Connecting Users to Cloud Applications

While washing our hands at a sink, do we think about the source of that water… or do we just expect it to be there when we turn it on? Do we set hot, warm, or cold temperatures according to our unique comfort levels?

Who moved my cheese… and my data?

ConvergeOne’s customer had what was once considered a best-of-breed contact center solution, but faced challenges leveraging its legacy solution to satisfy the rapidly evolving needs of its business. Over the past decade, the company’s leadership team recognized that although its investments in self-service had paid off well, they’d also created a challenge. The basic transactional calls that once dominated call queues—address changes, balance inquiries, new-service activation—had all but disappeared. The queue was dominated by the complex and varied issues that customers couldn’t solve on their own.

Every four to six years, a new type of wireless LAN technology comes out with much fanfare. Case in point: when Wi-Fi 6 came out, it was hailed as the greatest thing ever. Since every generation of wireless makes a similar claim, it can be difficult to know what truly is a significant upgrade and what is "just a little bit faster."

Effective communication is a continual challenge for healthcare providers. Communication challenges amongst patients, payers, and providers are frequently linked to inefficiencies that result in unnecessary costs, care delivery errors, and of course negative patient outcomes. Enabling providers, payers, and patients the freedom to effectively collaborate and share information using the devices and services that are most convenient at any point in time is critically important to solving these issues across the healthcare enterprise and to provide meaningful solutions in areas such as:

According to our research with Avaya and CatalystMR, there are two main areas contact center challenges fall within: customer support and data/technology. Considering each of these key areas, the three biggest challenges contact centers face today in the support arena are:

Does your network meet all of your needs, or is it the sum product of a series of compromises put in place to meet competing needs for different applications and use cases?

Performance, Capacity, Scalability, Availability, Security, and Recoverability: These are all pillars of a multi-cloud data center strategy. In the past, applications were dependent on the on-premises data center infrastructure. “What you see is what you get” was pretty much how application developers had to deal with it. Today, the business dictates how an organization deploys data center resources to support an application. For a commercial business, the desire is for the application to generate significantly large amounts of data traffic that translates into revenue. For the public sector, it’s about getting information to and from the community at a rapid pace.

The remote workforce is now more prominent than ever, and companies are looking for the best long-term or even permanent solutions for a work-from-home model that meets the needs of the business. With video conferencing becoming more widely used by businesses, the ability to prioritize voice and video over the home internet connection can really add stability and improved experience to video and voice calls. The good news is that permanent home offices can now be treated in the same way a satellite office has been traditionally configured with an SD-WAN solution.

Given the already-expanded attack surface, in my estimation it is never too early to look at lessons learned from the pandemic—and there certainly isn’t a shortage of teachable moments, right from the top down. Here are eight lessons for Directors of Security and CISOs whose organizations and livelihoods have been imperiled by the pandemic.