What is Webex Teams?

Cisco's Webex Teams, utilized by businesses around the world, is a cloud-based, or hosted, collaboration platform that’s modeled around teamwork in the modern working environment. Built on the Webex platform, it can act as a phone system, a video conferencing system, a file share, and a whiteboard environment. Persistent, or ongoing, chat can be utilized by people within an organization as well as with partners and clients who work externally. Essentially, it’s a communication platform that will change how your organization collaborates, seamlessly and for the better.

When organizations decide to move data to the cloud, there are several benefits including cost efficiency and time savings. Consistent and frequent updates to make usability easier and friendlier is yet another benefit. For those organizations that have adopted Microsoft Office 365, (or better yet Microsoft 365, a.k.a. 'Modern Desktop') for example, you might have noticed that once a login occurs, the default page seen now is Office.com. As such, Microsoft announced the following explanation earlier this week:

If you’ve been in or around information technology (IT), you are most likely familiar with Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC). If not, maybe you've heard of its subscription-based cloud-delivered model, unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). Gartner breaks UCC into six broad communication functions:

Over the past four decades, organizations of all sizes have seen a significant change in how they do business due to evolving technologies. And now, as we approach the end of the 2010's decade, the term “Digital Transformation" is abound and you might be asking, "Haven't we already done enough transforming?"

There are so many reasons small- to medium-sized business are moving to the cloud. There is the attractive CapEx vs. OpEx model, scalability which comes with elastic payment strategies, and flexibility. While those business benefits are some of the chief reasons businesses migrate to the cloud, many aren’t taking advantage of the full range of productivity capabilities that are available.

It's no secret that technology is rapidly changing. As such, businesses have to keep up in order to retain good talent and to remain competitive amongst peers and similar organizations. In today's recruiting world, a Millennial (or Generation Y) would think twice about working for a company who expected limited use of the Internet and used old versions of applications with no collaboration capabilities. As a generation that upgrades their smartphones every couple of years, they would expect the same of an organization's network and applications. 

The New Year is a great time to revisit your technology strategy. IT Strategy is getting more and more important every year - whether you are a software company who makes a living with technology or someone running a law firm or other small business - technology should be making you better.  Far too often, however, we lose sight of our strategy dealing with the day-to-day bustle of running our business while keeping older systems running.  The New Year is a great time to step back and revisit the key components of your IT strategy.  Here are five strategic IT investments every company should be making in 2018: