October 03, 2019

Video conferencing remains one of the most in-demand communications services for businesses. Just about every company today is using video conferencing in some form or another, to reduce travel costs, improve collaboration, streamline meetings and enhance customer support.

That doesn’t mean all companies are doing video conferencing right, though.

In fact, many companies are being held back by systems that are insecure, expensive and operationally inefficient.

Here are some of common pitfalls that businesses are running into with their video conferencing solutions:

Lack of standardisation: According to one study, 54 percent of U.S. workers regularly engage in video conferences, yet less than one quarter use paid enterprise services. Seventy percent use free services like FaceTime and Skype.

This is not only unprofessional, it’s also very risky. Employees should be using a single, approved platform for video conferencing.

Shadow IT: When employees start going rogue and using their own video conferencing technologies, this leads to “shadow IT” where IT loses control over how employees are communicating across the organisation. Simply put, IT can’t protect or manage systems that they don’t know about.

This can lead to many security issues. Some communications platforms, for instance, allow employees to store recordings on their local devices or in cloud systems. When this happens, sensitive information can become siloed—and easily accessible to bad actors.

Poor accessibility: We’ve all been there: You’re waiting for a team member to log into a conference, but he or she can’t get in due to a password or software-related issue

Again, IT can’t help with this type of issue when they don’t have visibility into the conferencing platform that employees are using. Oftentimes, meetings have to be rescheduled or cancelled because employees simply can’t get into the conference.

Heavy bandwidth consumption: Another common issue is bandwidth consumption. Video conferencing can take up a great deal of bandwidth, dragging down other users on the network.

To prevent this from happening, IT needs to be equipped with next-gen tools like software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), to prioritise traffic across the network. Without SD-WAN, video conferencing will almost certainly lead to performance issues.

Businesses can avoid these pitfalls by leveraging PCCW Global’s white label, fully-hosted video conferencing solution—a feature-rich platform that can accommodate up to 10 parties at a time.

This service can be obtained on a pay-per-use basis, eliminating the need for hefty capital or operational expenditures. Since the service is fully hosted, businesses don’t have to worry about maintaining any equipment either.