Copyright TechTarget - All rights reserved https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Techtarget Feed Generator en Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:59:41 GMT https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing editor@techtarget.com <p>Contact centers and their agents are a critical part of customer service. They're the ambassadors of the organization, responding to large call volumes daily, interacting with customers and collecting feedback to pass on to the business.</p> <p>Modern contact center platforms increasingly use AI-driven analytics, speech recognition and sentiment analysis tools to monitor interactions in real time and identify opportunities to improve both agent performance and customer experience (CX).</p> <p>A contact center monitoring program can help businesses <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/The-ultimate-guide-to-contact-center-modernization">transition the contact center from an expense center to a strategic asset</a> by ensuring representatives effectively resolve customer issues along with&nbsp;capturing valuable customer feedback. Many companies have a basic QA monitoring program but often struggle with transitioning to a more advanced one. Businesses should identify the benefits of an advanced quality monitoring program and implement key best practices to ensure the program's success.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is a contact center monitoring program?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is a contact center monitoring program?</h2> <p>A basic contact center quality monitoring program consists of listening to phone calls between customers and contact center agents and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance">providing feedback to improve agent performance</a>.</p> <p>An advanced QA monitoring program adds three key elements:</p> <ol class="default-list"> <li>Provides insight into why customers call and facilitates action plans to address the root cause of customer inquiries.</li> <li>Identifies <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Contact-center-challenges-and-how-to-overcome-them">customers who are frustrated with the company</a> and might decide to do business with a competitor.</li> <li>Analyzes the tools that agents use and implements enhancements to those tools that improve the agent experience and provide more accurate and timely responses to customers.</li> </ol> <p>&nbsp;Many organizations now augment traditional QA monitoring programs with AI-driven analytics tools that automatically analyze call transcripts and customer sentiment.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are the benefits of contact center monitoring?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are the benefits of contact center monitoring?</h2> <p>A contact center is the place where the voice of the customer is heard. It's the one place in the organization where a large number of customers reach out and, in most cases, provide unsolicited feedback to the company. A well-designed contact center monitoring program provides a valuable opportunity to identify customer pain points and gather intelligence with the goal of improving products, services and overall CX.</p> <p>Retaining existing customers is typically less expensive than acquiring new ones, so it's critical to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-improve-the-contact-center-experience-for-customers">identify areas for improvement in the current customer</a> base to increase retention and reduce costs. Contact center monitoring also provides real-time information at a much more granular level than either customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score surveys, which are performed after the fact and have some level of bias, depending on who does or doesn't respond to a survey request.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics.png 1280w" alt="Graphic listing key qualities of a contact center agent, including knowledgeable, detail-oriented, organized, flexible, empathetic and effective communicator." height="288" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Successful contact center agents combine interpersonal and organizational skills such as communication, empathy, flexibility and problem-solving to deliver strong customer service. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How to start a contact center monitoring program"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How to start a contact center monitoring program</h2> <p>Starting and developing a contact center monitoring program require several steps, including the following:</p> <ol class="default-list"> <li>Identify the criteria that is monitored and scored, such as greeting, tone, call documentation and adherence to procedures.</li> <li>Develop a scorecard that measures the items to be monitored.</li> <li>Determine who performs the monitoring, such as a supervisor or QA analyst.</li> <li>Set the frequency of monitoring per agent and when the monitoring occurs.</li> <li>Develop a process to provide feedback to agents.</li> <li>Let the agents know the purpose of the monitoring program and how it works.</li> <li>Test the quality monitoring process end to end.</li> </ol> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Contact center monitoring best practices"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Contact center monitoring best practices</h2> <p>Successful quality monitoring programs typically include the following best practices.</p> <h3>1. Define quality and the ideal customer interaction</h3> <p>Contact center agents can't provide the proper service to customers if they don't know what the company expects of them. So, it's important for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/contact-center-management">contact center management</a> to train employees on what to say and do during a customer interaction before beginning the monitoring process. Scripts for agents are sometimes a contact center practice and other times a legal requirement, but they can help agents start off on the right foot by giving them a roadmap of what to say and how an interaction should be done. When scripts aren't a legal requirement, it's often beneficial to modify and use them as a guideline and make them less robotic-sounding to better serve customers.</p> <h3>2. Decide what customer service metrics are most important</h3> <p>Businesses shouldn't try to measure everything. Contact center managers need to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-7-call-center-agent-performance-metrics-to-track">decide what metrics they value the most</a> and communicate them to their teams before beginning the quality monitoring process. Some metrics include first-contact resolution (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/first-call-resolution-FCR">FCR</a>), average handle time (AHT), average speed to answer, repeat call rate, calls answered per hour and agent utilization rate. If a contact center, for example, strives for FCR but also expects low AHT, it might be disappointed. The goal of FCR is to resolve customer issues with one phone call, eliminating the need for repeat calls and increasing customer satisfaction. But AHT might be longer as agents work to address the problem.</p> <h3>3. Provide feedback to agents on 100% of monitored calls</h3> <p>For calls that businesses monitor via analytics, a scorecard, which measures customer service and agent performance, should be sufficient. However, companies should <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-manage-remote-call-center-agents">provide agents with timely feedback and coaching</a> on monitored calls instead of waiting for a monthly review. It's also important for companies to provide agents direct feedback from customers. Companies need to offer agents feedback and coaching in areas of strength and opportunity. Some contact center platforms now use AI-driven coaching tools that automatically identify performance trends and recommend targeted training opportunities for agents.</p> <h3>4. Enable agents to listen to and score their own phone calls</h3> <p>In many cases, agents are the toughest critics of their own work. They should have the opportunity to hear how they sound and interact with customers.</p> <h3>5. Include side-by-side monitoring</h3> <p>Side-by-side monitoring enables analysts and supervisors to interact with agents and ask questions immediately following a phone call. Contact center management can then gather additional valuable insight into specific actions during the customer interaction, including any gaps in the tools agents use.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter.jpg 1280w" alt="Two contact center agents wearing headsets review information on a computer screen while other agents work at nearby stations."> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Supervisors and analysts often review agent interactions together during contact center monitoring to evaluate performance and identify coaching opportunities. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>6. Use a different quality form for each customer service channel</h3> <p>Contact centers interact with customers across multiple channels, including phone, email, mobile apps, chat and social media. It's necessary to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-contact-center-quality-assurance">create different QA forms for each channel</a> to gather appropriate insights. On a QA monitoring form for phone calls, for example, one question might be about an agent's active listening skills. While that question is appropriate for a phone call, it might not provide any value for an email interaction.</p> <h3>7. Save examples of excellent customer interactions</h3> <p>Contact center managers monitoring agent performance inevitably come across some examples of excellent service and support that should be saved for later review and shared during training sessions. Contact centers can use these gold-standard examples as training tools for new agents and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/Nine-skills-every-call-center-agent-job-requires">agents who need to brush up on their skills</a> by highlighting the language and techniques that helped create outstanding CX.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Technologies to support advanced contact center monitoring"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Technologies to support advanced contact center monitoring</h2> <p>A basic contact center monitoring program requires a technical foundation of quality monitoring software, which is included in many <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/contact-center-as-a-service-CCaS">contact center-as-a-service</a> platforms and provided as a standalone tool by many vendors. This technology enables a team to listen to a sample of recorded phone calls and score each one using an electronic form.</p> <p>The first step in enhancing a monitoring program is to add the capability of capturing contact center agents' computer screens when recording a call. Screen captures enable analysts to do the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Observe how agents interact with desktop tools.</li> <li>Identify areas where agents can improve a process or transaction.</li> <li>Determine how businesses can improve desktop systems and tools to streamline processes and improve CX.</li> </ul> <figure class="main-article-image half-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_technologies.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_technologies_half_column_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_technologies_half_column_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_technologies.jpg 1280w" alt="List of technologies aiding contact center monitoring" height="292" width="279"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Speech analytics software facilitates contact center monitoring. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>The next step is to use <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/speech-analytics">speech analytics</a> software to increase the number of calls monitored without requiring more staff to perform the function. Speech analytics can help increase the volume of quality monitors, especially at the agent level, and automate the call scoring process. With an increased number of monitors, patterns showing where an agent may be struggling with a specific type of inquiry can be more easily identified.&nbsp;</p> <p>Speech analytics provides several benefits beyond the ability to monitor a higher volume of calls. It can be used to identify the root cause of phone calls, which is more effective than analyzing disposition codes entered by an agent. Businesses can run a query, for example, that provides 100 calls in which customers have similar issues with a product. Analysts can listen to those calls, identify the root cause of a problem with a product or service, and resolve it.&nbsp;</p> <p>Speech analytics can also analyze phone calls for specific words, phrases, patterns and tones and provide reports. A word cloud, for example, is a collection of words depicting the frequency they appear in calls so companies can better identify customer expectations and sentiment communicated during calls. In more advanced real-time speech analytics, AI analytical capabilities are used in real time to identify calls in which the agent or <a target="_blank" href="https://www.dialora.ai/blog/ai-voice-frustration-detection-call-centers" rel="noopener">customer is becoming frustrated</a> and notify a supervisor to assist in handling the call.