The world of work is becoming increasingly mobile. Employees have one meeting after another, work daily in the home office or are on the way to customer appointments by train, plane or car. There is less and less phone calls on the landline and more with smartphones, the proportion of e-mail remains high and new forms of communication such as instant messaging and videoconferencing have been added.
For a long time these tools have led a life of their own. This has changed with Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC). UCC brings users voice, data and video images together in a unified user interface, centrally managing the underlying applications. Functionally, UCC integrates the different communication channels and the terminals used by employees directly into the user interfaces of Microsoft Office applications or CRM and ERP applications. It does not matter whether the employees use a PC, a notebook, an IP-based desk phone, a tablet or smartphone.
This trend is fostered by a convergence of diverse communication channels through the way employees communicate in their private lives. They have long been using their smartphones and tablets for a variety of activities, such as arranging appointments with family and friends, coordinating organizational issues, sharing photos and documents quickly and conveniently, and video chat with acquaintances and distant relatives. Services and apps from the cloud play a crucial role in making this work smoothly and comfortably. And basically, employees expect that in their office or on the go.Such requirements can be implemented with a UCC solution. In companies that have equipped their office workstations with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Skype for Business (formerly Lync) is the answer. There are functions for chats, online meetings, audio and video calls and presence display. But the key question is whether companies want to run the UCC solution on-premise or use it as a cloud service.
UCC in your own data center or from the cloud?
A virtual private cloud is ideal for delivering selected applications, compute and storage capacities, and test environments. The companies also like to use these options. On the other hand, they are much more reluctant when it comes to common applications for an office workplace. But they miss out on considerable opportunities to increase the productivity of their employees and lower the operating costs of their IT infrastructure.
Businesses - and especially mid-sized companies - are primarily concerned about the security of their data in the cloud. Part of this objection is understandable; especially when the data center operator is a US company and thus free access to US authorities to access the data stored in this country. In a purely German virtual private cloud, however, the desired confidentiality is guaranteed, because here only the strict German data protection legislation applies.
Cloud service users expect the provider to ensure 24/7 secure and continuous operation; the details should be regulated in an individual service level agreement . For example, the provider has to prove that he uses highly reliable servers and storage systems in his data center, and that the central infrastructure components are designed to be redundant. This applies, for example, to electricity and air conditioning, building control systems and double Internet connections.
