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Benefits of Staff Support for Your Collaboration and AV Technology

AV Everywhere

For those times when you wished you could have a robot clone of yourself (or at least a third or fourth hand), AVI-SPL Managed Services is here to help create a strong end user support experience while doing the heavy lifting to keep your systems functional.

How can AVI-SPL Managed Services strengthen your operations?

Improved Response Times

When we place our staff on site, whether augmenting your current support staff or providing staff in a remote office that needs it, we’re removing the phone call barrier to support.  The ability to walk into a conference room and demonstrate how to conduct a meeting, and to begin troubleshooting immediately when an issue arises builds your workforce’s trust in their collaboration technology and improves their experience.  We’ll even provide backfill when your employees are out for a day – ensuring you always have a smiling face with expert knowledge available to help. 

Improved Staff Capabilities

As the industry and technology evolve, you need staff who can support your current and future environments.  AVI-SPL has some of the most knowledgeable staff in our industry, and our size and scope make us a top prospect for potential employees.  All AVI-SPL employees, including those at your site, have access to our internal training initiatives, as well as partner and industry training.  We remove the cost and time associated with employee training from your budget, while providing staff who are extremely capable and incentivized to continue learning and improving.

Best Practices of the Industry

AVI-SPL follows documented industry best practices.  This means that your organization will benefit from processes that provide the best operational efficiencies, security, and lifecycle management.  Our ITIL-certified staff are experts in IT as well as collaboration technologies, ensuring clear communication with your IT department and compliance with their standards. We also follow best practices with regard to the training and development of on-site personnel, so that you are assured of support from staff members who follow mutually approved documented processes. Your on-site staff effectively coordinate the response to incidents, collaborate with your teams, answer their questions, and make recommendations to your operations and technology based on their qualified assessments.

Even More Efficiency with Symphony

Beyond just managing your day-to-day collaboration estate, our patented AVI-SPL Symphony remote monitoring and control application can provide operational efficiency and reduce staff costs.  Integrating all your workflows into a single workflow provides easier management, while also automating previously manual procedures.  Our Room Sweeps provide a daily health check of each space, alerting you to issues before they impact an end user.  Beyond daily support, Symphony provides analytics and actionable business intelligence to ensure your current and future systems continue to meet your collaboration goals and unlock business value. 

With over 350 employees on site at client locations daily, AVI-SPL has the operational experience to support small, one-location organizations up through multinational Fortune 50 enterprises.  We have the standardized roles and the flexibility to create a role for your specific needs. so tell us about your support staff challenges and let’s begin strengthening your operations with AVI-SPL Managed Services.

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Why Your Business Continuity Plan Needs Video

CMMA Blog

The need for a strong, scalable and nimble business continuity plan is clearly evident today. Situations arise where last-minute cancellations have a drastic impact on businesses. But there is an alternative to cancellation: Innovative companies are leveraging video in their business continuity plans for both external and internal communications. This not only accommodates consumers’ immediate needs, it also fosters brand loyalty and builds new virtual communities as a result. 

Here are some powerful examples of video use cases across industries that enhance external communications within a business continuity framework:

Event companies: Adopting a video strategy means supplementing offline offerings with online content by live streaming conference tracks, publishing video on websites and social media and/or making recordings of events available on-demand soon after they happen. The Brightcove video platform can scale to live stream some of the biggest events in the world, including sports, political elections, and industry conferences. 

Online retailers: With foot traffic declining, online eCommerce orders have seen unprecedented surges of up to 300% in a week, with some retailers unable to cope with demand. Retailers need to create immersive online experiences to display their products, like Hugo Boss’s live-streamed fashion show. The time is now for brands to evolve their eCommerce strategy to include video, as well as cart checkout and delivery options. 

Lifestyle and wellness brands: Lululemon in China opted to stream training classes directly to consumers who have little choice but to work out indoors because of gym closures. Online fitness brands like Alomoves and Peloton could experience a spike in subscriptions and video streaming traffic as more users choose to train at home.

Government agencies: In any breaking news scenario, communication is central to a government’s strategy. It is absolutely critical to connect with the public both offline and online and to deliver updates directly to devices. As government agencies roll out their digital transformation programs, expanding communication channels with citizens should be part of their core strategy. And any communication that includes a video element can be especially engaging and effective. 

Education: When conditions prompt school closures and disrupt lesson plans, video e-learning can make a difference. Most schools are not prepared to implement a remote study option, but the beauty of technology in 2020 is that educational institutions can quickly adopt video streaming as a continuity plan. The once highly manual process of uploading slideware with no live commentary can now be replaced with lecturers uploading and publishing their lessons in video format with just a few clicks, then streaming them across various devices and browsers. The advances in streaming technologies make it easy for schools to serve remote students and minimize disruption to regular classes. Whether live-streamed or on-demand, video can be an effective contingency plan to make sure students can stay current with their coursework.

Faith-based organizations: These organizations have mostly relied on the physical attendance of their members but now face a challenge. With worshippers avoiding crowded environments, faith-based groups are exploring new ways to share their message and promote their events, sermons, and services – all of which can be video streamed to worshippers in their homes or on their mobile devices. 

During any unexpected situation, brands and organizations need a business continuity plan that includes engaging and informing their customers and employees through offline and online channels.

In an effort to support our business community and help you avoid business disruptions, Brightcove is now offering 50 free hours of HD Live for 90 days. If you’d like to learn more about this offer, visit our page here.