</p> <p>Many modern contact center platforms also incorporate real-time agent assist tools that analyze conversations during live calls and recommend next best actions.</p> <p>As contact center technology evolves, monitoring programs are becoming more data-driven and automated. Organizations that combine traditional monitoring practices with modern analytics tools can gain deeper insight into customer behavior and service gaps.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b> <i>This article was updated to reflect the latest developments in contact center monitoring tools, techniques and practices.</i></p> <p><i>Scott Sachs is president and founder of SJS Solutions, a consultancy that specializes in contact center strategy assessments and technology selection.</i></p> </section> A well-designed monitoring program identifies customer pain points and gathers valuable intelligence that can improve agent performance and CX, as well as products and services. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/customer_service03.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-monitoring Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT <p>Cloud backup has made it possible for organizations of any size to improve their data protection. At the same time, traditional local backup still has its place in the storage world. The decision to use one or the other -- or, in some instances, both -- comes down to an organization's specific needs.</p> <p>In the cloud backup vs. local backup debate, both options have their advantages and disadvantages.</p> <p>Cloud-based workloads have seen a huge surge in popularity. Not only are established vendors adding more cloud capabilities, but new cloud storage and backup vendors are appearing. The simplicity and scale of cloud computing can provide a backup solution for organizations that need protection.</p> <p>However, local backup providers are not sitting still. Disk speeds continue to get faster, and tape storage capacities are growing. In addition, if an organization has used local backup for a long time, it can be a burden to move to the cloud. IT and executives should ask several questions about such a move, including whether the move makes sense operationally and financially, and whether they should consider a partial migration and keep some local backup.</p> <p>Many organizations, especially enterprises, have a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Hybrid-backups-reap-benefits-of-cloud-and-local-backup">mix of cloud and local backup</a>. Both have pros and cons. For example, local file backup can be quicker for recovery purposes, but the cloud provides that off-site location in the event of a primary data center disaster. Local backup typically requires more in-house management and staff time.</p> <p>To decide which method is best for your organization, weigh the pros and cons of cloud and local backups and how they match with your existing infrastructure.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Cloud backup basics"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Cloud backup basics</h2> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/cloud-backup">Cloud backup</a>&nbsp;involves copying data over a network to an off-site storage server, typically hosted by a service provider. The cloud backup vendor charges the customer based on elements such as capacity, bandwidth, number of users and data egress.</p> <p>Cloud data backup options include&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/answer/What-are-some-public-cloud-backup-options-for-better-data-protection">backing up directly to a public cloud</a>&nbsp;such as AWS, Google or Microsoft Azure, or backing up to a service provider's private cloud.&nbsp;The newer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/cloud-to-cloud-backup">cloud-to-cloud backup</a>&nbsp;involves backing up data that originates in the cloud -- in SaaS applications, such as Salesforce and Microsoft 365 -- to another cloud.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lc-hY-uHgUU?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Understanding local backup"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Understanding local backup</h2> <p>Local backups are a longstanding form of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/The-pros-and-cons-of-on-site-backup">backing up data at an organization's primary site</a>. Organizations typically use disk-based hardware for this backup. Backup software manages the copying of data to the hardware. Sometimes that software is integrated with the hardware, or it runs separately. Data reduction features, such as deduplication, decrease the amount of data backed up on the disk.</p> <p>Tape was the more common traditional backup medium before disk took over in the early 2000s. In the&nbsp;tape backup process, an organization moves data to a tape cartridge that resides in a library. Organizations <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Storage-media-showdown-The-benefits-of-tape-vs-disk-backup">still use tape</a> today, typically for immutable offline protection against ransomware and other cyber attacks, or for long-term archiving. LTO-10, the latest version of the Linear Tape-Open format, offers 75 TB of compressed capacity per cartridge.</p> <p>A new twist to the cloud backup vs. local backup story involves backing up SaaS data to a local device. In this case, data originating in the cloud -- such as Microsoft 365 emails -- is backed up to local storage.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_backup-cloud_vs_local_comparison.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_backup-cloud_vs_local_comparison_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_backup-cloud_vs_local_comparison_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_backup-cloud_vs_local_comparison.png 1280w" alt="Chart of cloud backup and local backup considerations" height="532" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>It's important to consider the many elements of cloud backup vs. local backup for your organization's data protection. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Advantages and disadvantages of cloud backup"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Advantages and disadvantages of cloud backup</h2> <p>Overall, cloud backup provides an additional layer of protection with minimal burden on staff. Although cloud backup is a popular mode of data protection with many advantages, pay attention to the disadvantages to make sure your organization is covered. Some areas of advantage can be considered disadvantageous in different situations.</p> <p>The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/The-pros-and-cons-of-cloud-backup-technologies">advantages of cloud backup</a>&nbsp;include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Low entry costs.</b>&nbsp;Backing up to the cloud, especially in the beginning, is a cheap form of data protection. Although local backup storage devices could run in the thousands of dollars, the cost in money and time to set up a cloud backup account is minimal. Cloud backup is especially attractive to an organization that doesn't have the funds or resources for a separate disaster recovery site.</li> <li><b>Wide-ranging accessibility.</b>&nbsp;A cloud backup is accessible from any internet-connected device, which is especially handy when an organization's primary site is down. Accessing a small amount of data is a quick process.</li> <li><b>An array of security features.</b>&nbsp;Cloud backup products offer a range of features to keep data safe.</li> <li><b>Easy scalability.</b>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/tip/Cloud-storage-advantages-Solving-five-common-IT-problems">Cloud storage is essentially unlimited</a>. Organizations can add cloud backup capacity with just a couple of clicks. In contrast, local backup requires acquiring and setting up another physical piece of hardware.</li> <li><b>Easy management.</b>&nbsp;Cloud backup management generally takes less time and effort than local data backup, depending on the organization's needs and requests. Organizations just need to make sure they are OK with leaving management of the storage hardware in the hands of a service provider.</li> <li><b>Simple disaster recovery.</b>&nbsp;If there's a failure or data loss event at a primary site, organizations can easily fail over to cloud-based disaster recovery as a service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/definition/disaster-recovery-as-a-service-DRaaS">DRaaS</a>). This option provides disaster recovery to businesses that couldn't previously afford it.</li> </ul> <p>The following are some&nbsp;potential downsides&nbsp;of cloud backup:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Cost accumulations.</b>&nbsp;Although a small amount of data is cheap, a lot of data stored over a long period of time steadily increases costs. A company must pay for its data backup storage every month. It's critical to keep a close eye on cloud backup expenses.</li> <li><b>Latency.</b>&nbsp;The cloud can cause latency, especially if many users are trying to access the same data or cloud, or if an organization is trying to get a large volume of data out of the cloud.</li> <li><b>Security issues.</b>&nbsp;Some organizations are still worried about the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/answer/Whats-the-best-method-for-protecting-data-in-the-cloud">safety of keeping data in the cloud</a>. Confirm that a cloud backup product has the necessary security elements, such as end-to-end encryption. In addition, just because a backup is in the cloud, that doesn't mean it's safe from cyber attacks, so be wary of a false sense of security.</li> <li><b>Slow, costly restores.</b>&nbsp;Although DRaaS is fast and efficient, actually restoring data from the cloud can be a time-consuming and costly process, especially when it involves large volumes. Data egress fees can quickly make restorations expensive.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Advantages and disadvantages of local backup"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Advantages and disadvantages of local backup</h2> <p>Organizations must consider their data protection needs when comparing cloud and local backup options. While the cloud is a popular option and offers benefits, local backups might be a better choice for some organizations. The benefits of local backup include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>On-site accessibility.</b>&nbsp;It doesn't get much more accessible than having the backup data at your primary site. Disk-based backups in particular are typically continuous throughout the day, so a user can go back to a specific point in time.</li> <li><b>Speed.</b>&nbsp;On-site disk is fast for backup and recovery operations.</li> <li><b>Security control.</b>&nbsp;An organization has more control over local backup than data that's in the hands of a cloud provider.</li> </ul> <p>The following are some drawbacks of local backup:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>High initial cost.</b>&nbsp;In comparing cloud backup vs. local backup, the expense of on-site hardware is generally far more than preparing for a cloud-based platform. Disks are expensive, so adding them can make a significant&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/How-to-craft-a-strong-and-cost-effective-data-backup-budget">dent in the budget</a>. In addition, the lifespan and durability of disk&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/life-expectancy-of-a-drive/" rel="noopener">requires replacement from time to time</a>&nbsp;as well as routine maintenance.</li> <li><b>Scalability difficulties.</b>&nbsp;With local backup, the process of adding space is more labor-intensive because the organization needs to acquire the additional storage and install it. Physically storing more data backups is more of a burden than just adding storage space in the cloud.</li> <li><b>High maintenance.</b>&nbsp;Local backup requires dedicated staff to maintain and manage it. When an organization uses cloud computing, IT staff is freed up to focus on other important tasks besides backup maintenance.</li> <li><b>Cybersecurity issues.</b>&nbsp;If a cyber attack hits the primary data center, an organization should&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/How-does-off-site-backup-stack-up-against-cloud-backup">use an off-site backup</a>&nbsp;-- whether it be on tape or in the cloud -- to make sure the restore is clean.</li> <li><b>Disaster recovery issues.</b>&nbsp;If there's a disaster at the primary site, a local backup will not be helpful. However, if your organization has moved tapes off-site, those backups are valuable for disaster recovery.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Bottom line: Which should you choose?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Bottom line: Which should you choose?</h2> <p>When your organization analyzes cloud backup vs. local backup, consider all these positives and negatives and address the specific needs of the business.</p> <p>Cloud backup clearly continues to gain traction in the market, and there are many options for businesses of any size. There are numerous reported cases of businesses ditching their legacy data backup platforms for a cloud-based product. However, the opposite is also true: Some organizations are choosing to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Is-cloud-backup-repatriation-right-for-your-organization">repatriate cloud backups</a> back on-site.</p> <p>Though not to the extent of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Top-20-cloud-backup-services-for-2019">cloud backup products</a>, local backup options are evolving as well. If you need a certain size of hardware for your data center, you can probably find it.