The ways in which individuals and workgroups communicate and collaborate continues to rapidly evolve. Consider that, according to Metrigy’s annual research based on data gathered from hundreds of end-user organizations:

• More than 90% of companies use meeting apps including Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and almost 85% of companies treat video conferencing as a vital communications technology
• More than 62% have adopted team collaboration applications including Microsoft Teams and Slack, with the majority evolving those apps to become a hub for workflows and business processes, both internally and between organizations
• The majority of companies are now leveraging multiple calling, meeting, and messaging applications to support employee demand, or to enable seamless cross-company collaboration
• Nearly half of companies have adopted, or plan to adopt, cloud-based calling platforms to replace on-premises PBXs, often leveraging Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) in association with self-provided PSTN connectivity via SIP trunking.

At the same time the application landscape has changed, so too has work location. Driven by the pandemic, just 21% of employers require all employees to work full-time in the office. The rest either are 100% based at home, or split time between office and home.

Taken together, these trends have created new cybersecurity challenges. Gone are the days when perimeter-based security was sufficient. Now, an effective security strategy must both proactively protect against risks from misuse or unauthorized access to an ever-growing set of collaboration applications, while also enabling employees with the flexibility they need to evolve their collaboration capabilities to support remote and hybrid work.

To assist business, IT, and security leaders with assessing both their risk and current posture, Metrigy, along with Unify Square, has created a self-service security risk calculator. The Collaboration Security Risk Calculator asks five questions to gauge where your organization is today in terms of security preparedness, helping you to easily identify potential gaps in your enterprise’s security posture, and the risks that you face. The output of this calculator is based on Metrigy’s success metrics that correlate security approaches with success in terms of measured ROI and productivity gains from collaboration investments. Metrigy’s research has consistently shown that those who have a proactive collaboration security strategy that ensures consistent policy enforcement across apps, and that leverages a dedicated security toolset, see the highest increases in revenue, decreases in cost, and improvements in productivity associated with their deployments of collaboration applications.

We invite you to leverage the Collaboration Security Risk Calculator to both see where you stand today and gain actionable insight that will allow you to optimize your enterprise’s security posture going forward.

Sourced from: Metrigy Blog. View the original article here.