To effectively navigate the digital transformation journey, there are several key topics that manufacturing companies should consider. Enterprise Resource Planning software and manufacturing solutions offer a broad spectrum of manufacturing planning, execution, and integration, making them great models to consider for digital transformation.

1. Change management enables teams to thrive in change

Efficient change management is necessary to ensure a smooth transition to new ways of working, manage supply chain disruptions and implement new business models, and support employees to thrive with change and navigate ongoing uncertainty.

Change management has become more critical since COVID-19 because the pandemic has significantly transformed how businesses operate, and companies have had to adapt quickly. All operations are in the hands of humans, and no matter how good technology is, execution will fail if individuals do not work as a team to support the company’s mission.

Manufacturing companies can best manage organizational change by setting up and managing a change management program and a change management organization. Specific methodologies to develop, deploy, and build a change management program are integral components in the digital transformation project for the respective project, and system integrators are helping with best practices and deploying them.

2. Business process management is key to digital transformation

Effective process management and a business process management organization as an endpoint for digital transformation are crucial because it enables organizations to optimize their business processes, improve efficiency, and achieve better outcomes.

Process management involves mapping and analyzing business processes, identifying areas of inefficiency or waste, and implementing process improvements. Organizations can reduce costs, improve quality, and increase productivity by optimizing business processes.

Related: Sustainability is the Key 2023 IT Trend

3. Sustainability – A new perspective for manufacturing

Sustainability is the third area of focus, driving digital transformation from both ends. It has emerged as a new initiative, pushing digital transformation forward. As a beneficiary of digital transformation, it gives manufacturing companies an entirely new world of data to measure sustainability goals such as carbon footprints or product lifecycle analysis to assess the impacts of products and what can be done.

Digital transformation to support sustainability for manufacturing is fundamental, considering the potential environmental effects of manufacturing processes, potential cost savings, reputation and branding, compliance, and innovation by adopting sustainable manufacturing practices.

Sustainability is still relatively new for most players in the general ERP space. However, the demand has never been higher than today. Managing sustainability goals can be challenging, requiring data availability, data quality, standards, frameworks, resources, investments to implement, and agreement on stakeholder expectations.

However, as with other areas in digital transformation, specific methods, and best practices are applicable.

4. The cloud is here to stay

The manufacturing industry may have been hesitant to adopt cloud computing due to concerns about data security, privacy and potential disruption to existing systems. However, as the benefits of cloud computing are more apparent, more and more manufacturers are beginning to adopt cloud-based solutions.

Security and privacy are a big concern for many; however, unless the manufacturing applications are entirely sealed off, the industry consensus is that security and privacy are a matter of managing policies rather than actual physical access issues. If done right, the cloud gives customers more control over privacy and security than traditional on-premises solutions.

Manufacturers today face a critical challenge – ensuring round-the-clock manufacturing operations with zero interruptions. Any potential disruption can have significant consequences with ramp-up and ramp-down processes requiring uninterrupted functions. However, manufacturers already offer cloud solutions with substantial development in this regard.

5. Cybersecurity challenges in manufacturing companies

In the age of digital transformation, cybersecurity is a critical concern for manufacturing companies. With increased reliance on interconnected systems, IoT devices, and cloud computing, the risk of cyber threats and data breaches is higher than ever.

Manufacturers must prioritize robust network security protocols, regular vulnerability assessment, and secure access controls to protect valuable assets. Implementing advanced intrusion detection and prevention systems, real-time monitoring, and incident response capabilities is essential for prompt threat identification and mitigation. Employee awareness and training programs also play a crucial role in preventing cyber-attacks.

By addressing these challenges, manufacturing companies can maintain operational integrity, protect sensitive information, and build customer trust. Cybersecurity must be fundamental to their digital transformation strategy for a secure future.

How to drive digital transformation

The points above highlighted the various aspects of digital transformation. However, the question that arises is how to tailor it to support the organization’s progress. The digital transformation process can be complex as it integrates new technologies, processes and data throughout the organization.

