High-tech collaboration requires higher levels of IP protection

Highlights:

• High-tech companies deploy UCC solutions for enhanced security
• What makes a UCC platform highly available and secure?
• RingCentral’s committed to ensuring data integrity and protections

Last year when everyone’s work-from-anywhere orders sent us home, many high-tech organizations very hastily turned to cloud-based video conferencing to host company meetings. The last thing anyone wanted or expected to experience were intermittent outages or significant security gaps that could undermine innovation and their company’s super-critical intellectual property (IP) protections.

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But, that’s exactly what happened to some firms, even those with rigorous regulatory compliance concerns. Consequently, some organizations banned the use of a popular video conferencing platform to shore up perceived vulnerabilities. In some instances, uninvited guests were “bombing” meetings and making abusive remarks. As a result, companies quickly learned to avoid incidents such as uninvited meeting guests that might lead to the loss of trade secrets.

Unified communications and collaboration: A more secure solution

These notable experiences left an impression on high-tech companies concerned about sullying their reputation. Many of those opting for a more robust approach to security turned instead to unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platform solutions, which combine video, messaging, and phone in one secure, cloud-based application. A recent Metrigy Workplace Collaboration Study¹ shows that achieving better security was top of mind for 35% of the high-tech companies² that tried UCC last year. Nearly two-thirds of high-tech firms said they plan to spend more on securing collaborative communications this year—a higher percentage than for any other industry including financial services and healthcare.

achieving better security was top of mind for 35% of the high-tech companies that tried UCC last year

While cloud-enabling communications was often the capability that prompted many high-tech companies to deploy UCC solutions, a core feature that quickly caught on was the integration of collaborative capabilities (both synchronous and asynchronous) that had long been siloed across two or three applications. High-tech firms found themselves not only planning, and meeting, but innovating and creating new IP over digital channels. The security pros soon realized: once collaboration moves online, it requires real-time protections.

One upshot of the video conferencing security misadventures is evident in the Metrigy survey findings. Today, 44% of high-tech firms have prepared a workplace collaboration security plan and another 18% intend to develop one this year. We take that to mean high-tech firms will hold collaborative communications applications to a mission-critical standard.

Prioritizing security and compliance

Vituity is a case in point. Like a Silicon Valley tech startup, Vituity began in a California garage, except the entrepreneur incubating this healthcare tech company was a physician rather than an engineer. When Vituity, caring for nearly 8 million patients annually across 450 practice locations, sought to replace its legacy, office-based phone system, the thinking was they didn’t want their doctors and clinicians tethered to desk phones.

But to enable its 5,000 physicians and clinicians to make calls from anywhere, Vituity first had to ensure that patient records and confidentiality wouldn’t be compromised and that they would adhere to stringent security and regulatory compliance practices that govern healthcare providers. They selected RingCentral’s work-from-anywhere cloud solution because it met those requirements.

“Our physicians could now give out their work numbers to patients and take those calls on their personal cell phones from anywhere,” said Amith Nair, Vituity CIO. “They weren’t exposing their private phone numbers—they were keeping patient communications secure through the RingCentral system. Most importantly, they were now accessible when patients needed to reach them.”

A highly available and secure platform: Checking off all the boxes

Successful business collaboration starts with building trust between teammates. But to create a safe space for online collaboration, you need a highly available and secure platform. RingCentral’s approach is to engineer robust security measures at every level of our architecture to ensure data integrity and protections.

Under the hood of our service, you’ll see the pillars of our security, data center, and cloud service architecture, which include these key capabilities:

“Five-nine” uptime

We’re fully redundant in every location we serve with real-time disaster recovery that ensures 24/7 business continuity for our customers. In fact, our data centers have “five-nine” uptime, at 99.999%.

Certifications and standards

We’re certified for ISO 27001-audited data centers and offer the controls to meet the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) principles of information security. To prevent interception of your communications, we provide Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) encryption between all endpoints.

Quality of Service

We provide connectivity through a private backbone that’s independent of local providers or telco operators and offer worldwide local access numbers. If needed, we can provision you a Direct Connect circuit directly to our cloud. We provide HD voice and video utilizing the Opus Interactive code for audio and video, as well as the G.722 codec for audio. You can actively monitor your phone systems’ call quality performance via our reporting dashboard. You can proactively address potential problems or troubleshoot at a granular level.

Fraud prevention

We prevent toll fraud through access control, detection controls, and usage throttling, which gives you granular control over international calls. Our global security department actively monitors your account to detect irregular calling patterns and prevent fraudulent charges.

RingCentral’s commitment to leading-edge security

This past year has underscored the value of our deep commitment to high availability and security. As high-tech companies have learned, tapping the integrated capabilities of unified video, messaging, and phone won’t move the needle if the solution is unavailable when needed most. Protecting your innovation and collaborative IP is essential for distributed tech teams innovating together as a hybrid workforce. That’s literally the essence of what we do.

Click here to learn more about RingCentral’s leading-edge security and commitment to protecting collaborative IP.

Originally published May 25, 2021, updated Dec 30, 2022