Flex is Best
Many businesses are moving towards hybrid working environments, and Contact Centres are no different. Having a hybrid contact centre-as-a service (CCaaS) not only enables employees more flexibility, it allows centres to attract potentially higher calibre employees without being geo-restricted. Think about the multilingual support you could offer, as well as the benefits of having employees in different time zones to maintain 24/7 availability.
Hardware to Software
While this is great news for employers and employees of CCaaS, moving from on-site servers to cloud or hybrid systems can be a bit of a headache for IT administration. Having a reliable PaaS or IaaS can help optimizes your IT team’s ability to manage hybrid systems or unify online environments onto a single platform, but what about cybersecurity?
How Secure are Hybrid Contact Centres?
Cybersecurity is certainly a challenge for hybrid contact centres who are dealing with private and confidential information. But exactly what level of threat are remote contact centres facing?
Frankly, it’s a significant one. A report by Forbes in June 2022 stated that the communications sector is the 3rd most likely to suffer a cyberattack on a week-by-week basis, showing an increase of over 50% between 2020 and 2021. Contact Babel have found that a third of contact centres consider cybersecurity to be the biggest concern about hybridized working environments.
Be Prepared
However, before you hustle your colleagues under one roof and lock the doors, ALL services and institutions are under the increased threat of cyberattacks. It’s not a question of will your business suffer a cyberattack, it’s how often. The answer is just a question of being informed and prepared.
Safety First
Security solutions for hybrid contact centres often means going back-to-basics. Consider how you built your systems. Were they put together in an ad hoc way, for example, during the height of the pandemic to enable the continuation of your services? Or perhaps you cherry-picked cloud-based platforms like Meraki MX67 or apps to augment your servers as your contact centre grew? If so, this may present a considerable security liability. Your system will need to be audited and streamlined.
Key Security Solutions
- Use a reputable business VPN for internal and cloud-based resources
- Use an integrated or multi-cloud management platform to amalgamate apps and silos to make IT monitoring easier
- Require fewer passwords—there’s less opportunity for them to be compromised
- Enable two-factor (2FA) or multi-factor authentication for increased security
- Maintain secure file sharing between colleagues
- Use cloud-based messaging rather than emails—as these can be hacked more easily
Work Like the FBI
Additional email security measures have been signposted by the FBI this year as countermeasures to the increase in cyberattacks. They can be easily adopted by hybrid workers:
- Ensure the URL in emails is associated with the business/individual it claims to be from
- Verify the email sender addresses, especially when using mobile devices
- Refrain from supplying login credentials or PII to anyone. Many emails requesting personal information may appear to be legitimate