</p> <p>In many cases, and if the budget and resources are adequate, a hybrid backup approach is appropriate. This combination of cloud and local backup provides strong data protection. &nbsp;</p> <p>Make sure you carefully assess your organization's backup and recovery needs, research potential products and make a careful, informed decision about your backup platform. This includes consideration of data retention and recovery needs. The survival of your business could depend on it.</p> <p><i>Paul Crocetti is editorial director of Informa TechTarget's Infrastructure sites, which include SearchStorage, SearchDataCenter and SearchITOperations. Since starting at then-TechTarget in 2015, he has also served as editor on the SearchStorage, SearchDataBackup and SearchDisasterRecovery sites.</i></p> <p><i>Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.</i></p> </section> Cloud vs. local backup is an important discussion for IT leaders today. The cloud backup market is soaring, but traditional local backups also have much to offer. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/searchVMware/cloud/vmware_article_004.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Cloud-backup-vs-local-traditional-backup-advantages-disadvantages Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>Securely sharing and synchronizing files across systems is a cornerstone of enterprise IT. Billions of transfers occur daily, involving files of all types, sizes and structures. Because legacy file transfer mechanisms lack built-in security features, organizations use secure file transfer services to ensure their data remains protected as it moves from point A to point B.</p> <p>Let's dig deeper into secure file transfer services, leading tools on the market and how to choose the best option for your organization.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How secure file transfer works"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How secure file transfer works</h2> <p>Secure file transfer services all have a common approach to protecting files: <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/access-control">access control</a>. How access control is achieved varies widely among products, but the basic idea is a shared secret between the sender and the recipient -- a hard-to-guess URL transferred via email, a password or integration with an enterprise <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/identity-access-management-IAM-system">identity and access management</a> system, for instance. This shared secret encrypts the file before transfer, and the recipient's computer uses the shared secret to decrypt the file.</p> <p>To satisfy security requirements of today's enterprises, secure file transfer services need a two-pronged approach:</p> <ol class="default-list"> <li><b>Secure data. </b>The data should have embedded security. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/encryption">Encryption</a>, for example, ensures no one else on a network can access, read or modify the contents of a file as it moves between systems.</li> <li><b>Secure delivery. </b>Secure file transfer involves reliable delivery, such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/TCP-IP">TCP/IP</a>. Secure file transfer services use a variety of protocols and standards, ranging from Secure FTP (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/definition/Secure-File-Transfer-Protocol-SSH-File-Transfer-Protocol">SFTP</a>) and Advanced Encryption Standard (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Advanced-Encryption-Standard">AES</a>) to vendor-specific proprietary protocols.</li> </ol> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Pros and cons of secure file transfer services"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Pros and cons of secure file transfer services</h2> <p>Secure file transfer services provide strong security for files and other data, and support compliance requirements such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Principles-of-the-GDPR-explained">GDPR</a> and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/healthtechsecurity/feature/What-is-the-HIPAA-Privacy-Rule">HIPAA</a>. Services are highly scalable and reliable, making collaboration smoother.</p> <p>The downside, however, is the technology's cost and complexity. Security teams often find the service difficult to deploy, experiencing compatibility issues across security protocols and performance issues during large-scale data transfers.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Types of secure file transfer services"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Types of secure file transfer services</h2> <p>Basic secure file transfer services, such as those based on Secure Copy Protocol (SCP), have command-line interfaces and are best suited for IT rather than end users. They offer few features and are relatively inexpensive compared to other file transfer systems. Some consider this type of transfer advantageous because the organization maintains full control with no third-party -- e.g., <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/A-cloud-services-cheat-sheet-for-AWS-Azure-and-Google-Cloud">cloud provider</a> -- involvement.</p> <p>Secure file transfer services based on SFTP are typically more feature-rich than those based on SCP. SFTP-based file transfers often have GUIs available, making them easier to use. However, both SCP- and SFTP-based systems lack many of the features of more sophisticated file transfer systems.</p> <p>Originally intended for end-user collaboration, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/7-cloud-storage-and-file-sharing-services-to-consider">file hosting services</a> offer access control and encryption features that enable users to email a link and be allowed secure access to a file hosted on the service.</p> <p>The most advanced type of file transfer platform, managed file transfer (MFT), provides an intermediary system between sender and receiver, such as a dedicated server within the organization's facilities or a cloud-provided service. The file travels from the sender to the MFT repository, where it is strictly protected through access control measures, including encryption of the stored file. Transfer to the recipient from the MFT repository occurs later. This isolates the sender's system from the recipient's system and permits easier monitoring and tracking of repository and transfer usage.</p> <p>Email also provides basic file transfer capabilities and should, therefore, be encrypted for security. Email encryption products support large file transfers via email.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Secure file transfer service features"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Secure file transfer service features</h2> <p>Organizations investing in secure file transfer services should consider whether they need advanced features typically available with MFT offerings and, sometimes, from other types of file transfer services.</p> <h3>Auditing</h3> <p>Audit logs provide detailed activity and performance data that organizations can use to demonstrate compliance with data privacy standards and regulations. This is especially important if personally identifiable information, such as financial or health data, is in play.<br><br>Legacy file transfer methods, such as SCP, have historically lacked auditing features. File hosting services typically offer at least some file transfer auditing capabilities, while most MFT platforms provide comprehensive audit logs.</p> <h3>Automated scheduling</h3> <p>Secure file transfer services offer a range of basic scheduling capabilities. <br><br>More sophisticated systems can stagger file transfers to reduce demand on bandwidth or processing. By managing resource use, intelligent scheduling can save money and prevent inadvertent service denials.</p> <h3>AI</h3> <p>Many secure file transfer services include AI capabilities that can quickly identify and mitigate security threats before files are affected. AI can enhance the functionality of encryption algorithms and security key management, preventing many cyberattacks. Predictive capabilities analyze performance data to reduce downtime. AI also improves the organization's ability to comply with critical standards and regulations.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Enterprise-level secure file transfer services"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Enterprise-level secure file transfer services</h2> <p>The following enterprise-level secure file transfer services have a variety of features, ranging from basic to advanced, and some offer free demos as part of their pricing plans.</p> <p>The tools profiled in this article were selected based on market research. Each has a sizable customer base, is under active development, and has numerous publicly available user reviews from verified purchasers. This list is organized alphabetically.</p> <h3>Box Business</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> File hosting service with optional AI-powered features</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> SaaS. Accessible via a browser-based UI; optional local application download for desktops and mobile devices.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> Android, iOS, macOS, Windows</p> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Transport-Layer-Security-TLS">TLS</a>, passive FTP/FTP Secure/Explicit FTPS (Business and Enterprise tiers only; vendor does not recommend FTP/FTPS/FTPES as primary access method). Active FTP is not supported.</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Active Directory (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchwindowsserver/definition/Active-Directory">AD</a>) and single sign-on (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/single-sign-on">SSO</a>); audit logging; cloud storage; enterprise-friendly design; file synchronization and versioning; <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhealthit/definition/HIPAA">HIPAA</a> and FedRAMP compliance (Enterprise tier); integrations with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack and 1,500+ other enterprise apps; threat detection (Enterprise Plus tier); workflow automation.</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> 150 GB (Enterprise Plus tier)</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Multiple plans are available for individuals and businesses. Basic individual plans range from free to $15/user/month; business plans start at $15/user/month up to $50/user/month.</p> <h3>IBM Sterling Secure File Transfer</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> MFT</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> Enterprise software supporting traditional installation and containerized deployment; on-premises, cloud or hybrid.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/Linux-operating-system">Linux</a>, Linux on IBM Z, macOS, multiple <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/Unix">Unix</a> platforms, Windows</p> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19398-01/820-1228/agfat/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Applicability Statement 2</a> (AS2), FTP, FTPS, <a href="https://www.odette.org/oftp2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Odette FTP 2</a> (OFTP2), <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Pretty-Good-Privacy">Pretty Good Privacy</a>, SFTP</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Automated inbound and outbound file transfers that work across protocols; file synchronization; intelligent, centralized management platform; RESTful APIs that support third-party integrations; scalable offering that supports a wide range of B2B file transfer requirements, for small businesses, midsize businesses and large enterprises. Key components include File Gateway, Connect:Direct, Control Center and Secure Proxy.</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> Depends on the protocol: AS2 (2 GB), FTP (10 GB), FTPS (10 GB), OFTP2 (5 GB), SFTP (10 GB)</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Monthly and perpetual licensing options are available for three packages: Essentials, Standard and Premium. Contact IBM for pricing.</p> <h3>pCloud Business</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> Cloud-based file hosting service</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> SaaS. Accessible via a browser-based UI; optional local application download for desktops and mobile devices.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows</p> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> TLS/SSL, AES-256; optional additional encryption uses 4,096-bit RSA for users' private keys and 256-bit AES for per-file and per-folder keys</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Activity logging; cost-effective; support for enterprise-scale requirements; optional zero-knowledge client-side encryption; option to encrypt or not encrypt individual files; file sharing, synchronization and versioning; data backups; digital asset management via pCloud Branding; team-by-team and user-by-user access control.</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> No limit</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> pCloud Business offers monthly and annual licenses at $9.99/user/month and $7.99/user/month; Business Pro is available monthly and annually at $14.98 per user/month and $11.98/user/month. 30-day free trial available.</p> <h3>Peer Global File Service</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> Cloud-based distributed file management service</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> Software platform. Management hub is accessible via local application or browser. Software installation required for both management hub and agents.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> Linux, Windows</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Management hub -- Linux or Windows dedicated server</li> <li>Agents -- Windows file servers</li> </ul> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> TCP/IP, TLS/SSL</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Real-time and scheduled file replication; support for multisite file sharing across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments; edge caching; integrations with all major storage platforms; central management console; comprehensive activity logs; AD integration; active-active file synchronization;&nbsp; anomaly detection.</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> No limit</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Custom pricing; contact Peer Software for more information.</p> <h3>Progress ShareFile</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> Secure file sharing and content collaboration platform, with some MFT-like capabilities</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> SaaS. Accessible via a browser-based UI; optional local application download for desktops and mobile devices.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> Android, iOS, macOS, Windows</p> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> TLS/<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Secure-Sockets-Layer-SSL">SSL</a>, FTP/FTPS.</p> <p><b>Features:</b> AD integration; SSO; activity logging; advanced security features, including remote device lock and wipe options; <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-access-security-broker-CASB">cloud access security broker</a> integration for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/data-loss-prevention-DLP">data loss prevention</a>; centralized management platform; encrypted email (Advanced+ tiers); enterprise-friendly design; file synchronization and versioning; integration with Microsoft 365; HIPAA compliance configuration (Premium tier); plugins for Gmail and Outlook (Advanced+ tiers).</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> 100 GB (Advanced and Premium tiers)</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Pricing starts at $16/user/month and ranges up to $67.50/user/month</p> <h3>Resilio Connect</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> Peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfer and synchronization service</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> Software platform. Software installation required for both management console and endpoint agents. Browser-based UI.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Management console -- <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/Discover-the-three-major-CentOS-clones">CentOS</a>, Linux, Ubuntu, Windows</li> <li>Agents -- Android, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows</li> </ul> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> Proprietary P2P protocol based on BitTorrent</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Audit logging; support for transferring or replicating millions of files across multiple locations and diverse networks and systems; automated, intelligent scheduling; central management console; integrations with other enterprise IT tools; file sharing, synchronization and versioning; job prioritization; cloud storage support; remote endpoint agent upgrades; effective for large, multilocation enterprises; can scale to support thousands of endpoints and millions of files.</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> No limit</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Custom pricing; contact Resilio for more information.</p> <h3>Tresorit SecureCloud for Business</h3> <p><b>Type:</b> Cloud storage and file hosting service</p> <p><b>Delivery:</b> SaaS. Accessible via desktop application, mobile application and browser-based UI.</p> <p><b>OSes:</b> Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows</p> <p><b>Protocols and standards supported:</b> TLS; AES-256; clientside encryption using a zeroknowledge model</p> <p><b>Features:</b> Zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/end-to-end-encryption-E2EE">E2EE</a>), including browser-based access; Gmail and Outlook integrations; enterprise application support; file synchronizing and versioning; encrypted cloud storage; compliant with HIPAA and GDPR (Business and Enterprise tiers).</p> <p><b>Max file size:</b> 15 GB (Business tier), 10 GB (Professional tier) 20 GB (Enterprise tier)</p> <p><b>Pricing options:</b> Tresorit offers a 14-day free trial. Licenses are available monthly and annually: Business $24/user/month or $19/user/month billed annually, Professional $33.99/user/month or $27.49/user/month billed annually. Custom enterprise-level pricing is also available; contact Tresorit for more information.</p> <p>Tresorit also offers a free, standalone file transfer app, Tresorit Send, which includes E2EE. Users can upload up to 100 files at a time -- max 5 GB -- and shared each file 10 times. Shared files are available for a maximum of seven days.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How to choose a secure file transfer service"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How to choose a secure file transfer service</h2> <p>Here's some helpful guidance on selecting the appropriate system for your organization's needs:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Review business requirements.</b> Data management teams should periodically discuss technology requirements with business unit leaders and senior management to identify trends and initiatives.</li> <li><b>Review historical performance data.</b> Analyze data from existing file transfer systems to flag metrics and identify trends that might inform the selection process.</li> <li><b>Prepare forecasts of file transfer and other IT trends.</b> Use historical performance data to generate forecasts, which can be invaluable when preparing for a change in a major IT system. Compelling forecast data can help justify future investments.</li> <li><b>Discuss secure file transfer services with other IT leaders.</b> Speak with IT leaders in other organizations to gauge their experience with other file transfer services.</li> <li><b>Research and examine available systems.</b> Vet suitable file transfer system candidates, including current vendors.</li> <li><b>Prepare a request for proposal.</b> If accepting competitive bids, prepare a formal RFP that specifies the organization's current file transfer activities, plus short-, medium- and long-term needs. The RFP should include the requirements for a service-level agreement.</li> <li><b>Send out the RFP and consider a bidders' conference.</b> It can be useful to gather bidders in person or virtually to discuss the RFP and understand service and support models.</li> <li><b>Select the best product and initiate a project plan.</b> Once the system has been selected, prepare a project plan to facilitate installation, testing, acceptance and rollout.</li> <li><b>Test before official rollout.</b> A pilot phase ensures the new system performs as stated and that users are comfortable with it.</li> <li><b>Organize and conduct user training.</b> Working with the vendor, prepare and deliver training to all employees.</li> </ul> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Use the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/definition/software-development-life-cycle-SDLC">software development lifecycle</a> as a framework for selecting and implementing a new file transfer system. Once the system is in production, set regular review and audit times and brief management on the findings.</li> </ul> <p><i>Paul Kirvan, FBCI, CISA, is an independent consultant and technical writer with more than 35 years of experience in business continuity, disaster recovery, resilience, cybersecurity, GRC, telecom and technical writing.</i></p> </section> With so many options, finding the best secure file transfer service can feel daunting. Discover top tools and what you need to make the right decision for your business. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/folder-files11.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/8-secure-file-transfer-services-for-the-enterprise Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:16:00 GMT <p>Businesses are migrating workloads to the public cloud and implementing private clouds in-house. As these forms of cloud computing continue to expand, large and small businesses are focused on a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/hybrid-cloud">hybrid cloud</a>&nbsp;strategy to bridge the two models and form a hybrid cloud environment to support ever-more complex computing demands, such as AI and data sovereignty.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is hybrid cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is hybrid cloud?</h2> <p>A hybrid cloud is a logical construct that establishes an operational connection between a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/private-cloud">private cloud</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/public-cloud">public cloud</a>. Typically, an individual business builds and operates a private cloud intended solely for its own benefit. The cloud might be implemented within the local data center or provided as a third-party service.</p> <p>A public cloud is typically a&nbsp;major multi-tenant cloud provider,&nbsp;such as Amazon Web Services (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/Amazon-Web-Services">AWS</a>), Microsoft <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Windows-Azure">Azure</a> or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Google-Cloud-Platform">Google Cloud</a>,&nbsp;as well as countless other SaaS providers. A hybrid cloud exists when an operational relationship is established between a public and private cloud to create a single, ubiquitous, interoperable logical cloud entity.</p> <p>In more practical terms, a hybrid cloud is an amalgamation of technologies that include an on-premises data center, in-house or third-party private cloud and public cloud services. These technologies are connected through a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/WAN-wide-area-network">WAN</a>&nbsp;and integrated through orchestration techniques to move data and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/workload">workloads</a>&nbsp;seamlessly between private infrastructure and public clouds as computing needs or cost models change.</p> <p>Ideally, a hybrid cloud provides businesses with competitive advantages, such as greater flexibility, as well as alternatives for workload deployment without unwanted tradeoffs, such as migrating traditional VM workloads to cloud instances or developing cloud-native applications tied to a specific provider's services.</p> <h3>Why hybrid clouds can be challenging to build and maintain</h3> <p>Enterprises have no direct control over the public cloud, so they must architect a private cloud to be compatible with the intended public cloud -- or even multiple clouds. Compatibility includes suitable compute, storage and networking hardware, along with compatible virtualization and private infrastructure software, such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/OpenStack">OpenStack</a>, to provide a desired array of private cloud services, network services, enterprise workloads and so on. This setup requires the substantial expertise of enterprise cloud architects and engineers.</p> <p>As an alternative, some private clouds rely on predesigned infrastructure platforms provided by the public cloud provider. Examples include Azure Stack, Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Anthos. Once deployed in a private cloud setting, these platforms offer a native interconnection to the broader public cloud -- Azure, AWS or Google -- to provide a faster and more convenient path to a hybrid cloud environment.</p> <p>The most critical consideration is implementing a private cloud software stack compatible with the target public cloud's APIs and services. Without this compatibility, workloads and data can't move seamlessly from private to public clouds and back.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are the benefits of a hybrid cloud?</h2> <p>Even though there's considerable investment and effort involved, these eight main hybrid cloud benefits make hybrid cloud architecture compelling for many enterprises.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hybrid_clouds_benefits-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hybrid_clouds_benefits-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hybrid_clouds_benefits-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/hybrid_clouds_benefits-f.png 1280w" alt="Chart showing eight benefits of hybrid cloud." height="189" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>These eight benefits make building a hybrid cloud infrastructure worthwhile for businesses. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>1. Cost control</h3> <p>A business must be prudent about the workloads and services that run in its private infrastructure. A private cloud is typically deployed with an on-premises data center infrastructure that the enterprise controls and operates, requiring a significant investment of capital, equipment and talent to deploy and maintain. Although a private cloud can parse and provision local resources in a cloud-like manner, its infrastructure is still relatively limited compared to the vast global infrastructure of a public cloud provider.