It’s the very first news roundup of 2021, and we’ve got a selection of fantastic updates and reports to welcome you back to UC Today. Over the last seven days, most of us have been struggling to find our routine after the holiday celebrations, but the UC landscape hasn’t slowed down.
During the last week, we’ve reported on everything from RingCentral’s new cyber essentials certifications to the steps that Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, and Google have taken to respond to privacy watchdog concerns.
Here are all the stories that you don’t want to miss if you haven’t had a chance to keep up with everything in the last week.
The Future of Work: It’s Already Here
Rob Scott, our own UC Today Publisher, recently released his new blog for the beginning of the year, discussing the rise of the new future of work, and what it really means to the way that we operate. As Rob notes, even before the pandemic hit in 2020, organisations were already experimenting with the potential of things like remote and anywhere working, and cloud-based technology.
The introduction of 2020’s new challenges meant that many companies simply had to embrace the “future” workplace a lot faster than they had predicted. In his blog, Rob discusses whether we should have seen this switch to digital coming years ago, and how companies can make sure they match the speed of transformation that’s evident now. Check out the insights here.
RingCentral Achieves Cyber Essentials Certification
RingCentral, one of the market leaders in the development of fantastic cloud communications solutions, recently announced that it has received the Cyber Essentials Plus certification status for the UK. According to the vendor, the accreditation was given following an audit of the company from the cybersecurity firm, the NCC Group.
RingCentral believes that to deliver the best possible experiences to its customers, it needs more than just innovative services. Trust is at the heart of all business communications, and RingCentral clients need to feel confident that they can rely on the highest levels of security, privacy, and compliance at all times. This new certification praises RingCentral’s approach to those pillars. You can learn more about the award here.
Slack Stumbles Yet Again
Slack didn’t have the most successful start to the year. The collaboration company apologized to its global base of customers on the 5th of January, after the service went down for several hours. The service checker from the chat firm had been showing error messages across the board as companies across the globe started to return to work.
Service returned to normal in the early hours of the morning, with the final issue announced as fixed at 5:05am. Slack announced that it was ‘…terribly sorry for the disruption’ and that it appreciated the patience of its customers. However, no additional information about the cause of the issue appeared. See the full story here.
Tech Giants Respond to Privacy Watchdog Concerns
Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft and Google have all responded to a letter issued by multiple government agencies recently, which outlines the concerns they have about privacy and security. In total, 6 global government bodies, including the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK, sent an open letter to the collaboration and video conferencing platform vendors at the end of the year.
Following the festive break, the ICO said that the four vendors mentioned above had responded to the letter, which addressed various privacy and security best practices and concerns. The ICO shared that the information given by each of the four companies in their responses was “encouraging”, paving the way for a more secure video conferencing landscape. Learn more here.
Commsverse and UC Today Partner on Microsoft Events
We’re proud to announce that UC Today, your go-to publication for communication and collaboration information, has entered into a new partnership with Commsverse. We’ll be supporting Commsverse in the UK for 2021 and hosting a series of mini-events that focus on some of the hottest topics to do with Microsoft Teams and the Teams ecosystem.
During this partnership, Commsverse will remain completely independent and community-focused, but we’ll be on-hand to help promote their content to our 1.5 million unique visitors per year, 500,000 of which actively focusing on Microsoft Teams content. Check out the details of the upcoming events here.
Happy New Year to all of our readers, and welcome back to UC Today.
Which were your favourite stories from this week? Connect with us on social media to let us know.
