The recording industry is changing the same way our personal tech lives are changing.
Not so long ago, most of us were using multiple appliances and gadgets on our day-to-day lives. Each and every one of us used to have an alarm clock on our bedside, to make sure we get up on time each morning. I know I used to hit that snooze button quite often… When I was traveling, I used to have this mediocre camera, so I could take some decent photos without carrying around my bulky DSLR camera. I used to jog with an MP3 player strapped to my arm, an HRM (Heart Rate Monitor) strapped to my chest and this bulky, ugly black clock on my wrist to monitor my running statistics.
And then came the iPhone in 2007, and changed our lives. Well, it was really the 2nd generation in 2008 that created a real impact, but you get my point. Seven years later, and all the hardware I just mentioned, is consolidated in my day-to-day life into a single device, my smart phone.
The same thing is now happening with the telecommunications and collaboration recording industry.
We are used to having multiple appliances and components in our recording solution that are responsible for the various recording functions - we have our VoIP, screen video, and text recorders. We have components responsible for archiving, others for resilience and additional for encryption. This myriad of components and servers in our recording infrastructure, and the scale restrictions that are determined for each component are increasing our TCO and our recording system footprint.
To help you make smart choice, we suggest looking at the 4 foundations of recording platform
Minimized IT Footprint and Higher Scale
The fact that we have so many components is complicating the deployment and administration of the system, even further increasing our TCO. This complication comes into play also when designing the resilience and redundancy mechanisms that we place to make sure we support our business continuity requirements.
But all this is now changing with the introduction of next generation recorders and recording technology. The various components are consolidating into a single component that can handle all the roles of the recording system with higher scales. The introduction of the advanced recorder allows us to simplify our recording system designs, lower our TCO, and minimize its IT footprint. The lives of the IT manager, has just become a lot easier!
Next Generation Business Continuity
The advancements provided by next generation recorders, also contribute significantly to business continuity capabilities. Mechanisms such as dual recording allow the organization to record every interaction twice, making sure it would never lose a single call, while archiving the recording once to save on long term storage requirements. The use of sophisticated “best call” selection algorithms allows the recording system to select the right copy of the call to be archived.
By combining local and geo resilience mechanisms to all components in the system, with disaster recovery automation tools that eliminate human error, and new enhanced N+1 recorder pools, the organization protects itself from data center outages, and minimizes down time due to fail overs, ensuring business continuity at all times.
With advanced alarming capabilities, the IT manager can keep tabs on the wellbeing of its recording system functionality and be alert in advance for issues that might lead to failures and stop them from happening.
Simplified System Management
All this sophistication needs to be managed easily. The use of easy to understand and easy to use UI with built-in wizards and point-and-click actions, streamlines the configuration and provisioning process and minimizes the management overhead. This concept of DIY administration also makes sure that any MAC (Move-Add-Change) activity is performed easily, with a few clicks of a button, with no need to get professional services involved. The same goes for maintenance activity. The introduction of silent update mechanism and maintenance mode allows updating and maintaining the recorders with no down time what so ever, allowing the organization to keep run its business.
Redefined Compliance Recording
As we all know, most organizations use recording in order to comply with various regulations such as Dodd-Frank, HIPAA, MIPPA, PCI-DSS, etc. Qualification and certification of the recording system with those regulations is a must in order to make sure that the enterprise complies with the regulations relevant to its business. Automation of process and smart rule engines are put in place in order to eliminate human error, and reduce the organizational exposure to regulation violations. From time to time, the regulation might change to adapt to changes in legislation. When this happens, we want to make sure our recording system can easily adapt to the new requirements and apply those changes on existing historical data.
Last, but not least, when selecting a recording solution, we have to make sure that our selection supports the latest industry standards of computing HW, virtualization, operating systems, and data bases, and that it also provides, open standard APIs to integrate with other applications and systems in our organization.