</p> <p>An enterprise can mitigate costs with a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Review-these-hybrid-cloud-connectivity-best-practices">connection between its private cloud and a public cloud</a>. When local demand stresses capacity, the business draws upon additional public cloud resources to help smooth those spikes in demand. Similarly, the public cloud suits temporary, experimental or general-purpose workloads the company doesn't want to source, set up and manage in-house, such as disaster recovery. It's best to use finite private cloud resources to host sovereign or critical workloads and data -- or simply run workloads where the costs are lowest.</p> <p>Public cloud resources and services can also reduce hardware costs within an on-premises data center. For example, a business that uses a server and storage within a public cloud doesn't purchase or maintain that server locally. The public cloud provider shoulders those costs.</p> <p>The cost benefits of hybrid cloud also provide clarity about where the money goes. A hybrid cloud can make it easy to divide IT consumption into capital and operational costs. Enterprises can use tools and practices, such as FinOps, to monitor cloud usage; obtain detailed reports on utilization by department, manager, workload or other criteria; and quantify the costs of cloud services for closer inspection and oversight.</p> <h3>2. Flexibility and scalability</h3> <p>Flexibility is a core premise of cloud computing. A private cloud provides some provisioning and scaling agility, but the resources available in a physical data center are still limited by the individual organization's budget and capabilities. In contrast, public cloud users can immediately deploy compute and storage instances -- as well as related services -- globally without resource constraints. But <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Plan-for-repatriation-on-day-one-with-a-hybrid-cloud-strategy">expect at least some migration preparation</a> work to move a local workload from private infrastructure to the public cloud or from a public cloud back to the private cloud.</p> <p>Consistency is one of the main benefits of hybrid cloud. It's easier to create, shift and scale workloads and resources if the private cloud offers instance types and services similar to those available in the chosen public cloud. This consistency enables enterprises to provision and use private cloud resources when it's appropriate and cost-effective, draw upon additional resources from the public cloud when necessary, and then release those additional resources in the cloud when demand or needs shift.</p> <h3>3. Security</h3> <p>Security is a core focus for many enterprise IT teams. Data and the workloads that access it are vital business assets. Traditionally, this requires a strong level of control over the IT infrastructure and its operation.</p> <p>A main security concern with public cloud is that the infrastructure is the exclusive property of the cloud provider, and its infrastructure is typically <i>multi-tenant</i>, or shared among various users. The cloud user can't see or control the entire cloud infrastructure. Additionally, the cloud provider takes on responsibilities to secure users' environments in the cloud but is rarely responsible when a breach or other malicious activity occurs. Security responsibilities are shared between cloud users and providers -- a relationship typically referred to as the <i>shared responsibility mode</i>l.</p> <p>In many cases, the best way to protect data is to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Evaluate-on-premises-vs-cloud-computing-pros-and-cons">keep it on-premises</a>. The most sensitive data and critical workloads stay within the owned data center on a private infrastructure where the organization's IT staff maintains and safeguards the assets. With a combined public and private environment, enterprises gain some common hybrid cloud oversight. Best practices and tools, such as Trend Micro Deep Security, McAfee hybrid cloud security products and IBM hybrid cloud infrastructure, can help organizations monitor, discover and report&nbsp;security issues across hybrid cloud environments.</p> <h3>4. Compliance</h3> <p>One advantage of public cloud is its global reach and abundant nature. Ideally, networking, storage and computing technologies support most workload operations from data centers located almost anywhere, even at the network edge. It should not matter where a workload and data reside in the public cloud provider's fleet of data centers. But geopolitical boundaries can come into play, with&nbsp;regulatory limitations on where companies store data&nbsp;-- a concept called&nbsp;<i><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/A-data-sovereignty-primer-for-cloud-admins">data sovereignty</a></i> -- and operate computing workloads. That complicates the move to purely public cloud for some multinational organizations.</p> <p>Regulatory compliance presents other challenges, such as protecting and retaining data, which can vary by industry. Regulatory compliance often demands direct control over the storage and processing of sensitive or personally identifiable information. These regulatory demands can often be met with a hybrid cloud infrastructure.</p> <p>With a hybrid cloud, a business can operate sensitive workloads in its private cloud and move data to and from suitable data centers across the public cloud as the regulatory landscape changes or as data and workloads evolve. In a big data processing project, for example, a company can collect personally identifiable customer data in a private cloud, sanitize it in-house and send it to a public cloud application for processing or analysis.</p> <h3>5. Uniformity</h3> <p>Hybrid clouds, in theory, support greater standardization in IT management practices. But in practice, organizations often struggle to create that uniformity. An IT staff doesn't want to assemble and operate a private infrastructure framework, then develop workflows and cobble together services that are hopefully consistent enough with a public cloud provider to make the hybrid setup work. That's a time-consuming, error-prone and expensive endeavor.</p> <p>Public cloud providers have become more sensitive to the importance and benefits of hybrid cloud as well as the challenges of integrating private and public environments. Top cloud providers offer various services that focus on hybrid needs:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AWS Outposts</b> offers capabilities for a hybrid cloud setup based on AWS services.</li> <li><b>Microsoft Azure Stack</b> enables a business to deploy Azure capabilities in on-premises systems.</li> <li><b>Google Anthos</b> doesn't directly extend Google Cloud Platform services on-premises; it uses Kubernetes, containers and plugins to deploy services and workloads in different locations.</li> <li><b>VMware Cloud on AWS</b> is a partnership designed so users can integrate their on-premises VMware environments with Amazon's cloud.</li> </ul> <p>These offerings provide prepackaged hardware and software stacks that can be easily deployed within the users' data center to create a private cloud that's already interoperable with the providers' broader public cloud&nbsp;platform. This saves businesses considerable time, expertise and investment.</p> <p>As public cloud providers embrace hybrid cloud management, businesses don't need to construct a complete environment top to bottom. Instead, they simply extend the virtualized data center into familiar cloud services. The disadvantage here is vendor lock-in; enterprise users might experience challenges employing multi-cloud hybrid paradigms or face stark limitations when building or configuring their own local cloud infrastructure.</p> <h3>6. Agility</h3> <p>Clouds are designed to make provisioning and scaling much faster than traditional physical or virtualized environments. This "on-demand-for-as-long-as-it's-needed" agility played a huge role in public cloud adoption. Private clouds seek to replicate this kind of agile behavior.</p> <p>When public and private clouds are merged into a hybrid cloud, that speed and agility take on an entirely new meaning. Businesses can stand up new workloads and data sets on demand and make strategic choices about where to deploy those resources across the hybrid cloud depending on factors such as cost, scale and performance.</p> <p>A business deploying an application in the private cloud, for example, could scale up the application by deploying a second iteration of the workload in a public cloud data center located within a different geopolitical area that can provide better performance for local users while maintaining data sovereignty requirements for all parties involved. Such goals are almost impossible with traditional data centers and workloads.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zae3jApGq-U?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <h3>7. Continuity and risk management</h3> <p>Business continuity -- the ability to continue functioning during disruption -- is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/tip/Business-continuity-maturity-model-An-at-a-glance-guide">often a primary element of regulatory compliance</a>. Another way that a hybrid cloud enhances business continuity is by supporting application, data and disaster recovery tasks to protect against system failures, security issues and physical disasters, such as fires, earthquakes and acts of war.</p> <p>A business, for instance, could replicate a critical workload's data from a local application to a public cloud, ensuring that the data remains available or can be restored in the event of data loss at the application. In a more sophisticated example, a business might scale or migrate a busy application from its private cloud to the public cloud to accommodate a spike in user traffic. Such tactics are ideally suited to hybrid cloud environments and can avert workload performance problems and disruptions, further improving UX.</p> <p>Risk management is another vital consideration. All enterprise applications and data resources carry some risk in terms of access, security, performance, and reliability. Hybrid clouds give businesses the control and agility needed to seamlessly locate applications and data according to changing business and technology needs.</p> <p>A hybrid cloud lets an enterprise decide where to locate its applications and data, and how to best provision the required resources and services to achieve the most desirable outcome for the business and its application users. For example, private and public clouds can implement strong security services, such as authentication and authorization, to ensure only appropriate employees or partners can access data.</p> <h3>8. Promotes innovation</h3> <p>Recent years have seen a strong emphasis on cloud computing as a driver of business innovation. The underlying idea behind "innovation" is the use of technology to create new opportunities. In this case, hybrid cloud computing can enable an enterprise to use it in ways that enhance business efficiency, manage costs, implement regulatory frameworks, and even drive new revenue.</p> <p>One example of this innovation is in machine learning (ML) and AI projects. AI platforms are appearing across industries, and it's commonplace for a modern enterprise to deploy several AI platforms -- often while refining and developing others. But AI platforms are particularly challenging in their infrastructure requirements. ML and AI demand considerable computing power, especially when training vast data sets.</p> <p>Today, an enterprise can deploy an AI platform in a public cloud, using the cloud's enormous infrastructure for training and testing. It can then migrate that trained platform back to the private cloud for production deployment, where it can control and manage the platform locally. In this context, cloud computing is a <a target="_blank" href="https://aibusiness.com/cloud-computing/the-role-of-cloud-infrastructure-in-unlocking-ai-s-potential" rel="noopener">fundamental enabler of AI innovation</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are the disadvantages of a hybrid cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are the disadvantages of a hybrid cloud?</h2> <p>Although the potential hybrid cloud benefits can be compelling, numerous&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365535626/Prepare-for-hybrid-cloud-headaches">hybrid cloud disadvantages need to be considered</a> -- mainly related to complexity issues.</p> <h3>1. Architectural complexity</h3> <p>Designing and implementing a hybrid cloud is a detailed undertaking and often requires the service of a skilled cloud architect. While the underlying servers, storage and networking hardware can be relatively straightforward, the private infrastructure software stack can be complicated to master. Cloud architects must build resources and services within that private tech stack and understand the intended public cloud so resources and services align and interoperate. That raises the bar for change management as well as software stack patches and upgrades.</p> <p>Ultimately, the key to a successful hybrid cloud is interoperability. A private cloud often must operate in the same ways as its associated public cloud to ensure seamless operation. If a business, for example, chooses to build a private cloud to interoperate with a public cloud, such as AWS, the private cloud must possess some level of compatibility with AWS and its services. As a result, private clouds might be forced to make software and architectural choices that could be difficult or suboptimal for the business. Packaged private clouds, such as AWS Outposts, ease these technical challenges but lock the business further into the provider's architecture.