Cory Communications

The Importance of Heightened Data Protection

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Find the agent with experience in your industry for the best data protection and cyber security strategies.

Can you think like a cybercriminal? If cyber security and data protection are important to you, thinking like a hacker is in your best interest. Most people don’t possess this ability, which is why you have to outsource experts who know what to look for, where you’re likely to be compromised and offer solutions to keep it from happening.

In the past two years, cyber security experts have noticed that the risks have become greater as more and more companies have embraced digitization and cloud-based solutions, which offer great advantages, but also come with a greater amount of risk, particularly in a multi-cloud environment.

There has been a shift away from thinking that it’s only a matter of when, not if, you’re going to get hacked. Therefore, strategies have emerged that are less reactive and more proactive. Your system is likely under a daily threat if not multiple threats. To stay ahead of cybercriminals, let’s look at some ways you approach data protection.

Where You Are Vulnerable

Cyber security experts are great at digging in and finding areas of your system that are vulnerable to attack. The network is thoroughly scanned, penetration tests are conducted and any exploitable area is quickly revealed.

This level of expertise isn’t often found on-staff, which is why taking the steps to find that expert third-party professional to assist you is going to be necessary.

Finding the right third-party professionals requires that you look for those who have experience in your particular industry. They should also have experience in similar systems, size of the company, and network complexity.

These are people who know about all the tools available that can assist them in zooming in on potentially vulnerable areas of your entire system.

Connect with the Right Agent

Don’t let the technology you use to do your business, particularly your communications technology, be the weak link in the system. Get the upper hand by utilizing solutions that are built to appease your data protection needs.

At Cory Communications, we’re assisting our clients in connecting to top-notch communication technology that keeps them competitive, but not vulnerable to attack from cyber criminals. Rather than take on technology that puts a roadblock in your workflow, contact us and let’s talk about reducing risk while improving services.

6 Ways to Build Flexibility Into Your IT Infrastructure

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Building a flexible IT infrastructure is critical for promoting agility in a growing workplace.

For many companies that have been around for a while, IT infrastructure has focused on centralized management and oversight. Any changes to the infrastructure are implemented through the IT team with a process that takes into consideration the cohesive nature of a top-down approach.

What’s intended to be an attempt at consistency and cohesion for bigger enterprises often results in an IT infrastructure that is cumbersome. It limits innovation and agility and often promotes technological priorities over that of business processes.

Centralized approaches are often pursued with the goal of improving efficiency and productivity, saving costs on specific solutions with a streamlined approach. What often occurs is an increase in complexity and bureaucracy. It slows an enterprise’s time to market and increases the cost of operations. It also places technology decisions with IT, rather than with business managers.

Some large enterprises find that it makes more sense to decentralize the IT infrastructure, allowing divisions or departments the independence to behave as small entrepreneurial start-ups that tend to achieve high levels of agility. In this model, there’s more opportunity for innovation and autonomy to choose the technology solutions that directly benefit that line of business.

If your organization is struggling with the disadvantages of a centralized IT infrastructure, or if you’re a growing business that’s considering the approach you should take toward your technology stack, here are six ways you can ensure a decentralized infrastructure:

Don’t mandate the usage of a particular solution. There may be some technologies that simply aren’t a good fit for every business department. Make it possible for each area of business to build out a solution over time.

Consult with businesses to create common capabilities. Once you have a good understanding of technology essentials, you’ll be in a better position to help add value over time.

Start with building blocks. You’ll be able to help each department build a solid foundation.

Support innovation. Encourage each division to adopt the solutions and policies that promote agility and help them to innovate.

Set boundaries. Whether this comes in the form of performance application interfaces (APIs), standards or architecture, you can help each line of business to be successful.

Encourage sharing. If a division discovers an IT infrastructure element that delivers the results they need, it’s a good idea for other areas of the enterprise to determine whether it might work well for them.

If you’re considering ways to decentralize your infrastructure, or if you’re making decisions about how to handle infrastructure as you grow, contact us at Cory Communications. We can help you balance the benefits of decentralization while supporting the efficiency and productivity that a cohesive infrastructure ensures.

The Maturation of Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation involves stakeholders from across the organization.

Digital transformation is no longer a project owned and executed strictly by enterprise IT. Across all industries, digital transformation is maturing beyond simply taking business processes digital. There are two main goals that enterprises seek to address:

·         Integrate various channels, including social, web, commerce and mobile efforts to offer a more seamless customer experience.

·         Increase agility, flexibility and security while opening up opportunities for innovation and modernizing infrastructure.

