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What is Video Conferencing in 2020?

The New Standard for Team Meetings

High-quality video conferencing experiences are increasingly important for end-user productivity. With more users turning on video, IT must ensure company networks can handle the load. Just as importantly, meeting rooms must support video conferencing, as collaboration between in-office and remote users is the new normal.

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Room Systems Supported

  • What is Video Conferencing
  • Current State and Trends for Telecommuting and Remote Work
  • Key Elements of Conferencing Security and How it Works
  • Managing the Video Conferencing Experience
What is Video Conferencing?
The Future of Remote Work
The Importance of Conferencing Security
Managing the Video Conferencing Experience

What is Video Conferencing?

Gartner defines video conferencing as communication by individuals or groups using systems that support image, voice and data transfer over digital networks or telephone circuits. Recently, several video conferencing platforms have grown in popularity for work. Top platforms include Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Skype for Business.

The Need for Video Conferencing

By 2024, remote work and changing workforce demographics will impact enterprise meetings. Only 25% will take place in person, down from 60% today. 

Challenges of Video Conferencing

The growing popularity of Zoom, Microsoft Teams and video conferencing in general is driving increased usage of room systems in organizations. These room systems exponentially increase support needs and associated costs. 

Common Challenges with Unified Communications and Collaboration Platforms:

  • Multi-platform Management: Modern organizations typically use multiple video conferencing platforms and require a central management solution.
  • Actionable Meeting Room Analytics: Are rooms over capacity? What rooms should be upgraded? Actionable insights are key to continuous improvement of the meeting room experience.
  • Integrating Software and Hardware: Meeting rooms are complicated. They require the perfect connection between hardware and software, typically from different vendors.
  • Inherited Video Conferencing Technologies: Organizations need tools to deal with legacy technologies while still meeting end-user expectations of a modern conferencing experience.
  • Room System Troubleshooting: If there's an issue with a meeting room, IT needs to know. Troubleshooting guidance is important, especially when working across multiple systems like Zoom Rooms, Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), and Skype for Businesss Room Systems (SRS).
  • Room System Security: What is the best way to manage admin access to your platforms and monitor the integrity of meeting recordings? Ensuring proper security is key.

Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration Platform Feature Comparison Guide

How do you know which platform is right for you? There is far too much information out there for you to do ALL the research. As independent experts, we developed a guide focusing on key factors to help you decide on the best choice for your organization.

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The Upside to this Quick Transition

This rapid transition to remote work showed a low impact on daily functions. Businesses reported that they experienced a number of benefits:

1.

Better employee quality of life (59%)

2.

Better environmental impact (42.7%)

3.

Reduced employee turnovers rates (32.8%)

4.

More productive employees (28%)

5.

Cost savings (24.9%)

 

The downside to this
quick transition

More Challenges for IT

Beginning in early-March, the world experienced an unprecedented shift to working from home. This resulted in two significant transformations. First, organizations suddenly found themselves with the need to deploy video conferencing on a massive scale. Second, the threat of video conferencing security dangers quickly became a top issue in the UC world.

Caught Unprepared
IT was not ready

A recent survey found that 85% of companies believe embracing the public cloud is critical to fuel innovation. But only 40% of those who have already adopted public cloud have a cloud security management approach in place. 

End users were
not ready.

Most end users were unaware of vital security settings of video conferencing platforms. For the few who did know about them, they assumed that someone else was managing security on the back end. 

And in many cases, the UC Platforms was not ready.

The Importance of Conferencing Security

With an expected 40% of businesses maintaining a remote structure post COVID-19, security is a higher priority as we transition back to a semblance of normality. The key elements of security for video conferencing monitoring can be broken down into three areas:

Pre-Call Settings and Policies

The difference between a “Zoom-Bomb” or an exposed chat thread and a secure meeting, is as simple as checking a few boxes in the settings.

Call Data Transmission

Data transmission is the most vulnerable area of security. In the wrong hands, the video conference stream can turn into a private surveillance camera.

Post Call Archiving

Information from these virtual meetings could be sensitive, so data storage needs to be secure and separate from all other networks.

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Is Your Collaboration Platform at Risk?