Adopting a strategic approach that aligns technology with business goals is necessary to prioritize digital transformation in the manufacturing industry. This can be achieved by following these key steps:

• Define business objectives: Identify the critical business objectives that digital transformation can help achieve.
• Evaluate current capabilities: Assess the current state of technology, processes, and data across the organization to identify areas of improvement and potential opportunities.
• Develop a roadmap: Chart a digital transformation roadmap, detailing the steps to achieve the identified business objectives
• Prioritize investments: Prioritize technology investments based on their potential impact on the business objectives identified in step one.
• Foster a culture of innovation: Encourage employees to experiment with new technologies and processes, thereby cultivating a culture of innovation.

Alexander Paulus is a Senior SAP Professional and SAP Project Manager with 15+ years of experience in various project roles, mainly in global ERP Implementation projects and Solution Architecture and Delivery & Operations Management. He is Managing Director at CNT Management Consulting Inc. and one of the key digitalization subject matter experts.

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“Hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda,” says Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up.”

Nag added, “Generative AI is supported by large language models (LLMs), which require powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real-time. Cloud offers the perfect solution and platform. It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) Growth forecast

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 24.1%.

The Stamford, Conn. research firm also predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform.

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital and business outcomes and the virtual-first world,” said Nag. “Emerging technologies that help businesses interact more closely and in real time with their customers, such as chatbots and digital twins, are reliant upon cloud infrastructure and platform services to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.”

While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market by end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 17.9% to total $197 billion in 2023.

“The technology substrate of cloud computing is firmly dominated by the hyperscalers, but leadership of the business application layer is more fragmented,” said Nag. “Providers are facing demands to redesign SaaS offerings for increased productivity, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, embedded AI and composability – particularly as budgets are increasingly driven and owned by business technologists. This change will ignite a wave of innovation and replacement in the cloud platform and application markets.”

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The Santa Clara, Calif.-based cybersecurity giant surveyed more than 2,500 executives around the world, and found that expansion of hybrid work and growing use of the cloud is putting pressure on software developers to produce more quickly. This is leading to more vulnerable applications and burnt-out security professionals.

The research, the 2023 State of Cloud-Native Security Report, finds that threat actors are working just as fast–if not faster than–as developers to take advantage of cloud vulnerabilities, which puts more emphasis on the ability to detect threats more quickly and close any security gaps.

The report also found that organizations continue to struggle with comprehensive security, compliance and the technical complexity of moving to and securing the cloud. Nearly 80% of organizations say they have distributed responsibility for cloud security to individual teams, but almost half say a majority of their workforce does not understand their own security responsibilities, according to Palo Alto Networks.

More companies are also encouraging a deeper level of engagement between application developers and security tools and teams, with 81% of respondents saying they have embedded security professionals inside their DevOps teams. This is designed to help prevent introducing vulnerabilities in the development process that could compromise an entire application later on.

Further, about 75% of organizations are deploying new or updated code to production weekly, and about 40% are committing new code daily, which can lead to overlooking the security of cloud workloads, says Ankur Shah, senior vice president of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks.

“As cloud adoption and expansion continues, organizations need to adopt a platform approach that secures applications from code to cloud across multicloud environments,” Shah says.

The report also finds that organizations are struggling to identify which security tools they need, and the average organization is using more than 30 security tools, of which at least six are dedicated to cloud security.

Cloud Security Recommendations

Palo Alto Networks’ report includes a set of five recommendations to help organizations achieve cloud security, including:

• Embedding security earlier in the application lifecycle
• Implementing continuous cloud visibility
• Adopting threat prevention techniques
• Aligning cybersecurity policies with cloud migrations
• Consolidating security tools

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According to the company, organizations are adopting Kubernetes to help developers move fast and scale, like how organizations are migrating to the cloud. The container application market is growing due in large part to Kubernetes, so organization need fast, agile and light-weight application development. However, security risks can increase if security isn’t incorporated from the start.

Expel says its new managed detection and response (MDR) for Kubernetes is designed to help teams quickly detect and respond to security risks in their Kubernetes environments without slowing down DevOps, enabling organizations to focus more on business priorities.

According to Expel, the MDR for Kubernetes offering offers insights across three core layers of Kubernetes applications:

1. Configuration: To help organizations stay ahead of pervasive misconfigurations, Expel MDR for Kubernetes identifies cluster misconfigurations and references the Center for Information Security (CIS) Kubernetes benchmark for best practices to recommend configuration improvements—allowing security teams to proactively become more resilient against threats.