While every digital transformation will be different and will seek to solve specific business challenges, there are general guidelines that can make any process smoother:

Aim for Broad, Enterprise-Wide Transformation. While many efforts begin in IT and center on technology updates, the immediate benefits often spur additional changes in marketing or operations. Look for opportunities for the CIO and CEO to champion digital transformation together, so the entire organization reaps the benefits of a digital shift.

Involve the Board. The board of directors was often the source of a slowdown for digital transformation in its early days. Concerned with providing growth to shareholders, board members often prefer the safe path to one that disrupts business processes on the way to massive growth opportunities.

It’s understandable that board members would be reluctant to get behind digital transformation; ROI information is limited and it can be hard to quantify goals such as “providing opportunity for innovation.” Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to seek buy-in from board members and involve them in your process in order to experience benefits across the organization.

Create a Formal Committee. In order to keep digital transformation on track, organize a committee to steer it through to its goals and keep various departments updated and on track. Involve members from various departments, including marketing, HR and finance, in order to consider each goal from different angles and provide support for resources and planning.

Prioritize Responding to the Market. While specific reasons may vary for pursuing digital transformation, each plan is generally in response to market demand. Enterprises are aware that consumers expect a personalized, convenient experience and are all too willing to visit a competitor’s site if their needs are not immediately answered.

Identify Your Goals. Just because everyone around you is migrating to the cloud, that doesn’t mean it’s the answer to your specific challenges. Perhaps investing in blockchain would be a better immediate strategy because it would eliminate your need for extensive cloud data storage. Or perhaps you work in an industry with lengthy and complex compliance regulations, and an investment in a cloud security solution would help you streamline your compliance processes. It’s a good idea to know what you can implement to realize quick benefits and increase buy-in for digital transformation across your organization.

Looking for help creating a comprehensive digital transformation strategy? Cory Communications can help you evaluate your needs and identify the solutions that provide immediate ROI for your digital technology. Contact us today.

Emerging Call Center Technologies for 2019

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Interactive voice response is one of the call center technologies that introduces cost savings.

Customer experience is the focus for many enterprises, with call centers looking for ways to increase satisfaction and loyalty while trimming costs. That’s also the focus of emerging call center technologies that promise to improve efficiency and productivity for the agent while improving satisfaction scores. Take a look at some of the tools shaping how excellent customer experiences are delivered:

Cloud Solutions: Communication tools delivered through the cloud are offering better scalability, agility and flexibility for call centers. Agents are able to access integrated solutions that provide comprehensive data surrounding a customer, including previous interactions and order history. A better-informed conversation allows customers to receive personalized service.

Call center managers appreciate cloud solutions’ scalability, allowing them to add or reduce the number of agents supported by the solution, with changes made in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. In addition, cloud solutions ensure that the call center only ever pays for the number of agents using the application.

Interactive Voice Response: One of the most impactful call center technologies is gaining momentum in 2019: interactive voice response (IVR). Built on the technology that brought you the original “press one for sales,” today’s IVR is a smart, intuitive tool that assists customers and allows them to interact with a call center system from anywhere and at any time.

Call centers appreciate IVR because it frees up agents to work on more complex customer issues, while IVR handles the routine calls for issues like requesting order status, paying an invoice or refilling a prescription.

Smart IVR systems are able to pull in an agent when they need to. For instance, IVR can be used in refilling a prescription, tapping an agent when the caller indicates that they have a question about their refill or when they have a change of address that needs to be logged.

A key benefit of introducing call center technologies like IVR is that it offsets the perennial challenge of call center employee retention. When agents are relieved of mundane, routine calls and are instead handling more complex customer issues, they experience an increase in job satisfaction.

Customers also appreciate the convenience of being able to access their accounts, even when it’s the middle of the night or when you’re experiencing a heavy volume in calls. Customers enjoy the ability to complete their order status request or pay an invoice without delay.

These call center technologies ensure your enterprise delivers a customer experience that builds satisfaction and loyalty, while keeping call center employees satisfied in their jobs as well.

For more information about emerging call center technologies, contact us at Cory Communications. We can help you trim costs while improving customer experiences with the right solutions.

Managing SD-WAN and Network Visibility: A Troubleshooting Guide

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SD-WAN and network visibility rely on a few helpful monitoring and troubleshooting steps.

While software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) offers advantages such as improved security, lower costs, and better control over network traffic, there is often a learning curve when it comes to troubleshooting the network when an application isn’t performing as it should. You need a troubleshooting guide for SD-WAN and network visibility to ensure your applications run uninterrupted.