</p> <h3>2. Security complexity</h3> <p>Hybrid clouds can be strikingly difficult to configure and secure. IT staff must implement and manage authentication and security for private -- or local -- workloads and data as well as comprehensive authentication and access control for public -- or global -- cloud resources and services. Security settings for the two realms must remain consistent and complementary, and a change in one cloud might need to be reflected in the other. Oversights, inconsistencies or errors can expose vital data and critical workloads to unauthorized access and loss.</p> <p>Clear security policies and practices will help by defining security settings and standards. Automation can be an essential tool in deploying and enforcing security policies to avoid oversights and human error. Still, security impacts regulatory compliance and requires comprehensive knowledge of private and public cloud architectures to implement, monitor and test thoroughly.</p> <h3>3. Troubleshooting complexity</h3> <p>Problems in a hybrid cloud environment can be troublesome to isolate and mitigate. Administrators rely on detailed logs and tools to identify problems, and the troubleshooting process can vary between private systems and public clouds depending on where the trouble occurs. Efficient troubleshooting can require the services of highly experienced administrators and cloud engineers. For example, a private cloud offers complete visibility into the private infrastructure and software stack, while a public cloud only offers the visibility and control supported by native providers' and third-party tools. Limited visibility might require some public cloud troubleshooting to involve support staff from the public cloud provider.</p> <p>Tools matter. Effective troubleshooting across a hybrid cloud&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Top-enterprise-hybrid-cloud-management-tools-to-review">demands well-integrated tools</a>&nbsp;that ideally support a single-pane-of-glass approach to enable observability and reporting with actionable alerting, no matter where the issue occurs.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f.png 1280w" alt="Graphic showing six parameters of hybrid cloud connectivity: bandwidth, latency, availability and reliability, security, costs, and monitoring and reporting." height="426" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Six key parameters in hybrid cloud connectivity. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>4. Complex cost structures</h3> <p>Cloud cost structures can be notoriously difficult to master. Public cloud costs are stunningly granular, making it difficult to align costs with storage, applications or users. Private cloud costs are much closer to traditional infrastructure, but there are still cost complexities in the integration between public and private clouds, such as the costs of public cloud data exfiltration or the use of API calls. All of these costs can vary with usage.</p> <p>Cloud cost management is often a team sport using highly experienced cross-disciplinary teams engaged in FinOps practices -- plus a suite of cloud cost-monitoring tools to predict costs and then break cloud billing into meaningful business operations.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Hybrid cloud best practices"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Hybrid cloud best practices</h2> <p>Enterprises can adopt several tactics to help mitigate the disadvantages of a hybrid cloud and enhance the success of any hybrid cloud project.</p> <h3>Align goals and start small</h3> <p>Business initiatives fail most often when they are approached with a shortage of time, talent and direction. Organizations new to hybrid cloud technologies should first understand <i>why</i> a hybrid cloud is needed and objectively consider how such an endeavor aligns with business goals. Overlooking this simple benchmark can doom a costly hybrid cloud project from the start.</p> <p>Next, hybrid clouds can be complex and will require human expertise to implement, refine, scale and manage. There's a huge difference between an IT admin who can deploy a workload in a public cloud versus an experienced engineer who can design and implement a fully realized hybrid cloud. Survey the available talent pool and hire the people who can make that project a success.</p> <p>Finally, start small. The idea is to limit initial investments and demonstrate the business value of a hybrid cloud relative to simpler, more direct opportunities (the "low-hanging fruit"). This proves the technology, builds skills and expertise, enables refinement and optimization, and increases the likelihood of success for more complex or demanding hybrid cloud mechanics.</p> <h3>Understand security</h3> <p>The team responsible for implementing and managing a hybrid cloud environment should master cloud configuration and security. Invest in training and expertise to secure both the private infrastructure and the intended public cloud. Those configurations must work together seamlessly, but the knowledge base to accomplish that can't be gleaned overnight.</p> <p>Some organizations spend considerable time and effort experimenting, developing, and refining proof-of-principle deployments before they architect a deployment for production. Companies should also carefully document and manage security to maintain business and regulatory compliance.</p> <h3>Move workloads with care</h3> <p>A hybrid cloud's flexibility doesn't eliminate the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Five-keys-to-an-effective-hybrid-cloud-migration-strategy">need for strategic decisions about workload deployment</a>. Not all workloads are appropriate for each cloud type. Business and regulatory concerns might require that some critical workloads remain in a local data center, while other workloads may be suitable or ideal for public cloud deployment.</p> <p>Organizations must understand where that line is for their own business and industry and make deployment decisions accordingly. Cloud data exfiltration can also pose unexpectedly high costs, so once data is in a public cloud, moving it to a private cloud can be a budget-busting affair.</p> <p>Similarly, not all workloads are suited for all cloud environments, and the costs of moving data sets from the public cloud can quickly become prohibitive. Legacy workloads might still require more traditional local data center infrastructure and management. IT staff must allow for private cloud and traditional data center infrastructure to operate simultaneously.</p> <h3>Use automation and orchestration</h3> <p>Clouds are not intended to be manually controlled entities. Private infrastructure, public clouds and the hybrid clouds created from them depend on substantial automation to implement services and resources as uniform, consistent processes. Automation, when paired with orchestration, performs tasks with little -- if any -- human intervention.</p> <p>For example, clouds are frequently based on container technologies and platforms, such as Docker and Kubernetes. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Ways-to-use-AI-for-cloud-infrastructure-management">AI is increasingly responsible</a> for these automation and orchestration tasks, and it should be approached with careful attention to operational efficiency and cost control.</p> <h3>Implement monitoring and observability</h3> <p>The adage "You can't manage what you can't see" is particularly true for hybrid clouds. Organizations depend on a variety of tools within the private cloud and&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-management-tooling" rel="noopener">tools</a>&nbsp;supporting the desired public cloud provider to achieve observability across the entire hybrid cloud environment.</p> <p>Comprehensive monitoring is crucial to ensure workload availability, health and reliability as well as to gauge performance, no matter where those assets are deployed. Monitoring and observability provide a sound justification for scaling -- adjusting the costly resources allocated to the workload -- and offer objective measures for troubleshooting when problems arise.</p> <h3>Use encryption</h3> <p>Data is an organization's most valuable asset. Encrypting that data at rest and in flight can help mitigate loss or theft when intruders manage to slip past a security vulnerability. Comprehensive encryption should be standard practice within private cloud and public cloud storage.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b> This article was originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to include more information on hybrid cloud.</p> <p><i>Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.</i></p> </section> Why choose between public cloud and private systems when you can have both? With hybrid cloud, enterprises can address workload requirements, business demands and budgetary needs. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/security_a292905838.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Top-5-benefits-of-hybrid-cloud Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:45:00 GMT <p>To this day, there's no single cloud solution. Cloud technologies have expanded, matured and proliferated to support the most demanding business needs and use cases.</p> <p>The proliferation of cloud technologies is particularly confusing to businesses new to cloud adoption, and they're sometimes baffled by the distinction between&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/multi-cloud-strategy"><i>multi-cloud</i></a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/hybrid-cloud"><i>hybrid cloud</i></a>. Each type of cloud has a distinct definition and purpose.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is multi-cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is multi-cloud?</h2> <p>Although the public cloud infrastructure and services can be similar among public cloud vendors, public clouds are not directly interchangeable or interoperable. Each public cloud offers a unique set of computing resources and services that are accessed using unique APIs. Every public cloud attempts to be ubiquitous, but differences do exist. And every cloud presents tradeoffs for different business use cases. When a company migrates to the public cloud, that business might eventually adopt a multi-cloud strategy that engages multiple public cloud vendors.</p> <p>A multi-cloud technology strategy involves two or more cloud computing&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Cloud-management-platform">platforms</a>&nbsp;or cloud vendors to handle various business tasks. The ultimate goal of any multi-cloud strategy is to match the business need with the specific strength of each public cloud. A business might perform some tasks or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Compare-AWS-Azure-and-Google-Cloud-IAM-services">host certain types of applications</a>&nbsp;on AWS; another set of tasks, apps and data on&nbsp;Google Cloud&nbsp;Platform (GCP); and yet other tasks on&nbsp;Microsoft Azure&nbsp;-- all while utilizing cloud applications hosted through various third-party SaaS providers.</p> <p>A multi-cloud approach can be extensive and complex, depending on the number of clouds involved and the ways a business consumes each cloud resource or service. For example, a business might employ a public cloud provider's IaaS to host its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/workload">workloads</a>. At the same time, it could use specialized SaaS or PaaS providers for business services, such as productivity tools (Microsoft 365), employee expense tracking and reporting (Concur Expense) and so on, where each service is its own cloud.</p> <h3>Benefits of multi-cloud</h3> <p>So, why undertake such complexity? There are compelling reasons why a business might explore a multi-cloud approach, including the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Reducing local infrastructure.</b>&nbsp;A business outsources some or all its on-premises infrastructure to third-party providers to shed the burdens of hardware, software, maintenance and support -- for example, moving business email from an in-house exchange server to Microsoft Exchange Online.</li> <li><b>Using specific services.</b>&nbsp;Clouds often specialize in ways that complement the provider's business background and strengths. A business, for example, might use one cloud provider to host a test and development workload but use a different cloud provider's more mature artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services.</li> <li><b>Managing costs.</b>&nbsp;Local infrastructure requires a capital investment, no matter how or whether it's used. Cloud resources and services employ a pay-as-you-go model in which costs scale based on actual use. A SaaS platform, for example, might charge based on the number of users (seats), while other cloud services charge based on usage or recurring monthly fees. These costs are well documented by providers, and businesses can see that money is spent cost-effectively. Similarly, a business can opt to shift workloads between multiple clouds as costs -- and potential cost savings -- allow.</li> <li><b>Improving resilience and compliance.</b>&nbsp;A business must run and remain secure in the face of disruption; this is a central tenet of today's regulatory compliance and business continuity environment. A business might deploy a redundant workload in two or more clouds to handle more application traffic and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/tip/When-is-a-change-to-multi-cloud-the-right-resilience-move">enhance resilience</a>. If one cloud goes offline, the other cloud can continue to function and support the workload.