For many business and educational leaders, the resumption of work and learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a challenge. Enforcing health and safety policies and detecting noncompliance can be difficult to accomplish, especially in high-traffic areas, but it’s crucial. Enhanced video surveillance can help. In recent months, many organizations have repurposed existing EVS systems, typically deployed for physical security, to support screening measures related to COVID-19, such as thermal imaging scans, occupancy management and contact tracing.

Layering face mask detection into video analytics, and potentially integrating it with access control systems, provides an additional layer of protection. As with occupancy management and contact tracing, many companies find that automated solutions are far more effective at mask monitoring than humans are.

When college students and their parents sign their tuition checks, they’re not just paying for the education they receive in the classroom or the degrees they earn at the end of four years of instruction. They’re paying, in large part, for the college experience.

But many higher learning institutions are currently operating with a remote learning model. Students at these schools can’t mingle on the quad, hang out in their dorm rooms or even study together in the library. To deliver the value these students are paying for, colleges and universities must find ways to create an online experience that comes as close as possible to replicating the energy and engagement of the on-campus environment.

Increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to student devices to help deliver that experience. Here are some lessons from institutions that are taking a successful approach.

Given the unprecedented business context of this year, things are even more challenging. Many organizations are still operating largely with a remote work model, and employees often join firms without ever even coming into the office to meet with their managers and colleagues — let alone HR personnel. Under these conditions, it is impossible to conduct traditional orientation programs, or even to simply sit down with new employees to lead them through the various payroll forms and other documents they need to complete.

Many companies are finding value in HR Service Delivery from ServiceNow. While the Now platform is primarily known for its IT service management capabilities, it can also deliver consumer-like HR experiences to employees, helping companies to get their workers up and running as quickly as possible.

Zerologon is the name given to a security vulnerability found in Microsoft Windows domain controllers by Secura. It is an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability in the Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC). An attacker can leverage this flaw to gain administrative access to a Windows domain.

This vulnerability was assigned CVE number CVE-2020-1472 and rated critical. A Zerologon vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft in August has been making the news lately as proof of concept exploits have started to appear in the wild. In this post, I will discuss in more detail what this vulnerability is and how you can defend against it.

Until the 1990s, organizations typically had only one kind of computing device to offer end users: the desktop computer. In more recent years, as laptops shrank in size and smartphones emerged, there were some who believed that devices might one day converge again into a single, unified form factor.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, more device types are available today than ever, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for organizations looking to equip their employees for optimal productivity. Instead, IT and business leaders must make decisions based on their specific business goals.

Here are some of the most common objectives that come up in our conversations with IT leaders at organizations across a variety of industries — and which devices are most likely to help organizations meet them.

Welcome back to the third part of this blog series, where I’ve been exploring the options available in the cloud contact center space. A quick recap of who we have talked about in this series: The first post was on the power of RingCentral, the second was showing off the red-hot Five9.

In this third blog, I will explore where Cisco Systems is at in this cloudy landscape. In a business landscape influenced by the pandemic and remote work, cloud computing has been a valued resource for many companies, especially those relying on cloud contact center technology. Let’s dig into where Cisco, one of the on-premises leaders of contact center, is with cloud.