In today’s hybrid working environment, organizations often have multiple communication and collaboration solutions. Even across multiple business units within an organization, various tools are used to support different applications.
With complex customer hybrid environments, the needs of the Cloud and Managed Service Providers (SPs) who support those organizations are even more complex.
In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges that SPs are facing as more organizations continue moving towards the adoption of the hybrid workplace and cloud technology.
The top 3 areas of focus for SPs and their customers
Service Providers’ priorities need to adapt in 2024 and beyond. To continue providing a seamless experience for their end-users and avoid disruption in their customers’ businesses, there are three things SPs should have at top of mind:
- The growing adoption of multi-vendor, hybrid and cloud collaboration architectures
- The expanding focus on Employee Experience (EX)
- An increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI), analytics and insights
The challenges of new architectures
- Enterprises are continuing to embrace remote working, and in turn, employees are embracing the added flexibility of their Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) applications. However, when users encounter problems during a conference call, there’s a tendency to switch from one platform to the next. This offers convenience from a user’s perspective, but it also means that issues may go unnoticed, or unreported. SPs need to identify issues quickly and act to remedy problems to reduce downtime – or they could risk failing to deliver on their Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Organizations are now becoming far more security aware with 73% of executives believing that remote workers pose a greater security risk, according to OpenVPN. With global organizations now permanently operating with a part-time or full-time remote workforce, the spike in security flaws and digital threats are causing a great deal of concern for SPs. Compromised passwords, leaking of personal data, phishing and malware are just some of the security concerns enterprises face. Also, residential-use routers can be a security risk with many lacking the proper network protection, firmware updates or other elements that could put a business network at risk.
- Most newer cloud collaboration vendors are natively multi-vendor, whereas an on-premises UC environment is more likely to be closed architecture. Managing this mix of ecosystems and devices introduces additional operational challenges for SPs.
An increased focus on Employee Experience (EX)
According to Indeed, 98% of workers want to work remotely at least some of the time. Additionally, 57 percent of workers would look for a new job if their current company didn’t allow remote work. Even large enterprises who were initially reluctant to switch to remote working are now acknowledging that the model is permanently affixed to the modern working culture.
Service Providers can support remote employee initiatives in several ways, enabling them to make the most of their hybrid working environment:
- Provide guidance on selecting, implementing and configuring cloud applications and services so employees can fully utilize cloud technology.
- Offer customers tools that provide deeper insights into their business and investments to facilitate more control over strategic decisions.
- Hire skilled IT engineers, so no matter what IT issues are encountered, they can be addressed quickly and efficiently.
The surge of AI, analytics and insights
While remote networks are all different, the overarching common factor for all networks is the need for monitoring. Monitoring employee and user experience and performance as an ongoing strategy is vital. However, SPs face some challenges:
- Finding ways to scale the businesses without having to equally scale their employee headcount.
- Delivering outstanding services while reducing manual processes.
- Increasing revenue per user and margin on services, as these financial metrics can decrease as customers move their services to the cloud.
SPs can achieve this by defining and refining processes, and implementing technologies that enable them to scale their services, while also ensuring that their customer outcomes are met. Technologies that can automate, correlate and extract insights while learning the behavior of these systems are key.
Analytics are no longer just the domain of technical experts. By having access to historical and ongoing data, analytics are used by everyone to help make informed business decisions, improve productivity and achieve faster resolution.
IR Collaborate meets these challenges head-on
With many organizations implementing multiple communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco, Zoom and Genesys, the multi-vendor performance management solution, IR Collaborate, powered by Prognosis, is here to help.
Data means everything in today’s technology-driven world. With the right data presented in the right way, businesses and SPs can make the right decisions with actionable insights that drive real operational outcomes.
Across hybrid cloud and multi-vendor environments, IR Collaborate can help SPs deliver deep insights, comprehensive visibility and customer-specific reports. This adds more value, helps you confidently meet SLAs with the evidence to back it up and improve customer onboarding and management.
IR Collaborate can simplify the growing complexity of service assurance for managed service providers, and ensure that their clients – and their clients’ customers – have a great experience every time, with:
- Customizable dashboards
- Multi-tenant, multi-vendor visibility from a single pane of glass
- Streamlined deployment models
- Secure, API-based access to customer data with robust access controls
- Integrated, automated incident management workflows
- Rapid troubleshooting
- End-to-end visibility of user experience
Ready to learn more about IR Collaborate?
