Tips for Keeping Your Hybrid Workforce Secure

Earlier this year, ConvergeOne’s Gabrielle Lukianchuk (Vice President, Marketing) and Tim Femister (Vice President, Digital Infrastructure) were featured on Designing Spaces airing on Lifetime TV. The segment (which you can watch here) centered around hybrid working trends and the security issues that have arisen due to the major shift in the way we work over the past year.

Today I want to talk about one of the guiding principles of modernization: Automation. When I talk about automation, I’m specifically talking about administration automation. At first, it would seem like this is mostly about making life easier for the administrators—and yes, that’s part of it. However, there’s actually a lot of business value that goes along with this type of automation. Let’s take a look at the benefits from the lens of the different stakeholders.

2020 raised the bar on customer experience across the board. Most people spent more time at home using more devices connected for more time, driving up both costs and awareness. In response to the changed landscape, utilities have pivoted to provide more personalized service, helping customers use energy more efficiently while providing access to more services virtually. From an internal operations perspective, many agents went remote, supported by cloud infrastructure and AI.

When neighboring school districts were hit with cyberattacks, Moreno Valley Unified School District knew they needed to upgrade their data protection.

Modernization: The concept isn’t new, but the form factor may be. This is due in most part to the consumption models of cloud, SaaS, and hybrid offers that are now available. Modernization has taken many shapes over the past 20 years because of the technologies that are available at any given time.

Machine learning is changing the way the world thinks and operates. Let’s face it, when the words “Machine Learning Algorithm” present themselves in a room full of peers, everyone takes a deep breath. Some are confused by the thought of math; others are thinking, “Oh no, which algorithm do we use for this problem?”

The return to the office—and the hybrid workplace—are hot topics for C-level executives across the nation, as companies decide how and where team members will work going forward. But creating a new way to work, in which some people work 100% in the office, some work 100% at home and others do a bit of both, presents a challenge for employers. How do you start? Who works from where? How do you set up your offices differently today?

Healthcare IT vendor Allscripts recently faced a significant and costly upgrade for its operating system environment. At the same time, its premises-based contact center system was up for annual maintenance renewal. Allscripts decided to take the opportunity to simplify contact center operations and move to the cloud—a move that was in line with its general commitment to cloud migration.

With public cloud adoption becoming the way of life for the increasing number of organizations looking to solve business challenges with remote working, questions about its security implications are inevitable. However, security has many different meanings and challenges in the public cloud with native solutions.

There is an old saying that states, “Take care of your house and let others worry about theirs.” This might be valid in the pre-internet world, but with so many dependencies and relationships that have been created between partners and third-party suppliers, the “trust but verify” motto has become commonplace—or has it? Companies are only as strong as their weakest links. Creating a strong cybersecurity program internally is not enough, as the program should include all aspects of business in which data is vulnerable.