</li> <li><b>Fostering innovation.</b>&nbsp;Every cloud is different and provides unique strengths and services that other competing providers might not. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy enables a business to engage the unique capabilities of different cloud providers simultaneously rather than facing an undesirable tradeoff of one cloud versus another.</li> <li><b>Avoiding cloud vendor lock-in.</b>&nbsp;Dependency on a third-party service provider can become a vulnerability for any modern enterprise. Changes in costs, services, functionality, support and other factors can render a business relationship difficult, forcing a costly and disruptive shift in cloud strategy. Using multiple public cloud vendors enables in-house staff to develop expertise with multiple clouds simultaneously and can potentially ease disruptions to the business relationship.</li> <li><b>Supporting data sovereignty.</b> As governments recognize the strategic importance of computing resources, the potential vulnerabilities of global interdependence are driving the demands for data and workload sovereignty -- ensuring that data is stored and workloads are operated within established boundaries. Multi-cloud strategies can support these demands through the global footprints of their geographically distributed data centers and availability zones.</li> </ul> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/networking-multi_vs_hybrid_cloud.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/networking-multi_vs_hybrid_cloud_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/networking-multi_vs_hybrid_cloud_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/networking-multi_vs_hybrid_cloud.png 1280w" alt="Diagram illustrating hybrid IT vs. hybrid cloud vs. multi-cloud deployment strategies." height="374" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Enterprises can deploy and manage traditional IT on-premises or integrate with varying levels of cloud services, including hybrid and multi-cloud models. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>Challenges of multi-cloud</h3> <p>The complexities of a multi-cloud approach extend beyond juggling resources, services and third-party providers. Organizations that embrace a multi-cloud environment potentially face some new risks and challenges&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Evaluate-on-premises-vs-cloud-computing-pros-and-cons">rarely posed by on-premises infrastructure</a>:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Security complexity.</b>&nbsp;An organization with multiple cloud providers and environments must grapple with multiple security configurations and authentication mechanisms to ensure user security and the security of sensitive data. It might be impractical to establish a common security configuration or workflow for all cloud providers. Also, there might be a high risk of security vulnerabilities in multi-cloud environments.</li> <li><b>Monitoring and management.</b> Every cloud is different, with unique interfaces, APIs and tools. As such, there is no single unifying standard for cloud monitoring and management. This creates major operational overhead and silos, forcing IT staff to use different platforms for monitoring and management. This often leaves some portions of the multi-cloud environment poorly managed. Observing cloud performance, diagnosing cloud bottlenecks and achieving unified visibility across different cloud environments can be a significant problem.</li> <li><b>Regulatory standards.</b>&nbsp;Although multi-cloud strategies can enhance compliance in areas such as workload resilience, there are other threats to regulatory compliance. These can include&nbsp;improper data storage locations, breaches in data sovereignty regulations or inadequately secured personally identifiable information in one or more cloud provider locations.</li> <li><b>Network security.</b>&nbsp;With workloads and data in clouds, it's unavoidable that sensitive business data traverses a public network, such as the internet. Businesses must take careful precautions to ensure the security of all cloud-related data through encryption, which might be appropriate for data at rest and in flight.</li> <li><b>Provider disruption.</b>&nbsp;A business must consider the implications of network and provider disruption and devise contingency plans. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Cloud-outages-expected-to-be-the-new-normal-in-2026">Understand the impacts of an internet outage</a> between the business and provider, a malicious attack on the provider, a deprecation of needed services or even the effects of a provider merger, acquisition or bankruptcy. It might be necessary to find another suitable cloud provider or repatriate the service in-house.</li> <li><b>Lack of multi-cloud skills. </b>Every cloud provider uses unique APIs, resources and pricing structures. This demands the direct intervention of seasoned IT professionals with expertise using multiple cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure and GCP. It can be even more difficult to find professionals capable of getting multiple clouds to work together effectively.</li> </ul> <h3>Multi-cloud management tools</h3> <p>Any organization with a multi-cloud approach must recognize the resources and services it uses, understand their configurations and monitor their performance.</p> <p>IT teams can use tools to handle multiple clouds from a single interface. These tools support a wide array of cloud platforms, such as AWS and Azure, as well as complementary tools, such as Kubernetes to manage container-based workloads. Multi-cloud management tools also should support strong abstraction, orchestration and automation; handle security, such as identity management and data encryption; control policy governance and compliance; monitor performance of the infrastructure and applications; and help manage costs, often using FinOps-related principles and techniques.</p> <p>There are&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Evaluate-these-9-multi-cloud-management-platforms">numerous tools and platforms currently available</a>&nbsp;to help a business manage multi-cloud environments. Tools and platforms can also vary greatly in their purpose, benefits and interoperability with existing software toolchains. The following list offers a sampling of varied multi-cloud management tools:</p> <p><iframe title="Popular multi-cloud management offerings" aria-label="Table" id="datawrapper-chart-MGsCC" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/MGsCC/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="1963" data-external="1"></iframe></p> <p> <script type="text/javascript">window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});</script> </p> <p>It's worth noting that many multi-cloud tools might be used in hybrid cloud environments where the private cloud portion of a hybrid cloud is simply treated as just another cloud to be managed. In other cases, hybrid clouds might also employ management tools that are native to the underlying private cloud software stack, such as those available in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/OpenStack">OpenStack</a>. Similarly, a hybrid cloud might employ vendor-specific tools, such as tools included with AWS Outposts or Google Cloud Anthos.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is hybrid cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is hybrid cloud?</h2> <p>A hybrid cloud technology strategy merges a private cloud, on-premises infrastructure or both with a public cloud environment to create a single cloud computing environment that combines the best characteristics of local and cloud enterprise computing.</p> <p>A business might create a private cloud to support self-service resource provisioning for software developers or run an important cloud-native application locally. The company can also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Review-these-hybrid-cloud-connectivity-best-practices">connect that private cloud to a public cloud</a>&nbsp;to gain extra resources or use specialized services unique to the public cloud provider. It's this integration of private and public clouds that creates a hybrid cloud.</p> <h3>Types of hybrid clouds</h3> <p>The key to a hybrid cloud is uniformity: consistent access and delivery of resources and services that smoothly integrate public and private clouds. There are two popular approaches to establishing a uniform hybrid cloud infrastructure.</p> <p>The traditional approach is to build a private cloud stack by using common platforms, such as OpenStack, that can integrate with a public cloud. These are sometimes referred to <i>heterogeneous</i>&nbsp;hybrid clouds because the resulting infrastructure includes technologies and platforms from multiple providers.</p> <p>Another approach is to use specialized appliances that contain the software stack and services specifically designed to integrate with the desired public cloud. Examples include Azure Stack, Google Cloud Anthos and AWS Outposts. These are sometimes called <i>homogeneous</i>&nbsp;hybrid clouds because the resulting hybrid infrastructure incorporates technologies from a single public cloud provider. Homogeneous hybrid clouds are typically quicker and easier to implement than heterogeneous hybrid clouds, and they are well-supported by the cloud provider.</p> <p>An enterprise must consider the costs, performance and management requirements, as well as the technology roadmap, when choosing the hybrid cloud program that best fits its needs.</p> <h3>Benefits of hybrid cloud</h3> <p>Organizations might <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Five-keys-to-an-effective-hybrid-cloud-migration-strategy">add a hybrid cloud strategy</a>&nbsp;for a variety of reasons, including the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Cost management.</b>&nbsp;Infrastructure is a sunk cost, and some workloads and data always require local infrastructure. So, a business might choose to build a private cloud with on-premises systems that are fast and flexible. Meanwhile, an organization can relocate other workloads and data to the public cloud as needed to take advantage of the pay-as-you-go or pay-per-use models. Merging these public and private clouds into a consistent&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Top-5-benefits-of-hybrid-cloud">hybrid cloud enables easy migration</a>&nbsp;of workloads and data as cost benefits allow.</li> <li><b>Control.</b> Some data and workloads are simply inappropriate for the public cloud yet benefit from cloudlike flexibility and self-service. Hybrid clouds let sensitive data and critical workloads remain on local infrastructure where the enterprise has direct control. Growing needs for data and workload sovereignty also benefit from hybrid environments where data and workloads can be kept within established geopolitical boundaries.</li> <li><b>Flexibility.</b>&nbsp;Enterprises implementing a private cloud can benefit from a cloud computing environment, preserve direct control over the actual computing infrastructure and data resources in-house, and draw upon public cloud resources as desired.</li> <li><b>Security and compliance.</b>&nbsp;Some workloads and data must run on local infrastructure for security, compliance and regulatory requirements. A hybrid cloud enables a business to establish and apply consistent security and compliance processes to address regulatory concerns. Hybrid clouds can also be used to replicate data and workloads between private and public clouds, supporting comprehensive backups, redundancy and effective recovery from disruptions.</li> <li><b>Increased scalability.</b>&nbsp;Workloads might need flexibility to add or drop resources as traffic ebbs and flows. Hybrid clouds enable workloads and data to shift between private and public clouds as demand dictates.</li> <li><b>Improved business agility.</b>&nbsp;Competitive advantages, new business opportunities and faster time to market usually rely on rapid infrastructure provisioning to support activities such as new workload testing, deployment and migration. A hybrid cloud strategy is uniquely suited to this agility. Staff can provision resources on a private cloud and then move workloads and data between public and private clouds.</li> </ul> <h3>Challenges of hybrid cloud</h3> <p>While a well-designed hybrid cloud can offer compelling benefits for a busy enterprise, there are also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365535626/Prepare-for-hybrid-cloud-headaches">various hybrid cloud drawbacks</a>&nbsp;to consider:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Lack of capability.</b>&nbsp;Building a hybrid cloud from scratch, especially a cobbled-together heterogeneous hybrid cloud, can be technically challenging and time-consuming. Not all hybrid cloud projects are successful or meet the organization's expectations. A business must possess solid employee skills and tools before it embarks on a hybrid cloud initiative and proceed in carefully orchestrated phases.</li> <li><b>Costs.</b>&nbsp;While hybrid clouds can benefit overall cost management, it's still expensive to keep and maintain additional private cloud infrastructure, plus develop new workflows and guidelines for private and hybrid cloud use. Consider all the costs when planning a hybrid cloud project.</li> <li><b>Management issues.</b>&nbsp;Visibility is a crucial element of any infrastructure. It enables a business to understand what workloads are present, how they are running and where they are located. The abstraction of a cloud environment doesn't alleviate issues regarding business continuity or data sovereignty. It requires careful management practices and policies using a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Top-enterprise-hybrid-cloud-management-tools-to-review">variety of tools capable of overseeing a hybrid cloud environment</a>.