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Ransomware’s Latest Hits

CMMA Blog

Ransomware remained at the top of the charts last year, as one of the most cunning and vicious forms of data theft. Ransomware attacks take place every 14 seconds and have increased by 700% since 2016. The loss of access to production data cost companies around $11 billion in financial, productivity, and downtime losses in 2019. Sifting through the latest ransomware news, I find it alarming that some organizations still do not see ransomware protection as a number one priority to protect their IT infrastructure. With the continued attacks on unsuspecting companies, the crafty criminals are getting away with a huge paycheck and with your data.

Public, Education, and Healthcare Organizations
are Likely Targets

According to recent data, public organizations and the healthcare industry are the most likely targets that could be hit the hardest this year. Many public and healthcare organizations may not have the budget to invest in the latest cyber-security software available in the market today nor do they have the systems in place to perform upgrades as needed, thereby leaving their systems vulnerable to attackers. Understandably so, it is seen as a weakness and one to be exploited where healthcare facilities can’t provide critical services to their patients. A published article by Tech Target quotes Caleb Barlow, president and CEO at healthcare cybersecurity firm, CynergisTek, in Austin, Texas. He states, “The most common attack on healthcare has involved data theft, but that’s starting to change. Today, hackers are using ransomware attacks more frequently, which have a destructive, “kinetic impact” to them. That means, you didn’t steal the data; you locked it up, destroyed it, or changed it,” Barlow said. “When those things happen, you can’t see patients.”

Ransomware is a destructive force and medical organization need to brace themselves in 2020 because these attacks will spread wider and with more frequency. This reminds me of the Campbell County Health 2019 attack, which was one of the worst recent hits because it put lives at risk. (Source: Campbell-county-memorial-hospital-ransomware attack).

Latest string of Companies Crippled
by Ransomware

  • March 2, 2020 (Reuters) – Currency service provider Travelex on Monday estimated a 25 million pounds ($31.9 million) hit to first-quarter underlying core earnings due to the ransomware attack in late December and said it has restored all its customer-facing systems. (Source: UK Reuters/ransomware attack). Travelex services remained offline for more than two weeks following the attack, leaving some customers cashless during the busiest travel season.
  • Among small and medium-sized businesses, in the last 12 months, twenty-two percent of organizations had to cease business operations immediately because of ransomware; Eighty-one percent of businesses have experienced a cyberattack; Sixty-six percent have suffered a data breach and thirty-five percent were victims of ransomware (Source: https://www.malwarebytes.com/ransomware/).
  • Legal services giant, Epiq Global, has been hit by a ransomware attack. A source with knowledge of the incident said the ransomware hit the organization’s entire fleet of computers across its 80 global offices.
  • And just recently, Visser, a parts manufacturer for Tesla and SpaceX, was hit by a more advanced, data exfiltrating ransomware. A portion of the files stolen from the company were published by the ransomware group. (Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/02/epiq-global-ransomware/).
  • How about the Ransomware attack against the New Orleans city government earlier this year, which cost the city $7 million dollars.
  • Albany County in New York was hit by three cyberattacks in the span of three weeks in late 2019, including a Christmas day attack on the Albany County Airport Authority (ACAA) that resulted in an undisclosed ransomware payment by the ACAA. (Source: Times Union https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Ransomware-attack-cripples-airport-authority-s-14963401.php).

Important to know: Ransomware is getting craftier

While some reports say ransomware
is going down and others say it’s going up, the bottom line is to understand
that the illegal activity will attempt to hit your datacenter, and the only
unknown in this equation is when? The answer is you never know, but there is
ninety-nine percent chance that your organization will be targeted,
unfortunately.

It’s important to protect your IT
environment by becoming aware and by applying old but true principles of data
protection (DP) and business continuity (BC) as follows:

  • Prevention and recovery should
    both be an important part of your DP and BC strategy.
  • Upgrading legacy backup
    infrastructures is top of the list, so it doesn’t become an easy target.
  • Next, is having your backups
    current and up to date, so you can recover the most recent instances of your
    data.
  • Whether you choose to back-up on
    disk or keeping an air-gapped copy on tape, the latter of which is iron clad
    protection from ransomware because it’s air-gapped, physical barrier, you will
    ensure recoverability.
  • Backup copies should not only be
    recoverable, but they should be predictably recovered. In other words, test,
    test, test the integrity of your backup recovery system and verify it. And
    speaking of predictability, the NCSC (UK National Cyber Security Centre) has
    updated its guidance and is suggesting greater emphasis is needed on that
    offline copy.

In conclusion, the most sensible approach to protecting your data should be prevent, detect, and respond, but also protecting your backup with the 3-2-1-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, 2 different media types, 1 offline and 1 offsite.

Visit our Ransomware Protection Solutions page for the latest information on our Ransomware Protection packs, our deduplication back-up appliances, and tape solutions with LTO-8 technology.

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Webinar Recording: How to Manage Your Classroom or Conference Room Technology

AV in Meeting Spaces

Whether you’re in a corporate conference room or a higher education classroom, it can be a challenge to manage different devices in one room as efficiently as possible while also maximizing the potential of the source and display content.

We’ll try to help you solve these challenges during this AVI-SPL/Harman webinar, “How to Manage Your Classroom or Conference Room Technology.”  Our host and panelists discuss:

  • The technology you need inside and outside the classroom to support remote work
  • The necessary ingredients to an exceptional video conferencing experience
  • How to tie together collaboration systems for a seamless experience that’s easy to manage
  • Use cases for different kinds of switches that transfer content

Stephen Bogart of Harman and Laurie Berg of AVI-SPL will walk you through technologies that aid in the conference room, including AMX Acendo Vibe, AMX DVX 4K60 presentation switcher, and AVI-SPL Symphony. The presenters also answer questions about the future of remote work and huddle rooms, and the difference between Symphony and other monitoring solutions.

Get the recording for “How to Manage Your Classroom or Conference Room Technology” >

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