Cisco Webex Teams

In March 2019, Cisco patched high-severity vulnerabilities in the video-conferencing platform. If exploited, these could have allowed an attacker to execute code on affected systems.

SLACK

Also in March, a critical vulnerability was found in Slack, which could allow automated account takeovers (ATOs) and lead to data breaches. 

Microsoft Teams:

Recently, Microsoft Teams had a security flaw that would allow a ‘malicious GIF’ to steal user data across an entire company.  Additionally, some customers are still looking for Teams to implement some advanced security features previously valued in Skype for Business.  

Both IT and end users need to keep a core list of video conferencing security best practices in mind. This renewed and hyper-vigilant form of digital workplace dexterity is essential.

Monitor &
Track Metrics

Deploy
Policies

Protect & Verify
Meeting Links

Don't Share Personal IDs

Authenticate & Track Users

Control Screen Sharing

Disable Join Before Host

Use Waiting Rooms

Avoid File Sharing

Double Check Confidentiality

Managing the Video Conferencing Experience

Shadow IT
and Our Free Solution

Get Shadow IT SCOUT Free

What is shadow IT? To complete their work, end users download video conferencing applications without considering security gaps. Gartner estimates that 1/3 of cyber-attacks in 2020 will center around Shadow IT, especially with remote workplaces.

Our free PowerSuite Shadow IT Scout monitoring software reveals security blind spots by surfacing usage of unsanctioned Unified Communications and Collaboration platforms. Identify account owners and individual users engaging on these platforms.

Take back control of your video conferencing UC environment with the free PowerSuite Shadow IT Scout.  Learn More here.

One Tool to Monitor, Analyze, and Secure

Request a Demo

Bring your users’ favorite collaboration and communications apps all under a single management framework, powered by our patented technology. Tackle cross-platform issues with ease. Learn about our plans and pricing to see which is right for you. Gain access to:

Help Desk:

Reduce troubleshooting time and improve end-user satisfaction by providing actionable and prescriptive guidance regarding advanced quality issues.

Benchmarking:

Use the power of crowdsourced cloud intelligence to compare anonymized WSC and UC performance KPIs across multiple sites and between different users and virtual meeting platforms.

Usage and Adoption:

Accelerate user adoption for meetings, chats, and calls across multiple platforms at the same time —visualize the full adoption profile of your entire enterprise Unified Communications and Collaboration environment.

Tracking:

Identify and track a customized and targeted set of Execs, VIPs or even conference rooms so that IT can stay ahead of any potential problems.

Problems & Insights:

AI/ML analyzes platform data to create a centralized hub to view problems and insights. Our software  prioritizes issues to troubleshoot and identifies system anomalies.

Policy Management:

Leverage PowerSuite’s comprehensive policy framework to implement governance covering security and workflow needs.

Let Our Consultants Join Your Team

Consulting

Video conferencing platforms have increased expectations for productivity gains and always-on reliability. Especially with so many companies new WFH policies, IT teams are now responsible for planning, deploying, and maintaining a multifaceted stack of unified communications and workstream collaboration platforms. Our unified communications experts have been busy honing their skills to cover the video conferencing solutions arena so that you don’t have to. Take a look at our Signature Consulting Services Datasheet to see how we can help your virtual meeting platforms be successful and secure.  Learn More Here. 

More Resources

Post-COVID-19 Remote Work

Long-term impact and statistics you need to know

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Readying the Workplace for the “New Normal”

Issues, considerations, and tips & tricks for managing remote work

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How to Plan Your Return to the Office Post-COVID-19

Current state and trends for telecommuting and remote work amid COVID-19

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Remote Work Means Increased Challenges for IT

Top 6 work from home UC challenges and solutions

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Unified Communications (UC) and Collaboration Platform Feature Comparison Guide

Deciding between Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others

DOWNLOAD Now

Video Conferencing Security Issues and Opportunities

Is Zoom simply the canary in the coal mine?

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How to Ensure the Perfect Video Conference

COVID-19 is forcing us to be better at remote work.

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How to Create the Perfect Zoom Co-existence Scenario

Best Practices for Pairing Zoom with Microsoft Teams and other apps

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Best Practices for Enterprise Usage of Multiple Collaboration Apps

Battling the multi-platform collaboration app hydra

Download Now
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