The past two years have brought a significant amount of societal change, including the way we work. This shift in lifestyle to one that is largely digital also brought about a surge in cyberattacks, which rose in both frequency and complexity last year, with several threats causing concern among industry experts into 2022.
Communications is moving to the cloud. That should be obvious to everyone at this time. What’s less obvious is that the definition of cloud is changing.
In reality, cloud has been constantly evolving since the early 2000s. The first wave of cloud was akin to a hosted service where cloud providers did a “lift and shift” of a big PBX and moved it into a hosting center. There were only two cloud-like things about these UCaaS and CCaaS providers: their infrastructure on the company premises and customers could shift to a subscription model.
Many predicted that the cloud would be the death knell for data centers. The use of public cloud services would make data centers obsolete – but that never came true.
In fact, the data center has never been more important. The enterprise is going through a data center Renaissance, where everything is moving to some kind of data center – whether it’s in a centralized public cloud, private cloud or edge location.
COVID-19 accelerated a buy-from-home economy, expanding the role of the contact center beyond customer support to building customer relationships. According to a new report released by Talkdesk, the majority of customer experience (CX) professionals believe their contact center is a main driver of customer loyalty.
The pandemic has had a profound impact in almost all aspects of our lives. One of the biggest changes is how we communicate with one another. Prior to COVID-19, collaboration tools were used by primarily knowledge workers when we were in the office and had to communicate with people outside of our walls. But then the world changed, and we all had to rely on collaboration tools to work, learn, socialize, and even be entertained. These applications allowed us to maintain social proximity even though we were socially distant.