2. Control plane: Regardless of where a business is on its journey, Expel MDR for Kubernetes turns complexity into clarity. This offering integrates with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) infrastructure, analyzing Kubernetes audit logs, applying custom detection logic to alert on malicious or interesting activity, and providing clear, step-by-step remediation recommendations.

3. Run-time security: Expel uses a Bring-Your-Own-Tech (“BYO-Tech”) approach, so customers can maximize return on investment (ROI) with the solutions of their choice. Expel MDR for Kubernetes integrates with a portfolio of run-time container security vendors to get customers more value from the tech they already use.

The company says Expel MDR for Kubernetes also aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, enabling teams to quickly remediate and create resilience for the future. Expel-written detections continuously learn and adapt based on activity in the environment, putting customers ahead of threats and equipping them with the answers and best-practices to track Kubernetes security posture over time.

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According to the New York-based company, the automated posture management tool continuously scans, detects and prioritizes cloud security risks, giving IT and security professionals real-time visibility into their data security posture and help them automatically fix misconfigurations in apps such as Salesforce and AWS from a single interface.

Citing data from Gartner, Varonis says ore than 99% of cloud breaches through 2025 will be caused by misconfigurations and end-user mistakes. With cloud apps and infrastructure evolving quickly, it can be difficult to know when sensitive data becomes vulnerable.

Large companies deploy an average of 187 different SaaS apps, Varonis says, which means security and compliance teams can spend months just trying to locate and understand their cloud security risk,

The company says the release represents a significant leap forward for cloud data security. Passive data security posture management (DSPM) solutions require manual workflows to open help desk tickets for someone to manually review and resolve in each individual cloud app. Varonis provides a unified and automated approach to reducing the multi-cloud attack surface.

Automated posture management is the latest of many features Varonis has launched to deliver effortless data security outcomes. Earlier this month, Varonis announced least privilege automation for Microsoft 365, Google Drive, and Box and a new customizable data security posture management (DSPM) dashboard.

Brian Vecci, field CTO of Varonis, says automated posture management takes the burden of understanding and remediating cloud misconfigurations off the customer.

“We stay on top of the latest configuration risks and best practices, so you don’t have to,” Vecci says. “Now, we can not only show you exactly how to improve your security posture, but we can also automatically mitigate risk on your behalf.”

Read more about Varonis’ automated posture management tool in this blog.

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In fact, the IT analyst firm says organizations are making several critical mistakes when building out their cloud strategy and aren’t using the business strategy to drive their cloud strategy and provide guidance to IT professionals who are tasked with implementing the technology.

A good cloud strategy must coexist with other strategic efforts and not try to completely overhaul the business, the analyst firm says.

The recommendations to IT and business leaders comes during the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2022, being held in London this week.

The firm lays out 10 common cloud strategy mistakes, including assuming that cloud implementation is only an IT strategy. Essentially, business and IT leaders should avoid labeling cloud computing as an IT strategy and then trying to push it on the rest of the organization.

In addition to devising a cloud strategy in the first place and including an exit plan from cloud providers, Gartner recommends that organizations keep open the possibility of not moving everything to the cloud. An approach that includes everything being migrated to the cloud could turn off some business and IT leaders, according to Gartner analysts.

While organizations should keep their cloud and data center strategies separate but aligned, they should not simply adopt cloud computing as a cost-savings directive from leadership. Instead, IT leaders should treat executive mandates as sponsorships to device a cloud strategy and not as a strategy in and of itself, Gartner analysts recommend.

Organizations should also avoid labeling themselves as a user of one specific cloud vendor, and business leaders should accommodate multiple cloud services, vendors and non-cloud environments. Similarly, IT leaders should refrain from focusing only on the cloud in a cloud-first strategy and instead work out the exceptions to the default choice.

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HHS cited a 2020 study from Ponomon, which found that 61% of data breaches involving an insider are primarily unintentional, caused by negligent insiders. Nearly 14% of breaches, however, are malicious, and nearly one in four involve stolen credentials. That same report found the average cost of insider threats per incident was $871,700 for credential theft, $755,800 for criminal and malicious insiders, and $307,100 for employee or contractor negligence.

