The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

Learn how open clouds reduce latencies to client device, improve customer and device (IoT) interactions and speed up innovations from the edge to the data center.

Imagine a Ferarri losing Le Mans to a 40-year-old Pinto with a broken headlight and two flat tires. That pretty much describes the cybersecurity industry.

Every day, hackers spending just a few thousand dollars manage to thwart defenses that cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s because these security systems only need to be beaten once out of thousands of tries to have their vulnerabilities exploited.

Crowdsec wants to fix this economic imbalance by using crowdsourcing and open source software. The company is building what it calls a “massively multiplayer firewall,” and it believes this collaborative approach represents a critical strategic shift for protecting digital assets.

“If you have to be open, then you have to take the risk that all your assets and resources have to be defended wherever they are,” Crowdsec CEO and cofounder Philippe Humeau told VentureBeat. “The point of our thinking is the only way to secure those is to establish trust between two peers. And the only way to establish trust reliably on a large scale is the crowd.”

The company, which was founded in December 2020 and is based in Paris, today announced it has raised a $5 million round of funding. Breega led the round, and partner Maximilien Bacot said the concept was too compelling to pass up, even for a firm that doesn’t invest in a lot of security startups.

“The product vision that they are putting on the table, to make sure that we can protect everybody by using the crowd, is very important,” he said. “I love the product and the vision.”

More protection for less

Enterprises have to spend a lot on security because they face so many disadvantages. Once a vulnerability is found, it can take time for a patch to be released. And it can take more time to deploy the patch.

Meanwhile, the perimeter companies have to protect continues to expand as more data moves to the cloud. Not only is this digital footprint larger, it is also more complex, increasing the chances of human or software vulnerabilities.

“The bottom line is the castle strategy is over except if you want to go back to pagers and faxes and stuff that would drag your business 30 years back in time,” Humeau said. “And then you would not be competitive anymore.”

Humeau believes Crowdsec can succeed because there are more humans working in cybersecurity than there are hackers. If the defenders banded together, that human-driven power could have a big impact.

Of course, some companies attempt to leverage this human factor with bug bounty programs. Crowdsec wants to take that further by creating a platform that allows for real-time, large-scale collaboration.

Once a member of the Crowsdec community reports an IP address that was used to launch an attack, Crowdsec’s software blocks it across its network. In this way, Humeau said the company will create the largest real-time hacking map on the internet. This will help block threats like port scans, identity theft, and denial of service attacks.

In addition to these defensive capabilities, Crowdsec will offer several types of remediation, including simple access prohibition and rights limitation. The solution will work on just about any environment, including public clouds, containers, and virtualized architectures.

The basic platform will be free as an incentive for people to adopt it and contribute back to the community. Crowdsec will eventually offer some paid services on top of that.

Crowdsec won the grand prize for innovation at the most recent RSA. In the five months it has been live, the company says it has already attracted more than 6,000 users in 90 countries.

The company intends to use the funding to expand its team and accelerate efforts to grow its community.

The promise of open clouds: Faster innovation, faster delivery

Learn how open clouds reduce latencies to client device, improve customer and device (IoT) interactions and speed up innovations from the edge to the data center.

Presented by NICE RPA

It’s no secret that Covid-19 has put businesses under significant operational pressure to improve their service delivery approaches to stay competitive. Along with the enforced shift to new ways of working — which are likely to continue after the pandemic — one of the main drivers has been evolving customer expectations.

Today’s customers expect the same high-level service no matter what the situation. They demand quick and accurate answers to complex questions. And if their needs aren’t met, they’ll look elsewhere.

What’s more, they now expect to receive personalized and customized experiences. This is a trend that has increased in prominence as we’ve all become accustomed to operating in a digitally driven reality.

The need to be agile and adaptable to customer needs in the moment is now abundantly clear. As a result, enterprises are being forced to adapt and embrace new technologies.

One technology that can have a transformative impact is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). More specifically, attended automation. The combination of attended bots with employees can amplify the customer experience, while also driving additional operational efficiencies.

Augmenting human talent

Unlike unattended bots that run on backend servers, working on highly structured and repetitive tasks that don’t require human intervention, attended bots live on the employee’s desktop. They go beyond basic process automation, with the ability to guide employees in real time with next-best action advice. This makes attended automation ideally suited to support customer service teams during times of disruption and help them meet customers’ evolving and often complex needs.

Equipped with RPA technology, businesses can augment human talent by streamlining processes and automating the more mundane, time-consuming admin tasks. This frees service reps so that they can focus on more complex, higher-value work. Such work may include more creative and strategically driven activities that add value to customers in a relevant and personal way. In today’s competitive landscape, this is what will drive customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

Attended automation can also provide real-time, context-specific guidance during live customer interactions. From proactively gathering and summarizing data from multiple applications, to providing quick links to relevant data depending on the employee’s needs, this real-time intelligence can take the pressure off reps and give them the support needed to delight customers with tailored advice. Most importantly, it empowers reps to deliver more engaging, memorable, and superior customer service.

The real-time guidance component of attended automation prompts employees to interact with customers in the most effective and beneficial way, such as reading a compliance script or presenting a promotional offer at the right moment. As a result, employees will feel empowered to deliver a high-quality service, while customers will get the experience they have come to expect.

Driving service excellence

Augmenting human talent isn’t the only way attended automation can help inspire higher levels of service delivery. With humans and attended bots collaborating, several additional value drivers can be achieved.

For example, attended automation solves many of the productivity and processing accuracy challenges facing businesses. Bots can complete the same desktop tasks faster, typically reducing average handle time by 20%, and allowing employees to get more done in their working day and direct more time towards value-added work that enriches the customer experience.

Bots also ensure accuracy and compliance across all the desktop tasks they complete, minimizing the risk of data capture errors and compliance breaches down to nearly zero.

This can all directly contribute to higher levels of employee satisfaction. Research shows that repetitive work is one of the top 3 reasons for agent attrition. With transactional and process-level tasks taken off the hands of customer service employees, they can focus more on work that requires judgement, empathy, and consulting expertise. As well as increasing their engagement, this will make them happier in their roles and more likely to deliver an exceptional and engaging customer service.

Finally, employees can benefit from the enhanced training capabilities offered by attended automation. In fact, a large majority of employees complain about the difficulty they experience in learning new systems. Add to that the need to learn new processes, products, and service offerings, and the time spent in classroom and online training can add up.

Real-time process guidance delivers effective on-the-job training that results in meaningful and sustainable learning. Employees get the reassurance of knowing they will be guided every step of the way and supplied with all the support materials they need to provide experiences that keep customers coming back.

Ultimately, attended automation exists to amplify human potential and empower extraordinary service delivery. Reducing the admin burden by streamlining internal processes is a key part of the puzzle. But the true value comes from the real-time insights attended bots can provide, inspiring human workers to deliver more engaging, empathetic, and impactful customer service experiences — no matter what’s thrown at them.

Oded Karev is General Manager of NICE RPA. With extensive experience in corporate strategy and operations, Oded leads NICE’s global Advanced Process Automation line of business, covering the full spectrum of robotics solutions. Prior to his current role, he served as Director of Corporate Strategy at NICE, leading some of the company’s key growth initiatives. Before joining NICE, Oded specialized in delivering multi-channel strategies, operating model designs and digital transformation projects for Accenture. Oded is a respected industry thought leader and key note speaker in the field of Robotic Process Automation.

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