Unified Communication solutions are a crucial element in running a successful business today. The right UC plan ensures that business leaders can implement all the tools that employees need for essential internal and external conversations. However, there’s a lot more to running a successful UC stack than simply choosing the right selection of services.
Business leaders, resellers, and anyone else implementing unified communication technology in the current environment need to ensure that the right tools are in place to control those UC assets. This means implementing everything from high-level security and privacy solutions to creating reliable and convenient endpoint deployment strategies.
Here’s how the concept of UC management is evolving in 2020 and beyond.
UC Management: Security and Compliance
Perhaps the most essential factor in managing a unified communication deployment is ensuring that the environment remains secure, compliant, and properly protected. Vendors from all background are putting more stock into making sure that their customers get the end-to-end security solutions that they need to thrive. All the while, new solutions are appearing on the market to help with protecting users against things like data loss and fraud.
As valuable as unified communications is to the current workplace, it also presents a selection of unique security challenges by bringing disparate technologies together, like voice, video, chat, and more. Business leaders will need to ensure that they work with resellers and vendors that offer auditing and system reports that allow them to comply with security and regulatory standards. Other components to consider will include:
- Voice and screen recording: Cloud-based software for recording conversations in all formats, from video collaboration through to audio calls, will be essential in allowing for greater security and compliance in the UC space. The right recording tools could make it easier for businesses to comply with audits.
- Data and call encryption: Information, from customer details to conversational data, will need to be encrypted both at rest and in transit within the UC environment. Business leaders will need to ensure that their vendors or resellers have the right encryption standards in place.
- Security and access controls: Vendors and resellers will need to ensure that businesses can control how much information any team member can access at any given time. A granular control system with policies for verifying users by their location, credentials, or device might be necessary.
New Opportunities in UC Management
As the demand for advanced service management tools and solutions continues to grow, we’re beginning to see the arrival of new and disruptive technology in the market. According to predictions issued by Forrester in 2019, RPA and artificial intelligence are combining to create a more “cognitive” enterprise. In this smart environment, businesses leaders can get a more granular overview of what’s happening behind the scenes in their communication stacks.
Artificial intelligence in the UC management environment means that business leaders, resellers, and vendors can monitor information and performance metrics in real-time. AI tools can collect and process vast amounts of data much more rapidly than any human. Additionally, AI systems can be implemented with specific automation strategies, so that pre-emptive fixes can be put into place when issues are detected.
There are even artificial intelligence tools in the industry today that can help companies to manage various other forms of UC management, from tracking and improving quality of service to reducing toll fraud risks. As the business landscape continues to evolve, and consumers become more demanding in the kind of quality that they expect, no-one will put up with issues like jitter and call quality drops.
Monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing the wide range of evolving technologies in the communication landscape with AI-enhanced solutions will allow vendors, resellers, and IT experts to maintain the kind of high-grade enterprise-level conversations that expected in the current landscape.
