As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the country and state governments responded by issuing shelter-in-place orders, many business owners found themselves hurriedly cobbling together remote work setups for their employees. A quick response was necessary and appropriate in the early days of the unprecedented coronavirus crisis.
However, hackers have swiftly adapted to and exploited the many gaps these new, unsecure, remote work setups created. This means as the pandemic persists and merges into a ‘new normal,’ the costs of waiting to establish secure, reliable business communications have never been higher.
The Trouble with Zoom
In the initial days of shelter-in-place orders across the country, the teleconferencing platform Zoom experienced an explosion in usership. Businesses used Zoom to get themselves organized and reconnect with clients while individuals used it to stay connected with friends and family during social distancing.
Unfortunately, the exponential increase in traffic made Zoom the victim of recurring service outages and the target of hackers. Early on, trolls joined unsecured meetings where they disrupted proceedings and abused participants. More recently, hackers have attacked services like Zoom to obtain personal and business data and login credentials. Although Zoom initially advertised that its service features end-to-end encryption, it later emerged that this is not exactly accurate, and vulnerabilities persist.
There are Options in the Cloud
Now that many businesses have managed to reestablish core functions remotely, it’s time to replace these fragile setups with secure, reliable arrangements that will carry operations efficiently into our new normal. Transitioning to a cloud-based business phone solution is the best way to achieve this for a minimal expenditure of time and money. Moreover, there are numerous high-quality unified communications platforms and Gregg Communications works with all of them.
To explore the wide-ranging benefits of moving to the cloud during this challenging moment, we’ll highlight Mitel and RingCentral as two examples.
Mitel’s MiCloud Solution
Mitel is a leading Unified Communications provider with more than 4.7 million cloud users. Their newly launched MiCloud is an enterprise-level platform that offers larger businesses unparalleled scalability, integration and remote work flexibility. Mitel chose to host their solution on the Google Cloud for all the right reasons:
· It’s a highly reliable platform that features multiple redundant backups.
· It has the highest obtainable speed and availability offering with minimal latency.
· It offers multi-layered security architecture that’s compliant with all major regulations.
The topic of security compliance is essential for businesses in certain industries. For example, a client of ours that processes academic transcripts for universities is under constant third-party audit. The cloud enables us to ensure they have the appropriate level of security and transparency even under a remote work setup.
RingCentral’s best-in-breed approach
RingCentral has topped the leaderboard of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in Unified Communications for the past five years. Their family of business communications solutions are secure and reliable with an additional benefit: wide integration with a variety of productivity tools such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and more. One outstanding feature of going to the cloud with RingCentral is they adopt a best-in-breed approach in which they have partnered with leaders in a variety of spaces such as contact centers and video teleconferencing. This is how RingCentral enables secure, user-friendly integration with some of the leading business productivity tools.
The Future is Now
Businesses that had transitioned their unified communications to the cloud before the pandemic faced a less jarring adjustment to full-time remote work. Similarly, business that make the transition now will future-proof themselves for the new normal that follows. Whether it’s renewed waves of infection, various other disasters (natural or man-made), or the need for remote work options, a robust cloud communications system is a solid investment.
At Gregg Communications our definition of customer service includes choice, which means we help you select the top-quality platform that’s best for your needs and price point, not in preference to the vendor that gives us the best kickback. Moreover, unlike other communications providers, we don’t desert you once the sale is closed. As part of our White Glove service, we guide, support and train you throughout the deployment process.
If you’re ready to establish secure, reliable business communications to get you through this crisis and whatever comes next, give us a call (630-706-8222) or send us an email.