The HHS report also covered the risks associated with insiders who are working on behalf of external groups, saying that 82% of organizations can’t determine the actual damage that an insider attack has actually caused. That said, the percentage of common types of insider threat damage include:

• Critical data loss, 40%
• Operational outage/disruption, 33%
• Brand damage, 26%
• Legal liabilities, 21%
• Expenses on remediating intrusions, 19%
• Competitive loss, 17%

Disgruntled employees pose a significant insider threat because of their access to a healthcare facility’s systems. Additionally, often they are emotional threat actors with an intent to cause harm to the company. Sometimes they believe they are owed something, according to the HHS report. About 80% of privilege misuse by disgruntled employees was financially motivated.

Related: Why Healthcare Needs Better Data Security

Third parties are also a threat since 94% of organizations give third parties access to their systems. Very often, third party vendors are given elevated permissions on those systems.

Insider threat activities in healthcare usually consist of fraud, data thefts, and/or system sabotage.

Behavior indicators of an inside threat actor can include:

• Official records of security violations or crimes
• Cases of unprofessional behavior
• Cases of bullying other employees
• Personality conflicts
• Misuse of travel, time, or expenses
• Conflicts with coworkers or supervisors

Indicators of IT sabotage include:

• Creating backdoor accounts
• Changing all passwords so that no one can access data
• Disabling system logs
• Installing a remote network administration tool
• Installing malware
• Accessing systems or machines of other employees

Indicators of data theft include:

• Massive downloading of corporate data
• Sending sensitive data to a non-corporate address
• Sending emails with heavy attachments to non-corporate addresses
• Extensive use of corporate printers
• Remotely accessing a server during non-working hours

The report also found that detecting insider attacks has become more difficult with so many organizations switching to the cloud.

HHS recommends the following practices to mitigate insider cybersecurity threats:

• Incorporate insider threat awareness into periodic security training for all employees.
• Implement strict password and account management policies and practices.
• Define explicit security agreements for any cloud services, especially access restrictions and monitoring capabilities.
• Ensure that sensitive information is available only to those who require access to it.
• Use a log correlation engine or security information and event management (SIEM) system to log, monitor, and audit employee actions.
• Develop a formal insider threat mitigation program.

CISA offers free cybersecurity services and tools, along with pertinent guidelines and updates that can help large and small organizations in the health sector. This information can be accessed online at .cisa.gov/free-cybersecurity-services-and-tools.

This article originally appeared on MyTechDecisions’ sister-site Campus Safety. 

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The company’s survey of 200 enterprise technology executives found that just 35% of enterprise tech executives store more than half of their legacy app data in the cloud, and just 2% leverage the cloud for at least 76% their legacy app data.

However, tech executives are much more likely to say they plan to make a cloud migration of their legacy app data a priority over the next 12 months, as 80.5% say they plan to do so over that time period.

Another 10% say it’s a priority within two years, and 5% say it’s not a priority at all.

For those that may be hesitant to dive head-first into the cloud, privacy and regulations (60%), security (55%) and budget uncertainty (51%) topped the list of concerns.

Other barriers impacting an organization’s cloud migration include volume and complexity of data (50%), lack of technical talent and resources (45%), lack of complete control of data (18%) and questions around cloud information management capabilities (18%).

When asked about top reason for retiring legacy apps and archiving data to the cloud, 46% of tech executives say regulatory compliance was the top reason, while cost savings was the second largest factor with 38.5% of executives saying so.

The report also suggests that organizations are accelerating its migration to the cloud due to the increasing rate of cyberattacks. According to Archive360, 43% of tech executives have accelerated their cloud migration due to cybersecurity concerns, while 46% have not changed their pace of migration. The remainder have either slowed cloud adoption or are not planning to dully adopt the cloud.

However, SaaS-based vendors aren’t meeting security requirements. The survey revealed that 90% of tech executives don’t think their SaaS vendors are meeting all of their security requirements, and 37% say they have had to make a security policy exception for at least one SaaS vendor.

In addition, 27.5% of tech leaders say data stored by a SaaS vendor has been involved in a cyberattack, and about 10% say they aren’t sure.

Despite those security concerns and documented incidents, nearly 80% of tech leaders that responded to the survey say their confidence in their SaaS vendors to protect their data has increased in the past year.

Going forward, tech executives will require SaaS vendors to offer custom security features rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, as 96.5% of respondents say they will require more customization of security protocols for apps running outside their data storage solution.

