Welcome! Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools and Security plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!

Craig’s walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements. 

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Well, we've talked about GoToMeeting. We've talked about Zoom. We've talked about Microsoft teams. Now it's time to talk about my favorite. How should you be collaborating in your business? Maybe your organization, your agency there's really. Only one solution and I'll tell you why

[00:00:23] Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here, we have had quite a week this week and it's been quite a year, right? It's a Jumanji season. I don't know if you ever saw that movie, but I think somebody playing Jumanji was set here in New Hampshire. The latest Jumanji movies out is actually pretty good I watched it with the grandkids.

[00:00:47]I quite enjoyed it. And they're always right. There are some issues with it and yeah, you have to just ignore you, ignore those things. but anyway, that's me. Right?

[00:00:59]We've been talking about online collaboration tools. Now, if you're like most of us and you had to have some people working from home.

[00:01:09]Even if you're. A business that was considered essential. And you had people who were in the office all day, maybe your accounting people worked from home. Maybe if you had to deal with an attorney, it was remotely. It was from home. And how did you do that? We've been going into businesses lately that have been having troubles and having a look at this very question, how did they do it?

[00:01:37]I think really it boiled down to one of two products that people were using. One of them was the Microsoft team's product. I was actually quite surprised to see the number of companies that were using the Cisco WebEx teams. Now I was surprised because I didn't know that many people really knew about it.

[00:02:02] How many people knew about WebEx teams? It was a frankly, it was a surprise to me, but WebEx teams is the only product out there right now that is fully compliant with the federal government requirements. So that includes things like DFARs, fed ramp, et cetera. Microsoft is promising that they will be compliant sometime in July. But at this point, they're not compliant. So if you have HIPAA regulations that you have to follow, or you have  ITAR or any of these other federal government requirements, there's only one option, that's WebEx teams. Now, oftentimes when there is a government mandate to use something and it's terrible.

[00:02:57] Right? How many times have you had that? You have to get her driver's license in order to drive on the road, not only in your state but another state. So that. It is a terrible experience, right? Going to the DMV, trying to get that all taken care of. It's not something I look forward to, but you get even into worse spots.

[00:03:18] I remember doing some work for the US Navy. As a subcontractor and all of the hoops who had to jump through all of the things that we had to do. And that was a few years back. Now, we're doing work with government subcontractors that are doing work for the US Navy. And I thought after these years, things would be a lot tighter.

[00:03:42] And in fact, they are. In fact, the new regulations, the CMMC regulations are much tighter with way more teeth on them. People will be going to jail. We're talking about huge multi multimillion-dollar fines. Even for a small company. So it is a very bad thing here to mess up on some of these regulations. So I've been surprised when I go in and find them using things like Microsoft teams, heaven forbid they've been using Zoom, which they have been.

[00:04:22] And they are a federal government subcontractor, in fact, for the DOD department of defense. Because again, what did we talk about? Then, all those stuff routed through China. China isn't just looking for military information. China is looking for information from our companies that they can use to compete against us are designed so that they can use they're selling it to their allies.

[00:04:49] The same thing is happening over North Korea. An article came out just this week, that North Korea has 7,000 highly trained hackers. That is aiming directly at our businesses here in the US in order to cause economic harm, but also those hackers to gain access to potential military information. So think about that.

[00:05:15] Think about how bad all of that stuff is and companies just don't understand what they should be using. So yeah, you had an excuse during COVID to not use something that's secure. I do get that. Believe me, don't know that the government regulators are going to be happy with you. You may go to jail, but I understand it. So for instance, for the HIPAA requirement, those were loosened because of COVID-19 the federal government said, Hey, listen, if you're a doctor in one state, you don't have to get licensed in another state in order to do the telemedicine stuff that made just a ton of sense They also, because of that loosened some of the HIPAA regulations, which they pretty much had to do.

[00:05:58] Right. Cause they didn't loosen the HIPAA regulations. You couldn't do the Teladoc across state lines. And you sure as heck could not do Teladoc using Zoom. So they just loosened it all up, but that's not going to last. All right. So start paying more attention to some of this. And some of these Teladoc things have their own platforms.

