The past two years has seen contact center as a service (CCaaS) go through unprecedented growth as businesses looked to enable contact center agents to work from home. For most companies, shifting to the cloud was a faster and simpler solution than trying to extend legacy, on-prem solutions to remote locations. Cloud contact center solutions generally have better tools for managers and are now being outfitted with AI to enable agents to service customers better.
Business have been moving to a cloud operating model for the better part of two decades, but the term “cloud” has been continuously evolving. Early cloud deployments were akin to hosted services where a business would “lift and shift” a workload to an offsite location. For the past decade or so, cloud has been defined by public clouds, where businesses would deploy data and/or workloads in a hyper-scaler such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Many technology vendors have used artificial intelligence to transform their products. This is evident in areas like unified communications, contact centers and cybersecurity.
Yet one area of IT that has yet to see AI play a significant impact is the network. AI has been used to improve basic management functions but has yet to transform network operations.
Arizona-based Liveops is a contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider that provides agent services for several industries, including insurance, retail and health services. The company was launched 20 years ago in the gig economy and maintains a large work-from-home workforce with more than 25,000 independent agents who provide contact center services to businesses of all sizes. The company has grown rapidly and provides services to many name brand companies across the US.
Palo Alto Networks has announced what it calls Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) 2.0, which shifts the focus of ZTNA from the network to the application layer.
Implementing zero trust has been top of mind for security pros for the past couple of years. Pre-pandemic, the topic had been gaining momentum, but interest in it exploded as work from home increased, applications moved to the cloud and the IT environment got more complex. In many cases, networks became too complicated to secure with traditional tools.