productivity levels. 

Zoom: Perception vs. Reality

Negative Press:

We have undoubtedly all heard the many reports questioning the security readiness of Zoom as of late. Are there impactful vulnerabilities, and is Zoom safe? We have even seen negative fallout due to some of the reported concerns. For example, the New York City school system has banned the use of Zoom as a direct result of the perceived security flaws within the Zoom platform. The problem is, much of what we are hearing is more about perception than reality, and the challenge is to sift through the facts versus fiction.