As the cloud becomes a defining force for contact centers, it is important to keep data security worries in perspective.
If you read my column last month, you’ve already met my maternal grandmother. Like most grandmothers, she spoiled my younger brother and me when my parents weren’t around. She lived with us from the time I was born until she passed away in 1988 (someday I’m going to nominate my father for sainthood). When my parents went for a rare evening out, she always took care of us.
Regular readers will also remember from last month that, when I was a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, there were only a handful of television channels on TV, one of which was KTVU from Oakland, Calif. Every Saturday night, KTVU presented “Creature Features,” a program that showed vintage horror movies from 9 to 11 p.m., which was way past our bedtime so we never got to watch it. But when my parents were out for an infrequent Saturday night without us tagging along, guess which program my brother and I always begged our grandmother to let us watch?
On one particular Saturday night when my parents were out, etched in my memory forever, “Creature Features” was showing a Vincent Price movie called “The Last Man on Earth.” After much whining and cajoling, my grandmother allowed us to watch the movie with the promise that, if my parents came home while it was still on, we’d run to our room and jump into bed so they wouldn’t know she’d let us stay up. The deal was sealed.
“The Last Man on Earth” was a film that was clearly ahead of its time. In the movie, Vincent Price was the last man left alive on earth after a plague turned everyone else on Earth into a zombie. Each night, Vincent had to take a shotgun and whatever other weapons he could conjure up and go out and kill the zombies that walked up and down his street and tried to break into his house. Those zombies were the scariest thing my young eyes had ever seen.
As luck would have it, my parents stayed out late that night and my brother and I got to witness the end of the movie as Vincent lost his battle against the zombies when he was impaled with a spear on the altar of a church in which he had taken refuge when a zombie hunting trip turned sour.
Needless to say, that night when I went to bed, and on many nights thereafter, my brother and I spent more than a few minutes peeking out of the curtain of our bedroom making sure there were no zombies walking down our street before we tried to go to sleep. Vincent Price’s zombies became the monster under my bed.
The monster under the bed was and still is a pretty common phenomenon among young children. Any of you who are parents can attest to this. In fact, if you go to wikiHow.com, you can find specific instructions for eradicating the monster under the bed. So modern science has provided a solution for the monster under the bed for kids, but what about the monster under the bed in the cloud contact center?
The results of the year-end survey of end users conducted by my company, Saddletree Research, in conjunction with the National Association of Call Centers (NACC) at The University of Southern Mississippi, points to the probability that many of us still believe that the monster under the cloud contact center bed is data security. Forty-six percent of this year’s survey respondents indicated that they have no intention of moving all or any part of their contact center to the cloud. When we asked them what might be holding them back from making the move to the cloud, the vast majority, 64%, stated it was because of data security concerns.
This response is easy to understand given the recent and highly publicized data security breaches suffered by such well-known companies as Target and Home Depot. If they can be hacked, doesn’t it stand to reason that any company is equally vulnerable? That’s a question that isn’t easily answered.
There are clearly steps that can be taken to ensure the security of company and customer data in the contact center, and a lot of them aren’t that difficult. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Mike McAlpen who is the Executive Director of Information Security and Data Privacy at cloud contact center provider 8x8. According to Mike, “One of the first things you should do is make sure your cloud contact center provider can provide you with third-party verification of their compliance. Depending on your business, there are a number of validations available.
“For example,” McAlpen continued, “Reputable third-party information security and data privacy validations include auditors who are certified as a Qualified Security Assessor. There is also ISO 27001 certification for basic security and data privacy due diligence. Cloud contact center providers have a number of validations from which to choose.”
Given the competitive nature of the contact center and many other industries, it is not unusual to find that some companies, in order to minimize costs, will choose to save money on the front-end coding process and take a chance on their company’s data not being compromised. This is a fool’s game. As 8x8’s McAlpen points out, “There are many security scanning tools that should be part of the process to ensure that major coding vulnerabilities are eliminated up front. These tools come from such familiar companies as HP and IBM and can go a long way toward protecting a company’s data and reputation.”
The reality of today’s contact center world requires constant diligence against data security breaches, but I don’t believe it’s as dangerous as many people think. If you use CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com, you’re already in the cloud. As the cloud becomes a defining force in the contact center industry it will be important to keep the security issue in perspective.
It takes a lot more than Vincent Price’s zombies to scare me these days, but it still happens. For example, I just read that Rod Stewart turned 70 years old last month. Rockin’ Rod a septuagenarian? That’s scary.