Your first step is to establish monitoring of your SD-WAN so that you know when the network isn’t performing as it normally does. While monitoring the physical components is relatively simple, the abstraction of the functions can be a bit more complex for monitoring.

Event handling: Your network monitoring begins with examining events, or noteworthy activity on your network. Look for a solution that can send events to a single event-handling system where they can be stored, sorted, and managed. There are budget-friendly solutions available, or more in-depth ones for enhanced analysis. The monitoring tool should automatically generate a ticket or initiate a real-time alert when a critical event has been identified. And all events should appear on a regular summary so they can be handled in a timely way.

Active path testing: Monitoring SD-WAN and network visibility includes determining whether it is delivering an optimized end-to-end service with a high level of reliability. Active path testing determines the paths for a variety of traffic types, and the tests should include the elements of real traffic, including quality-of-service markings, transmission rate, and packet size. One advantage of this type of testing is that it can be conducted overnight or when there is no regular application traffic.

Physical components: SD-WAN is generally run on an x86 system that uses an internal central processing unit (CPU), interfaces, memory, power, and cooling. Any problems with these components should show up on a network events log, but monitoring can also validate how many buffers are used on each path, whether the CPU is saturated at certain times of the workday, and whether power supplies are functioning well. It’s a good idea to verify that the SD-WAN controller will issue an alert or report when there’s a problem with the physical link.

Topology maps: The SD-WAN and network visibility control system should provide physical and logical topology maps. This allows a baseline to be established so that the enterprise can determine the difference between actual and desired dynamic maps.

Troubleshooting SD-WAN and Network Visibility

The guiding principle of your troubleshooting plan is to be methodical. You’ll need to determine if it’s a physical problem, such as a downed interface, a link problem, or a routing or application problem. Work through the following steps:

  • Determine the basic functionality of the SD-WAN node, examining the CPU, memory and interface connectivity.
  • Evaluate basic interface functionality.
  • Virtual private network functionality must be validated.
  • Examine integration with overall routing architecture, with no black holes, unreachable subnets, or routing loops.
  • Determine a forwarding policy verification to detail how traffic is routed if there is jitter, packet loss, or latency.

Examining SD-WAN and network visibility for troubleshooting can be daunting, but an optimized network with SD-WAN introduces key advantages for enterprise IT. Contact us at Cory Communications to discuss solutions to aid in your network optimization efforts.

How Big Data Analytics Are Changing UC Migrations

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UC migrations can be slow and tedious, but big data analytics are making the process faster and more accurate.

As interest in Unified Communications (UC) is growing, and more enterprises are implementing cloud solutions for communications, it’s becoming clear that migration is a long and tedious process. With massive amounts of client and user records to shift, many enterprises are forced to dedicate more resources or face weeks of data transfers. Big data analytics is beginning to change the cost and time necessary to complete a UC migration.

The traditional methods of relying on site surveys for collecting user and phone data is time-consuming and prone to human error. Similarly, transforming user and phone data into UC settings through spreadsheet macros is difficult to validate in its large-size files and its single-point access. The only way to make these tedious processes go faster is to add more people working on it, which only increases the risk of errors while driving up costs.

There’s also generally a disconnect between the time that the data is collected and the cut-over date, which demands a freeze on changes. This negatively impacts day-to-day processes and often requires additional support staff.

How can big data analytics improve UC migrations?

Big data analytics using extract/transform/load (ETL) technology offers a variety of improvements for UC migration:

  • Automatic discovery and extraction of a legacy user and phone data.
  • Supply clean data that is normalized against multipole secondary feeds that can be cross-referenced with the private branch exchange (PBX) data.
  • Validate data before and throughout transfer to the cloud platform.
  • Automatic testing of the newly loaded platform for successful call execution.

With ETL, data migration can be processed through in batches, creating a repetitive process that can be accelerated without requiring additional personnel or other resources.

There are several benefits that come from accessing big data analytics for UC migration, including a lower cost of data transformation and shifting, significantly lowering the error rates that impact end users, as well as increasing the number of enterprises that adopt UC solutions.

For companies that previously considered implementing UC technology, but had passed it over because of the time and resources involved in a migration, the ability to access big data analytics in the process may make the upgrade more easily within reach.

For more information about beginning a communications upgrade to a UC solution, contact us at Cory Communications. From identifying business needs for communications to guiding you through a cloud migration, you’ll experience a seamless transition with us.

Why Now Is the Time to Invest in SIP Trunking

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SIP trunking offers agility and scalability with the reduced costs of connecting to the PSTN through an IP connection.