“We’ve long heard that most enterprises would like to manage their legacy data,  including data that’s potentially sensitive, in the cloud, but that doesn’t seem to have translated into full-fledged cloud adoption and data migration,” says Archive360 co-founder and CTO Tibi Popp, in a statement. “The obvious benefits of such a move must still be balanced with potential fears, in part because many technologies deployed by SaaS providers were created in on-premises environments and can’t deal with emerging security and compliance priorities. It’s clearer than ever that we will never be able to take full advantage of cloud architectures until a new generation of technologies is adopted.” 

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To make things even more complicated, businesses must build in this operational agility while also facing the usual plethora of challenges – most notably increasing levels of competition and rapidly evolving marketplaces. This all requires a solid technology foundation that can empower organizations to pivot its strategies and tackle unforeseen situations. Enter: the cloud.

The continuing growth of cloud adoption shows that businesses are continuing to realize the power of the technology. According to Gartner, global cloud revenue will grow from $408 billion in 2021 to $474 billion in 2022, with 85% of organizations set to embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025. What’s more, over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud native platforms in 2025, illustrating how anything non-cloud will quickly be considered legacy.

At the turn of the new year, we thought now would be a good time to consider what it means to adopt a cloud-first mindset and what the cloud native enterprise will look like in 2022. Most importantly, why is becoming a cloud native enterprise essential to long-term business success?

What is cloud-native?

From a technology perspective, the silver lining of the pandemic is that it has accelerated cloud adoption and driven a faster conversion to cloud-centric operations. Even before COVID-19, we were entering an era where cloud adoption had matured to the point that the best practices to achieving high-level business transformations were generally well understood.

This conversation has reached a whole new level over the last 18 months. Organizations that weren’t already in the cloud had no choice but to embrace it as working practices were irreversibly changed, presenting significant opportunities for those organizations ready to realize the possibilities that the technology offers.

But being a cloud native enterprise isn’t just about rolling out various cloud platforms. It’s also about adopting the culture and ways of working that are connected to cloud. Most importantly, it’s about using the new rate of innovation and technical possibilities that cloud enables to drive fundamental business change.

The organizations that drive the most value from cloud will be the ones that understand it in the context of how it brings true business value. This means thinking beyond basic benefits such as cost optimization or speed to market, to implementing new processes and working in ways that non-cloud native competitors simply can’t match.

Practically speaking, they must connect the dots between traditional IT centric cloud adoption (which usually has a specific end goal) and business experimentation (often dismissively referred to as ‘shadow IT’). By aligning these two core adoption strategies and combining them with a leadership ambition to drive meaningful change, businesses will empower themselves to break through to new levels of performance.

Moving forward

So, how can enterprises progress on its journey to becoming cloud native in 2022 and beyond? First, organizations should focus on using cloud to lower the cost of failure and embrace the power of iterative trialing. Failure is how the most effective organizations learn and develop – but it can be costly. Luckily, cloud is adept at minimizing this cost. By resetting the idea of failure and leveraging cloud technologies to bring the cost of failure down to the absolute minimum, businesses can start establishing a culture that puts cloud experimentation at the core. Essentially, organizations can focus on doing, rather than analyzing.

This directly feeds into the software development lifecycle, which can be transformed with a cloud native approach. A cloud-first culture will empower software development teams to quickly deploy and scale apps to address business requirements, experiment without the risk of disrupting customer operations, and rapidly test new features.

From reducing operating costs to launching new products and services faster, this approach can deliver tangible business benefits. But it can also go beyond that by breaking down organizational silos and enabling large-scale automation – that’s the transformational next step that can be achieved by using the cloud to implement new ways of working.

Finally, CIOs must be prepared to drive cloud-first initiatives. As the one position that can bridge the gap between technology and business, the CIO has the potential to be the most important person on the executive team. Indeed, how well they do that – such as by driving cloud education and awareness outside of IT – will largely determine the relative success of their organization.

Ultimately, the importance of rapid change has become crystal clear over the last two years. Those organizations that embrace a cloud-first mindset will be the ones that achieve the resiliency, agility and innovation need to be successful in this new era of the cloud native enterprise. The rest will struggle to keep up.