[00:06:20] Your doctor, you get paid per whatever it is, hour or patient, whatever it might be. And you're not worried about the platform. And you're probably okay. If that platform is not secure in just speaking in general terms. Because you don't know anything about it, but some of these telemedicine companies that have these apps, et cetera, should be anyways, that gets into WebEx teams here.

[00:06:46] Some of the advantages that have made it the most popular web conferencing solution today. Number one, it's a software as a service. You just have to subscribe to the surface, you have internet access and you're ready to go. WebEx teams is also one of the oldest out there that you can use. And I think that's really kind of cool when you get right down to it.

[00:07:12] And remember I mentioned a little bit early. that, it was the GoTo meeting was one of the older ones that were out there. You might remember some of the ads I do from WebEx, that it has been around a long time, but WebEx was founded in 1995. It really is the grandpa out there. It has been doing the software, this meeting software for a long time.

[00:07:38] So it works everywhere. Unlike zoom, you do not have to have a desktop app to do pretty much everything or anything that you might want to do on WebEx, which is a very big advantage. You don't have to have a download your audience doesn't need to be a subscriber to watch and listen. Which is not true for some of these other products that we've talked about today.

[00:08:01] It also, I think it very, very successfully combined your online viewing with the ability to teleconference easily. And you can connect to the webinar via just the webinars access code. You can have passwords and whatever you might want to do. And this lots of presenters know who is actually there during the presentation.

[00:08:24] You don't have to have a time consuming, roll call or anything else. It's right there. You have. Also, of course, the chats, you have the questions and answers and you can have automatically in this space, a meeting, just take place as scheduled one or just ad hoc. So let's say you have a space in WebEx teams, that's for the team to discuss some part of some project.

[00:08:50] And so you're going back and forth, back and forth. I said, okay, look, let's just hop on right now. You, you just hit the button, the meet button, and poof in comes. You're now in a meeting and people can call in on the phone. They can connect via their smart device. Anybody that's in the room's going to get notified that there's a meeting on right now can go from your desktop.

[00:09:09] It is phenomenal. Just a simple click is all it takes. Then anybody who's in the meeting can present. You can use a built-in whiteboard, it can take remote control of your computer. Are you kidding me? Why would anyone not use this? And it's using the military-grade encryption that we were kind of talking about earlier, right?

[00:09:31] The exact opposite of what zoom has been using it also. It allows you to do what we do ourselves and what we do for our government subcontractors. And that is we host the encryption key for all of the meetings and all of the communications. So the only way anyone can see any of this stuff, There was in a meeting is to have this encryption key.

[00:10:01] It's absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. You also have your own site. So for instance, my company has a site at, you know, company named.webex.com. If you want to meet with me again, it's just. Company name.webex.com/meat sauce. Craig Tata, you are done. They've got tons of training articles for subscribers to use.

[00:10:24] It uses a proprietary network that has nodes all over the world. It's reliable. It's secure. It is absolutely amazing. You have to use it. You have to try it. And I advise people to use WebEx over anything out for almost anything. All right. You and you can have conferences. For instance, my room allows up to 10,000 people into it, 10,000.

[00:10:53] You know, where else can you get that? But you don't have to have that bigger room if you don't need it. It is just phenomenal share files. Oh, videos, chat back and forth. Multiple spaces are what WebEx calls them. Ad hoc meetings, conferences. It is the tool to use. And you can find out a lot more by just going to webex.com.

[00:11:20] If you would like a demo, you can just get one right there. You know, I'm not going to make a dime off of it. Okay. It's not like I own WebEx or own any stock in it. Cause I don't, but it is the way to go. And if you'd like me to help you with it, well, that's a different story. You can get help from me about almost anything we talked about here on the show.

[00:11:41] You can just email me. M E at Craig Peterson dot com and we help people out every day. It doesn't have to do with WebEx. It doesn't have to do with anything that you're buying from me. I just make myself on my team available. We have a, an offer going where we had 20 companies that we selected from people that applied, that we provided an hour of tech support for anything they wanted.

[00:12:09] So that went really well. We've done that before. We may be doing the. The whole cyber health assessment thing. Again, we'll see how that goes. We did those for free about a year ago. So we may do that as part of our security summer this year, but the only way you find out about all of this stuff is to be on my regular emails, my weekly emails.

[00:12:30] And you do that. By going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Make sure you're on that list. You'll get my weekly show notes and you'll find out about all of the extra free stuff and services that we provide.

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