Cybersecurity teams often find themselves faced with the unenviable challenge of trying to anticipate the next attack they’ll face. Rising to this challenge requires deep visibility into the activity of the many users and devices that operate on enterprise networks, which enables security teams to look for signs of unusual activity. Teams that react quicky with automated responses have the greatest chance to nip malicious activity in the bud, protecting their information and systems.

Endpoint protection has evolved in recent years to meet these increased demands. Cybersecurity teams shifted away from traditional anti-malware tools to next-generation endpoint detection and response solutions that provide deep insight into desktops, laptops and mobile devices. While EDR technology marked a significant advance, IT security professionals still have an overarching need: the ability to see the big picture.

Extended detection and response solutions, or XDR, promise to fill this gap, supplementing EDR’s device-centric capabilities with the ability to observe network traffic, peer into cloud services and comb through the activity logs generated by other security solutions. Acting on this knowledge, XDR platforms are able to alert administrators to suspicious activity and trigger situation-specific automated responses.

Surveillance cameras have been in use for decades, and organizations that employ them are able to collect a valuable record of what has happened in the area being watched by their cameras. But organizations that use smart cameras, video management software and data analytics can approach their surveillance video as data and gain far more value from it.

In the past, security teams have been in charge of surveillance, for obvious reasons, but by bringing IT professionals in to make use of the data that surveillance systems create, organizations open up a variety of use cases.

For example, the manufacturing industry has a wide variety of opportunities to apply enhanced video surveillance (EVS) technology to modernize operations, improve efficiency and enhance physical security.

To get started, a company should consider upgrading network connectivity throughout its facilities and connecting IP-based cameras to monitor business processes. By connecting these cameras to the data network and applying analytics software to the video data being collected, a company can unlock a number of valuable capabilities. Let’s take a look at some innovative ways that EVS technology can improve a company’s work.

City leaders may know they need a smart city strategy to attract and grow business, and to connect and serve citizens. But often, achieving the desired outcomes is harder than it sounds. These initiatives vary widely, with some struggling to get off the ground, while others achieve significant successes, such as aligning disparate, siloed systems.

To help establish the kind of success that drives further investment, I often suggest focusing on the development of the smart city “nervous system” platforms — the place where humans and data intersect for the purpose of better decision-making.

I work with companies of all sizes across a variety of industries on their Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) initiatives. There are almost as many different reasons for making the move to a cloud contact center as there are organizations using them. One might want to redeploy internal IT staff to more business-focused strategic projects. Another might be following internal policies to seek out cloud solutions where viable. Still another might be under the (often mistaken) impression that CCaaS will result in instant cost savings.

However, several reasons come up in our conversations time and again. Here are the top factors driving organizations’ CCaaS deployments.

We still don’t know when or how the COVID-19 pandemic will end, but one thing seems certain: The workplace is unlikely to ever look the same.

While it has become clear that most businesses will maintain physical office spaces, the majority of employers say they will give their employees some choice over where they want to work once the pandemic is over. The likely result? A hybrid workforce made up of employees who split their time between home and the office, depending on their roles and their to-do lists on any given workday.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms are uniquely suited to support such an arrangement, offering the following benefits:

Cybersecurity philosophies have changed significantly over time to adapt to the changing needs of the organizations they serve. In the early days of cybersecurity, we focused on building boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside.” Users and devices that we trusted were placed inside network perimeters and granted largely unfettered access to systems and data within that environment. Those on the outside were untrusted and blocked from accessing sensitive resources. While that approach served us well for decades, it fails to meet the needs of increasingly mobile and cloud-focused organizations as well as increasingly sophisticated and covert threats and malware. The evolution of the perimeter of the network has made it difficult to draw lines between “inside” and “outside” effectively.

Zero-trust architecture (ZTA) represents a philosophical shift in cybersecurity planning that seeks to address this limitation by making trust decisions based on the identity of a user or device, rather than the location.