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An IT silo can be defined as information that is contained within an isolated framework. A framework in this context could be a specific application, department, or even one team member. For example, if a department deploys software to meet its unique needs, team members in other departments may not have access to that software or the data it generates. Another term for this approach is “shadow IT,” which occurs when groups deploy software or applications without approval of the IT department or decision maker.

Shadow IT creates IT silos and can lead to information sharing that is inaccurate or inconsistent. These instances can create problems such as duplicated efforts from employees that drive up costs and use of resources, inconsistent employee performance metrics that hinder effective reporting, and lack of unification and standardization processes that can impact progress on company goals.

IT silos not only hurt internal operations, but they also impact the customer experience (CX). This threat is highly common with only 33% of CX professionals saying that they can actively communicate and collaborate across teams to drive improved CX because of disconnected and inefficient systems. IT silos are often responsible for the worst types of customer service interactions: missing customer information, lost orders, long wait times, and endless transfers during support situations. A customer may be forced to repeat him/herself over and over when speaking with service representatives which leaves him/her with a bad CX and negatively impacts the company’s brand and reputation.

Cloud-Based Telecom Tools

Many businesses are turning to cloud-based telecom tools to eliminate and prevent IT silos and improve customer service. For background, cloud-based telecom can be defined as communication systems that are hosted in the cloud and don’t rely on traditional on-premises hardware. Two common cloud-based telecom tools include hosted PBX (Public Branch Exchange) and VolP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Hosted PBX systems rely on three channels to facilitate calls: The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the internet, or both. VoIP combines traditional phone service with computer networks using packet-switch protocol.

So how can cloud-based telecom tools help businesses fight against IT silos? In short, connectivity.

Cloud-based telecom tools meet business needs for reliability, quality, and simplicity with increased accessibility and connectivity. With the enhanced scalability and flexibility that cloud-based solutions offer, business leaders can look to innovate offerings on a continuous basis as their needs evolve. Modern cloud-based telecom solutions can also power collaboration tools with carrier-grade services (e.g., chat features, virtual meetings, emails) through a single application. This configuration is often known as UCaaS (Unified Communications-as-a-Service).

UCaaS enables a company to streamline datapoints and its cloud-based telecom applications into one consecutive platform. UCaaS is found primarily in collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams (Teams). Teams provides an all-in-one approach to communication where individuals can access messaging, video calls, calendar functions, file sharing and more. By having multiple communications tools integrated in one application, employees can communicate efficiently no matter where they’re located, and businesses can drastically reduce silos and cut costs.

Another cloud-based telecom tool that enterprises can leverage to mitigate IT silos and improve CX is telecom Application Programming Interfaces (API). Telecom APIs make it easy for developers to add communications capabilities to existing software or products, such as a chat function in a mobile app. One essential way telecom APIs can mitigate IT silos is by helping businesses create contextual communication experiences for customers. Specifically, decision makers can utilize a Call Detail Record (CDR) API. This API attaches a CDR to a specific caller’s phone number. So, when a customer calls a contact center, the support agent can access the CDR to gain insight into the customer’s past interactions with the company. An agent that’s armed with visibility into past communications can shorten the length of the conversation, streamline support, and ultimately boost brand loyalty.

Telecom Tools in Insurance Industry

Let’s look at a real-life scenario. In the insurance sector, cloud-based telecom solutions facilitate smoother and quicker claims processes because team members can view policyholder information that has been collected by different departments. For example, an adjuster can see that the policy holder inquired about their deductible and overall coverage via an online chat bot. With that context, the adjuster is better equipped to review the claim and handle the policy holder’s questions or complaints. Adjusters, appraisers, engineers, or contractors who don’t have unified communications may end up delivering differing or inaccurate information to policyholders regarding coverage, repairs, or payments.

IT silos pose a severe threat to productivity, efficiency, and brand reputation in today’s modern work environment. As such, it’s imperative that software and IT decision makers communicate with internal groups to educate them about the threat of shadow IT. They can then evaluate existing systems and identify ways to unify communications and break down silos. Modern, cloud-based communications tools such as telecom APIs, VoIP, PBX and UCaaS can help companies combat barriers standing between open dialogue and strong customer service. With access to contextual communications and synchronized data, businesses can elevate the customer experience, enable scalability, boost brand loyalty, and add value to their bottom line.

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