Hosted Call Center Featured Article

For Benefits of Premise-Based Cloud, Look to 'True Cloud' Solution

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

Cloud computing offers a host (no pun intended) of benefits for enterprise business solutions, particularly in the contact center. Hosted applications stored on someone else's servers – either the application provider's or a third-party hosting company – mean that contact centers can use as much or as little application as they need, scaling up and down according to need, and can allow anyone in the greater contact center, from branch offices to personnel on the road to home agents, to access and use the application easily.

The cloud model also allows contact center organizations to get up and running quickly on new applications, with little to no upfront cost. So what's the downside? Many contact centers use and store sensitive customer information, and have found that many cloud solutions just do not offer the kind of confidence in the security of the cloud application they require.

So how to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud model while securing customer data so you can sleep at night? According to a new whitepaper, "Security Whitepaper: Moving Your Contact Center to the True Cloud," from LiveOps (News - Alert), contact centers must seek solutions that offer and excel in five criteria that enable a solution to be classified as a “true cloud” solution. It must support the stringent requirements of your mission-critical contact center and deliver on the promises of a cloud platform, yet it must offer the kind of security a contact center that fields sensitive customer information demands.

LiveOps, the operator of the world’s largest virtual “contact center in the cloud,” notes that to meet the criteria of a “true cloud” solution, a contact center platform must offer the following:

• Complete security and risk audit controls that far exceed the most stringent industry standards;
• 99.99 percent uptime;
• Proven scalability, successfully processing millions of transactions everyday, seamlessly with no downtime or maintenance windows;
• Continuous innovation, future proofing the contact center environment with innovative new capabilities and upgrades; and
• Complete visibility and control in real-time, directly from a Web browser.

The stringent security noted by LiveOps includes the ability to maintain the highest levels of security with sensitive customer data such as credit card numbers, bank account, social security numbers and medical information. With a proprietary system in place to secure customer or patient information at multiple levels (the system level, the application level and the network level), “true cloud” contact center platforms can provide companies with all the flexibility of a cloud solution plus all the security of older, premise-based solutions.