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.
Defending Against Toll Fraud and Robo Calls
As mentioned above, it’s not just a loss of quality or damage to UC performance that companies have to worry about when it comes to investing in management tools. The right UC management solutions can also make it easier for vendors, resellers, and end-users to play their part in the fight against security breaches caused by toll fraud and robocalls.
The issue of toll fraud continues to become more worrisome for businesses in all industries today, particularly as the software that criminals use becomes more sophisticated. Fortunately, it’s possible to access APIs and UC tools that make it easier to detect the potential signs of toll fraud before they have a chance to damage business operations.
Some vendors and market leaders are even experimenting with the arrival of artificial intelligence and biometrics in the call protection landscape. For instance, solutions can be implemented into a call centre that allows companies to instantly track biometric markers in a voice to determine whether the person calling on a phone is the customer that they claim to be.
Managing a Multi-Stack Environment
Properly maintaining a UC stack to ensure protection from toll fraud, better security, and consistently reliable performance can be complicated enough on its own. When you add in the fact that more companies are beginning to build their own multi-vendor UC stack environments using best-of-breed solutions from around the market, things become even more complicated.
Businesses from different backgrounds won’t always want a full-stack solution for their unified communications experience from the same vendor. Instead, they may prefer to pick and choose components of their communication landscape based on what they consider to be best for their teams and end-users. In this case, it will be crucial to learn how to implement integrations, APIs, and other solutions for interoperability, to bring the stress of UC minimum down to a minimum.
Going forward, vendors and market leaders will need to consider the needs of their customers and partners when it comes to things like multi-stack environments. Building tools on an open-environment, or allowing for API and SDK integrations may make it easier for a lot of leading tools to work more smoothly together in the future.