New technologies like software-defined networking (SDN) are making it an ideal time to upgrade to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking for communications. Combined with network functions virtualization (NFV), your IT team may be starting to wonder if you can afford to justify your legacy phone system any longer.

SIP trunking offers far more than just an upgrade to how you access voice calls. Its agility, flexibility and scalability demonstrate clear benefits over a legacy private branch exchange (PBX). SIP trunking enables your users to make a direct connection to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through an Internet Protocol (IP) connection.

One key benefit of SIP trunking is that it not only supports voice communications, but also offers video, images and texting. Because of technologies like SDN and NFV, companies can also leverage cloud solutions that offer as-a-service communication solutions. This allows for better control over applications, as well as the following benefits:

Business continuity: Any interruption to communications can be costly. While legacy trunking services are limited in their continuity capabilities, SIP offers a rerouting option to alternate endpoints. This prevents you from missing calls during a power outage or a natural disaster and allows you to continue business as usual.

Seasonal scalability: If your business has a seasonal component, such as those found in retail, tax accounting and HVAC services, your legacy system has to account for those peak communication times. This means that for much of the year, you’re paying for hardware, network and licensing for phone lines that are only accessed for a few months. SIP trunking allows you to adjust the number of users you need, and also supports bursting for instances where you max out on the number of available users. Scaling up and down takes minutes, with no need for on-site installation or management to increase or decrease the number of users.

Thinking ahead: Traditional PBX systems are declining, while IP-based PBX investments are increasing. SIP is not only a good fit for today’s technology, but it will also support the growing focus on collaboration tools that stream audio and video. SIP is also aligned with software-defined technology that opens up visibility into networks that help companies optimize their network performance.

As companies’ legacy PBX contracts come up for renewal, you can expect to see many making the upgrade to SIP trunking and other IP-based communications. With SDN and NFV solutions to support it, SIP trunking is likely to experience continued growth.

If you’d like to learn more about the types of benefits your company might see with SIP trunking, contact us at Cory Communications. We can help you identify the right provider based on your specific business objectives.

Should You Revisit Your Business Continuity Plan?

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New cloud solutions make a business continuity plan affordable for any size business.

Small businesses often don’t spend enough time considering a business continuity plan. Assuming that hackers must have bigger fish to fry, they continue to rely on backup tapes that they store in a closet in what they hope is a fire- and water-proof safe.

If this sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. For small- to mid-size businesses, the investment in the reliable backup of data is critical. If it’s been a while since you’ve considered your business continuity plan, there are new, affordable tools available.

Whether you’re hit with a natural disaster, malware or a lengthy power outage, the general rule is that the smaller the business, the more likely it is to experience a failure unless there is a reliable solution that can be executed quickly. You may be prepared for a short-term or minor problem, but you may not have the plan in place for a significant disaster.

Consider seasonality: If you’re a retail store and rely heavily on the income that you pull in between October and January, or if you’re a tax accountant that makes 75% of your income during the months of February to April, you need a business continuity plan that acknowledges seasonality. You need a faster response during your busy season, or you could lose enough revenue and customers to sink your company.

Key questions: There are some questions you should ask yourself to ensure your business continuity plan matches your business goals:

·         Is your business able to bounce back after a power outage of a few hours? What if that outage lasted days? How about weeks? Evaluate the cost of one hour of downtime to help you determine how long you could withstand an outage.

·         Are your systems safe in your location, or should you consider investing in a cloud backup solution?

·         What is the impact of hidden costs, such as loss of reputation or negative public relations?

Invest in data recovery and data backup: Consider not only your data storage but also the ease with which you can retrieve the data and restart operations. If you pair cloud storage with backup and a replication plan, you can quickly restore your data. You also reduce your risk of data loss because your data is stored on-site.

A disaster recovery managed service provider can provide information on how quickly you can expect restoration following an outage. While an in-house data backup can be destroyed, a cloud solution ensures that all data is quickly retrievable. Depending on the managed service provider, your recovery time can vary, but most ensure recovery within minutes up to a few days.

If you need help creating a business continuity plan from scratch, or if you’re interested in selecting a cloud backup solution, contact us at Cory Communications. We can help ensure your business is protected in the event of any type of disaster imaginable.

Why Pairing AI and Hosted Voice Service Makes Sense

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The pairing of AI and hosted voice automates the analysis of data, allowing service reps more time with customers.

Enterprises like yours are logging vast amounts of data, through cloud-based technology like hosted voice communications and other solutions. Few companies are tapping into the potential that data has for improving productivity and enhancing the customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) and hosted voice, when paired together, offer a way to utilize data for streamlined customer service.

