How secure is your remote collaboration tool?

For many of us, the way we work has changed immeasurably. Businesses in all industries must now be quick to pivot, determine the best ways to maintain employee productivity, and keep their work moving forward without interruption. While many organizations are adjusting to the reality of a remote workforce for the foreseeable future, one major question remains: how can remote collaboration be made sustainable, effective and secure for employees and employers alike?

Remote collaboration today

For many organizations, the first challenge has been determining the best ways for employees and customers to meet while working from home. Many have scrambled to solve this challenge by leveraging solutions they already had in place, or even free solutions.

Now, months later, some businesses are finding that the original “quick fix” solution to their collaboration needs does not necessarily provide the most effective capabilities to meet their end-users’ long-term demands. For example, Zoom users may have found the collaboration tool useful for workplace happy hours or weekend chats with families at first; however, those who utilize collaboration tools at work daily may now find that the free trial experience leaves something to be desired.

Fortunately, collaboration tools like Cisco Webex have been perfecting the work-from-home experience for years. By focusing on the user experience, Webex has allowed distributed teams to be as effective as co-located teams. Today, Webex is one of the leading collaboration tools enabling employees everywhere to do everything they would normally do in an office setting—like meet, share, communicate and create with co-workers—all while working from home.

Five factors to consider when choosing a remote work collaboration tool:

  1. Informal conversation

    Before working remotely became the norm, many probably had the experience of dropping by a coworker’s desk for a quick, informal chat about a project. Obviously, this isn’t something you’d ever set up a meeting to do. While working from home today with the right collaboration solution, employees can easily track a colleague’s online status, send a quick message, review/edit work and quickly escalate to a face-to-face video conversation when additional dialog is necessary.

  2. Team camaraderie

    It’s easy to get co-workers to engage, celebrate, and develop camaraderie when they all share a physical space, but building those relationships in the virtual world can be a bit more daunting. Luckily, tools like Webex Teams allow users to chat, share files and react, all while seeing, hearing and interacting with one another. This trend is expected to continue as teams become more distributed and employees continue working from disparate locations.

  3. Physical collaboration

    In the work-from-home era, bringing people together physically to connect, collaborate and brainstorm around an opportunity or a problem with a whiteboard can be challenging. However, with modern collaboration technology like Webex, creating an environment to deliver this experience digitally is a breeze. Virtual whiteboards and the ability to ideate on personal devices have made it easier than ever to bring the physical collaboration experience to the home office.

  4. Virtual events

    As more events move to a virtual space, the ability to disseminate information internally throughout your organization and externally to customers is critical. With the right tools, virtual experiences like lunch-and-learn events, town halls and all-hands meetings can be just as effective as in-person ones when it comes to broadcasting information, answering questions, and even engaging audiences.

  5. Security

    For many, remote work may mean working on a more vulnerable network, which can make securing your intellectual property (IP) a challenge. Consider collaborative tools that have a long history of strong security and privacy controls. Whether your IP is part of a meeting discussion, a messaging exchange between co-workers or a conversation with people outside of your organization, all of your information must be protected at all times. Tools like Webex not only provide built-in security and user verification out of the box, but with the option to add on Cisco Security, you can rest assured that your IP is protected from malware, viruses, and any other potentially harmful threats.

 

 

With these key factors in mind, it’s clear that when it comes to collaboration, a solution that provides your organization the flexibility to respond quickly to the changing environment as well as your own business needs without sacrificing productivity or security is essential. A long-term, sustainable collaboration solution can make it easier for those in the office to work effectively with those working elsewhere—especially today when it’s unclear how soon offices will return to a shared physical space.

Webex’s value proposition is centered around seamless user experiences, allowing users not only to meet with each other but to elevate those meetings into full collaboration sessions. This includes all of the key capabilities you would expect in an office setting, like presence-based information, one-on-one calls, message and file sharing, co-editing and creation.

The bottom line is that the right collaboration tool should give your organization the ability to get your best work done together, wherever your employees are.

For more information about collaboration solutions for your business, please contact us. To learn more or to request a free enterprise trial of Webex, please email siriuswebextrials@siriuscom.com.