There are two topics I spend a good deal of time discussing: Cisco Spark and Network Security. I touched a nerve last week when on this blog, I brought up the latter; nearly everyone I’ve bumped into since has expressed panic inducing security anxieties. This stuff is serious; there is no arguing that. We wake to horrific accounts of breached data and malware infections on our social media feeds and in network news. It can be difficult to have a positive outlook when the threat of cyber attacks looms large like an ever-present elephant in the room.

I’m here today to quell your Cyber Security fears and provide a few more reasons to consider liberating your inbox by making the jump to Cisco Spark.

Email is the enemy.

According to a 2016 report published by PhishMe, 91% of all cyber attacks and resulting breaches stem from users mistakenly opening phishing emails. Some of you may question the intelligence of folks opening emails from an unknown source but even the most security savvy among us make an occasional mistake. The report shows the top reasons people are fooled by phishing scams are curiosity (13.7%), fear (13.4%), and urgency (13.2%), followed by reward/recognition, entertainment, social, and opportunity (Dark Reading). Email is not only a source of lost productivity it is also the root cause of most security breaches.

Break free from your inbox.

We’ve written about Cisco’s cloud collaboration platform Spark at length and I’m positive the conversation has only begun. Cisco continues to make enhancements to the base platform and interface and with January’s introduction of Spark Board, a brilliant touch-screen enabled collaboration endpoint, it’s clear the innovations will keep on coming.

Cisco Spark allows for a level of ease in collaboration that simply didn’t exist before. Seeing an opportunity to improve the meeting/sharing experience for users, Cisco developed a platform that gives teams the ability to collaborate in a seamless and organic way. With Spark meetings have again become relevant not just blocked time on your teams schedule.

With nearly 40% of our work-lives spent in meetings, we’ve got to make sure they are as productive as possible. When we aren’t in meetings, technology needs to help us collaborate better, share documents and send messages in a way that works across all devices no matter where we use them. Spark accomplishes this by connecting the physical capabilities of communications hardware and devices to the virtual world.

But…is Cisco Spark secure?

As the BYOD revolution has spread across our professional universe and email has been revealed as the ultimate culprit of breaches and productivity loss, the time is right for Cisco Spark. Spark uses an open architecture for the secure distribution of information, allowing organizations to gain exclusive control over the management of their encryption keys and the confidentiality of their data. This means that content is encrypted on the user client and remains this way until it has reached the recipient, with no intermediaries gaining access to decryption without being allowed by the organization (Cisco). Sounds complicated? Well, it is. Fortunately you don’t have to worry about the specifics of how your data is secured. Cisco went out of their way to check all the security boxes when they built Spark from the ground-up. The entire platform has been designed with security and encryption in mind.

It’s exhausting to spend your days worrying about the possible threat of Cyber Attacks. It is also exhausting juggling multiple devices and platforms for team collaboration. Add the anxiety created by overflowing email inboxes and a never-ending stream of uninspired meetings and you have a recipe for complete mental burnout. With Cisco Spark bad meetings, security fears and your time bomb of an inbox are a thing of the past, a ‘remember-when’ moment to discuss with your grandkids in twenty years. If you’d like to learn more about Cisco Spark and Spark Board or would like a demo please leave a comment below or reach out via Social Media.

Let’s start the discussion on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

- Ashlee Dufek