The Cloud: A must for your help desk
Cloud computing has been an instrumental asset for companies in a multitude of industries, but with its evolution, it is perhaps the most useful for businesses catering clients from a customer-service standpoint. If your company provides customer support around the clock, you know it is critical to maintain a high degree of efficiency and service quality. With the cloud making everything easier and easily accessible in a virtual-environment, switching to the cloud can offer a number of benefits that make your help desk operations run more smoothly.
Why move a help desk to the cloud?
A cloud-based help desk packs the same punch as on-premise solutions, without a long deployment time or large up-front costs. The following are some additional reasons to switch to a cloud-based help desk:
Minimum configuration time:
- There is no requirement of purchasing and configuring a physical server. In just a few minutes, you can have a help desk up and running on a functional server delivering all the features that would be delivered by a help desk set up in-house. The hassle of dealing with on-site equipment is out of the picture.
Minimum configuration time: There is no requirement of purchasing and configuring a physical server. In just a few minutes, you can have a help desk up and running on a functional server delivering all the features that would be delivered by a help desk set up in-house. The hassle of dealing with on-site equipment is out of the picture.
Unparalleled software upgrades and response times: Any reported problems will be handled immediately by the cloud service provider; these are kept to a minimum because of automatic version updates from the backend that provides better usability.
Flexibility in customization: Modern help desk software offer flexibility and adapt to the requirements of the organization. Some solutions also offer customizable help desk applications, which help companies define business rules and customize the work flow based on how the corporation operates. In some cases, multiple service desks can also be set up to be used by different departments such as operations, finance, human resources, etc.
Are there security risks with a cloud-based help desk service?
There’s only one way to completely foolproof the cloud: take it off the web and far away from users. Maybe assign a security guard while at it. That’s not a viable option, so security issues are going to be present, and the cloud is no different.
Top security threats to the cloud in general are also the vulnerabilities that will affect the help desk service hosted on the cloud. For examples, organizations using cloud-hosted help desks as well as API networks can be targeted by DDoS attacks, which can delay service pages as well as disrupt customer service operations. Tokens that are used to validate user access can also be hacked for access to the customer service database while sending a request to the API.
Apart from DDoS and the threat of exposed API, browser exploit vulnerabilities can also enable hackers to access the applications and data hosted by the help desk team. These are the reasons why the option of cloud computing security becomes a viable consideration for organizations planning to leverage a cloud-based customer service help desk. Trend Micro says security that fits a dynamic environment would be easy to deploy, light on system resources, and would do a good job at anticipating new threat trends.
Organizations can look for a solution that’s integrated with the administration of leading virtualization suppliers and cloud providers to that appropriate security implementations are applied automatically across all platforms, including the help desk.
While there are many protection measures out there, the best solution is the one that provides complete threat intelligence, which includes faster blocking and detection of threats, and smaller pattern updates of data files. Furthermore, an industry leader in cloud security would continue to expand their threat combat capabilities by applying big data analytics to keep pace with the velocity, volume and variety of today’s threats.
Lastly, vendors that enable companies to cost-efficiently monitor help desk security and control system policy would reduce the management requirement by automating security policy enforcement, providing overall control for segregated help desk administration for customer service and other departments.