Hosted voice solutions such as hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) gather extensive information about communications, from time-of-day call volumes to patterns in word usage and response times. Companies can tap into this information to analyze and understand customers, their preferences, and which complaints are most likely to terminate communications.

What’s even better is when AI and hosted voice come together to automate some of the more time-consuming aspects of customer service. This approach frees up service representatives to spend more time talking with customers, resolving complex problems and identifying ideal solutions. Here are a few ways that AI and hosted service improve the customer experience:

Personalized service: Your company is able to utilize interactive voice response (IVR) to collect all relevant information about a customer so that a service representative is equipped to better handle the call. From account information to a history of communications with your company, your representative is able to see that the customer called the week before with a complaint or question and they can follow up to determine if the issue was resolved satisfactorily. This tool allows service reps to handle calls more efficiently and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Pattern analysis: No customer ever likes to sit on hold, and AI and hosted voice can be tapped for critical pattern analysis to determine when it’s most likely to happen. Scheduling the right number of reps for any given period has always required some analysis, but through AI, that analysis can be automated. This tool can come in handy when seasonality or a special promotion are expected to increase call volumes, but it can be difficult to determine just how much.

Chat bots: This technology has come a long way in recent years, with chat bots making it convenient for customers to quickly and easily schedule appointments or other tasks that can be automated and taken off the hands of customer service representatives. In the healthcare setting, chat bots can even help patients receive all of the information for an upcoming procedure and answer questions about timing or location.

Virtual contact center agents: Virtual agents can handle a wide variety of tasks, from either offering services in a customer’s native language to offering translation between the caller and a customer service representative. Virtual agents can also recognize patterns, such as a flood of calls coming in when a promotional item’s landing page isn’t loading correctly, and be programmed to offer a set of instructions for accessing the promotion.

AI and hosted voice offer a wide variety of ways to improve the customer experience and streamline productivity for customer service departments. For more information on what this technology could do for your enterprise, contact us at Cory Communications.

Cloud Security in the Serverless Age

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As enterprises adopt new technologies, cloud security must be adapted and revised to prevent hidden vulnerabilities.

The typical cloud security model has been one of shared responsibility between the enterprise and the cloud provider. The cloud provider secured the hardware and software of the cloud, while the enterprise was responsible for securing the data stored in the cloud. In the best scenarios, these areas were spelled out in detail, with clear parameters for securing all aspects of the technology.

As new features, software models and approaches emerged, security teams might find themselves scrambling to revise their policies and detect any potential vulnerabilities in the cloud. The variety of workloads powering open source, owned and borrowed code became more complex as new technology appeared.

The benefits offered were often offset by the new security challenges they presented. For instance, as virtual machines made way for microservices and containers, there were always cloud security issues that came up to complicate the shared responsibility over how security is handled.

The newest approach to building and developing cloud native applications is serverless, or Functions as a Service (FaaS). In this model, development teams write application code in terms of a collection of functions, and the cloud provider runs the functions. It’s an approach that frees developers to focus on coding, and the provider handles provisioning, billing and scaling of the applications.

The technology is increasingly adopted, but will require a new approach to cloud security. While the traditional model creates clear boundaries for the parties responsible for each aspect of the application, serverless shifts more responsibility back to the cloud provider. The cloud provider handles the management of the operating system, while the enterprise becomes responsible for the applications in the cloud.

While this might seem like a good thing for DevOps and for security teams, the new model of security introduces blind spots, because the enterprise no longer has visibility into the operating system. This creates a challenge around adding firewalls or workload protection tools.

Security professionals need some new guidelines for handling cloud security in the age of serverless:

Determine ownership: Don’t make assumptions about who owns each part of the shared security responsibility. Defining rules makes it easier if or when you have a breach and saves you the step of finger-pointing when the vulnerability is identified.

Gain visibility: Assume your cloud provider is only taking care of the minimum cloud security measures agreed upon, and then secure visibility into your workloads across the data center.

Begin from the ground up: Addressing security as you discover vulnerabilities will always keep you scrambling. Build in cloud security from the initial development stage of the application, working closely with your cloud provider from the beginning to prevent attacks.

To learn more about how to adapt your cloud security strategy to changing technology, contact us at Cory Communications. We can help you ensure that blind spots and vulnerabilities don’t have a place in your cloud environment.

Connect With Cory

Cory Communications, Inc.
200 Haddonfield Berlin Road,
Suite 203
Gibbsboro, NJ 08026

Phone: 856-795-2223

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