Today, people work from where they can. Work is no longer happening only within the four walls of a single building. In fact, 65% of full-time employees think remote work increases productivity. And this is validated by two-thirds of managers.
In addition, work no longer just happens within a single company. More than 55% of business leaders are extending collaboration to external parties. This means that there is an increase in collaboration between companies, and between people in different locations.
Of course, people expect team collaboration to be seamless. Who wants to spend time working out how to work with someone else depending on their location? In order for people to be able to be as productive as possible, collaboration tools need to be easy to use, and offer great user experiences. They need to enable people to work with others, wherever they are, at any time – that’s a given.
However, at the same time, privacy, security and compliance are a key consideration when selecting a team collaboration solution. And as more people work with others inside and outside their company, and increasingly with more people in different locations, these considerations extend to where important information is located. This study shows that keeping data in-region is now a key consideration.
We understand these needs – privacy, security and compliance are a key factor in Webex solution design. As a truly global service, our Webex Meetings service has a globally distributed architecture, and there are many ways in which Webex helps customers work with the solutions that they have in place, which is key to keeping data in-region.
As a global service provider, we understand that our customers require their data to be handled securely, with privacy and resiliency. They look to us to solve these problems:
The next logical step for us is to introduce new European data centers for Webex Teams itself, to hold personal information and encryption keys for team collaboration. These data centers are located in London, Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and are in addition to our US data centers and provide in-region storage of our customers’ Personal Identifiable Information (PII) data and encryption keys used to encrypt user generated content.
What does this mean for you and your users? Well – the answer is that your users get the same great collaboration experience they are used to, while keeping important information in-region. Cisco Webex achieves data locality without compromising on the promise of a global collaboration platform.
Most cloud solutions drive businesses through instance-based workloads, requiring users to sign-in to specific logically separated instances of a service. These cloud services may be multi-tenant, so this approach provides a sense of separation of customer data, although it is not truly a physical separation.
This model introduces cumbersome administrative overhead. It allows cross-organization communications through guest accounts – which essentially replicates a user’s PII in two different logical locations for performant reasons.
Managing such guest accounts is akin to having multiple phones for each company you work with.
In this scenario, the compliance officers of a guest user have no visibility into these communications – leaving a large gap for compliance, eDiscovery and legal requirements. This results in Information Security overseers and CIOs resisting introducing solutions that enable external communication. The effect of this can be to inadvertently encourage other “non-approved” apps for external communications and collaboration, due to business needs.
In Cisco Webex Teams, there is a single identity, a single conversation thread, and a single place for all users’ collaboration messages, whiteboard drawings and file sharing. Webex Teams has unique ownership rules for users as they collaborate. And we enable clear visibility to all organizations for multi-organization communications.
Like other cloud service providers, Webex Teams is multi-tenant; but it also allows for co-mingling. Co-mingling allows messages from users from different companies to be associated with a project space. With Webex Teams, compliance managers from each company have visibility of those messages and have the option to control aspects such as:
As we introduce physically separate data centers with multiple instances of services, how do we meet the needs of global seamless, simple and intuitive collaboration?
Our design leverages the concept of federation to make this happen.
What is Federation?
Federation is a complex capability for services to be able to discover each other, trust each other, communicate information to each other in order to support seamless workloads from the clients. This has to be done without compromising the service’s own integrity and availability in case the other service is no longer available for any reason.
With the European data center, we have the following globally federated services:
Our future phases will introduce locally stored messages, files, whiteboards (all always encrypted) with global access (only if authorized by the customer).
Through all of the above semi-technical jargon, what do you stand to gain when you use Cisco Webex Teams?
Please also review the blog – Three things to consider for safe and secure team collaboration for more insights on that topic.
Visit our booth at Cisco Live US to learn more about all the latest Webex innovations, and speak to our experts about how we can help you achieve more.
Check out Webex Meetings or Webex Teams for free:
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