Getting Control Over Enterprise Communication Solutions

The traffic volumes and variety of formats and devices continue to grow as enterprise communication solutions promote enhanced productivity and collaborative work styles. From voice calls to videoconferencing and file sharing, these technologies are equipping companies to do their work better and faster and with superior customer experience.

The challenge for enterprises is keeping all of the devices, solutions, and formats manageable in terms of equipment, security, and maintenance. There are two major categories that enterprises need to designate to effectively sort their communication tools and support them:

Modalities: These are the two-way enterprise communication formats that require both parties to be engaged. These are voice communications, data sharing, collaboration. and messaging that can be one-to-one (a simple voice call), one-to-many (presentations), or many-to-many (conference call or collaboration).

Temporal Elements: These are the formats in which real-time communication is not necessary, because the parties are uncoupled. This includes enterprise communication such as emails or text messages. Both parties can engage independently of one another.

Once technologies are understood in these terms, there are several considerations that must come into play with effectively managing a framework:

Policy: It’s important to have a written, organization-wide policy that guides communication across the enterprise. It should cover areas like permissible traffic, monitoring, enforcement capabilities, and record-keeping.

Requirements: This includes the required capabilities of enterprise communication, the specific implementations and which tools are included. Determine whether email or messaging are included in these types of conversations.

Integrity and Security: This area is growing in importance in the age of daily cyber security threats. Organizations need to determine how to protect the integrity of the network, cloud solutions, servers, and other systems and infrastructure components. The approach requires a culture of security in the enterprise in order to embrace aspects like employee training and prioritizing investment in security tools as well as looking for communication solutions that offer encryption and other protections.

Cost Control: While modern cloud solutions often help reign in the spend related to enterprise communication, increased bandwidth demand and the impact of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs can result in costs spiraling out of control. It’s critical to have agreements in place with providers that detail expected costs alongside service level agreements (SLAs). so you know what you’re entitled to for your expense.

Management Visibility: This factor can get challenging, particularly among enterprises with BYOD programs. Fortunately, new solutions are emerging that go beyond mobile management to including all endpoints, creating better visibility for all communication formats.

If you are noticing that your enterprise communication suddenly seems overgrown and unwieldy, contact us at One Connect. We can help you put the framework in place to take control of communications, in terms of management, security, and cost.