</li> <li><b>Security.</b> The presence of two distinct computing and data storage environments can pose serious challenges for security and compliance. Understanding and securing data between environments is difficult, and this can easily result in data breaches and regulatory violations, such as with GDPR or HIPAA.</li> <li><b>Integration problems.</b>&nbsp;The whole point of a hybrid cloud is to integrate a private and public cloud, but that alone can be one of the biggest challenges. Homogeneous hybrid cloud products make this considerably easier. In addition, the hybrid cloud might require maintenance to keep up with changes and updates to the public cloud provider's infrastructure or software stack. Homogeneous hybrid clouds can also result in vendor lock-in, which is typically undesirable -- especially with rapidly changing business and computing needs.</li> <li><b>Network disruption.</b>&nbsp;Hybrid clouds depend on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/WAN-wide-area-network">WAN</a>&nbsp;connectivity. Any disruptions can render the hybrid cloud inoperative.</li> </ul> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BBjeGX-xbiQ?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Multi-cloud vs. hybrid cloud: What are the key differences?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Multi-cloud vs. hybrid cloud: What are the key differences?</h2> <p>While hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployment models differ in purpose and infrastructure, they do have some similarities. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud do the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Provide flexibility and redundancy.</li> <li>Enable a business to deploy highly tailored infrastructures.</li> <li>Support the transition of capital investments into operational expenses.</li> </ul> <p>By the same token, they have important distinctions:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Hybrid clouds always involve public and private clouds, whereas multi-clouds typically involve public clouds -- IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.</li> <li>Hybrid clouds connect a private and public cloud to establish a single ubiquitous environment, including management, while multi-clouds don't rely on such interoperability, even though some level of interoperability can be achieved.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Can a hybrid cloud be multi-cloud?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Can a hybrid cloud be multi-cloud?</h2> <p>Given their similarities and differences, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud are typically regarded as separate approaches or architectures, each with its own purpose. But hybrid clouds and multi-clouds <a target="_blank" href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/scenarios/hybrid/strategy" rel="noopener">can coexist</a>.</p> <p>A business can build a private cloud for internal use, merge that private cloud with a public cloud to create a hybrid cloud, and add or integrate multiple other clouds -- whether IaaS, PaaS or SaaS -- to deliver specific resources or services to the business. Similarly, a business could create a hybrid cloud with one public cloud provider but also consume the resources and services of other public clouds outside the hybrid cloud environment.</p> <p>It's theoretically possible to create a hybrid multi-cloud, but this would require a private cloud that integrates with two or more public clouds simultaneously. In practice, the complex technical hurdles involved in such simultaneous integrations are rarely worth the effort. Only the largest and most technically adept enterprises with demanding hybrid project requirements should consider such an endeavor.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and AI"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and AI</h2> <p>The dramatic development of ML and AI <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/AI-will-heavily-influence-cloud-related-decisions">has brought new attention to the question</a> of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud selection.</p> <p>Ultimately, both approaches will support ML and AI use cases, but the choice must involve considerations previously discussed here. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies can both offer flexible foundations for AI by enabling organizations to select the costs, features, control and performance appropriate for the AI use case.</p> <p>For example, a hybrid cloud strategy might connect public clouds for dedicated AI services and advanced computing resources, such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/GPUs-vs-TPUs-vs-NPUs-Comparing-AI-hardware-options">GPUs and neural processing units</a>, while connecting a private cloud to keep sensitive data local. Conversely, a multi-cloud strategy can be better when a business seeks specialized services for different AI workloads, such as selecting one cloud for cost-effective scalability and another for varied computing models.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How to choose which cloud is best for your business"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How to choose which cloud is best for your business</h2> <p>The general criteria for choosing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy can be reduced to a matter of ownership or control. The choice isn't always obvious or easy, but it should always be driven by specific business needs and goals.</p> <h3>When to choose a hybrid cloud strategy</h3> <p>A business requires cloud flexibility, resources and services but is obligated -- by choice, industry practices or regulatory standards -- to host certain data or workloads locally and can't place them outside the organization's on-premises data centers or direct geopolitical control. For example, a business wants to build cloud-native applications and host some applications in the public cloud but must run certain critical workloads locally. In such cases, building a private cloud for those internal cloud transformations and blending the private cloud with a public cloud for its scope and extended service offerings might be an ideal solution.</p> <h3>When to choose a multi-cloud strategy</h3> <p>A business requires services, resources, infrastructure or cost models provided by specific cloud providers. For example, a business might opt for VM and storage instances from one public cloud provider; business applications, such as productivity or finance, from various SaaS providers; and perhaps AI and ML cloud services or language cloud services from other cloud providers. In these cases, the business doesn't need or desire on-premises cloud capabilities, and a multi-cloud&nbsp;strategy&nbsp;might be a suitable solution.</p> <p>Always choose a cloud architecture based on specific business needs and goals. There is no "best" cloud model. Rather, understand the complexities and challenges that each cloud option presents.</p> <p><strong>Editor's note: </strong>This article originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to update the list of popular platforms and tools.</p> <p><i>Stephen J. Bigelow, senior technology editor at TechTarget, has more than 30 years of technical writing experience in the PC and technology industry.</i></p> <p></p> </section> As businesses digitally transform across increasingly distributed environments, know the benefits, challenges, similarities and differences between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_g1265279914.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Multi-cloud-vs-hybrid-cloud-and-how-to-know-the-difference Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:15:00 GMT <p>Amazon announced in early 2025 that it planned to spend approximately <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/366619057/Amazon-to-spend-100B-in-AWS-AI-infrastructure">$100 billion on AWS infrastructure</a> for the year, owing largely to rising AI demand. But did that investment pay off in a banner year for the cloud giant?</p> <p>Last year in AWS was one of highs and lows, according to Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at the cloud cost consultancy Duckbill.</p> <p>"AWS got its mojo back in some ways," said Quinn, who also curates the weekly newsletter <i>Last Week in AWS</i>, where he provides commentary on recent AWS news and developments.</p> <p>In this episode of <i>IT Ops Query</i>, Quinn underscored the company's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366636033/AWS-AI-Factories-target-hybrid-cloud-AI-infrastructure">progress with its AI initiatives</a>, noting that AWS seems to have become comfortable enough with its AI program that it can refocus on its other strengths, such as infrastructure, production workloads and databases.</p> <p>"The fact that they talk about [AI] less is a strong signal that they actually know what they're up to now," he said.</p> <p>But the hyperscaler also faced its share of challenges in the past year. Quinn cited a "talent exodus," a drop in morale and multiple critical security issues, including a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/news/366628167/What-Amazon-Q-prompt-injection-reveals-about-AI-security">prompt injection attack on Amazon Q</a> Developer's extension for VS Code, along with two significant issues flagged by security researchers in AWS CodeBuild.</p> <p>In July 2025, AWS suffered a prompt injection attack in the Amazon Q Developer for Visual Studio Code extension, which integrates the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/366583032/Amazon-Q-GenAI-assistant-out-for-developers-AWS-users">Amazon Q generative AI assistant</a> into the VS Code editor. An AWS security bulletin published July 23 stated: "The threat actor was able to commit malicious code into the extension's open source repository that was automatically included in a release."</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> The fact that they talk about [AI] less is a strong signal that they actually know what they're up to now. </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Corey Quinn</strong>Chief cloud economist, Duckbill </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The first CodeBuild vulnerability, also <a target="_blank" href="https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/aws-2025-016/" rel="noopener">revealed in July 2025</a>, required multiple conditions -- including improperly secured code repositories and poorly scoped access controls -- to be exploitable, according to AWS. But a successful exploit could have given attackers an access token for an entire source code repository, and if the access token had write permissions, the threat actor could commit malicious code to the repository.</p> <p>Then, in January 2026, researchers at cloud security platform Wiz reported they had uncovered a vulnerability in a "subtle misconfiguration" in CodeBuild CI that attackers could use to gain admin access to the AWS JavaScript SDK, which powers the AWS Console. According to Wiz, attackers could have exploited this flaw -- <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/critical-flaw-in-aws-console-risked-compromise-of-build-environment/809745/" rel="noopener">dubbed CodeBreach</a> -- to enact a "platform-wide compromise" affecting every AWS account.</p> <p>"You'd think that after the first CodeBuild issue last year, they really would have gone over everything and touched it with a fine-tooth comb," Quinn said. "And maybe they did, but they missed the thing again. And it starts to shake confidence."</p> <p>Watch this episode of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/series/IT-Ops-Query"><i>IT Ops Query</i></a> to dive into more of Quinn's highlights and lowlights for the last year in AWS; advice for enterprise IT buyers dealing with the cloud vendor; the developments he's following in 2026; and what he hopes will -- and won't -- happen with AWS in the year ahead.</p> <p><i>Kate Murray is a managing editor with Informa TechTarget's Infrastructure editorial team. She joined the company as an associate managing editor of e-products in 2020.</i></p> <transcript> <p>Beth Pariseau: From Informa TechTarget, I'm Beth Pariseau, and this is IT Ops Query.</p> <p>This podcast distills the signal from the noise about enterprise software development and platform engineering. Each week, we'll talk to expert guests about the latest tech industry news and trends that engineering and IT leaders need to know.</p> <p>Don't forget to subscribe to IT Ops Query for more conversations on AI and the future of the enterprise digital workspace.</p> <p>Corey Quinn is the chief cloud economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills, quote, 'by making them smaller and less horrifying,' end quote, according to his website bio.</p> <p>He also hosts the <i>Screaming in the Cloud</i> and <i>AWS Morning Brief</i> podcasts and curates the weekly newsletter <i>Last Week in AWS</i>. He is also the only podcast guest of mine, so far, whose face is a sticker on my laptop.</p> <p>Welcome, Corey.</p> <p>Corey Quinn: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here to once again indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice.</p> <p>Pariseau: Well, we're happy to have you and the sound of your voice. So, let's talk about last year in AWS. What do you think was the most significant development for enterprises and AWS infrastructure?</p> <p>Quinn: AWS got its mojo back in some ways. They stopped running their mouths about AI to the exclusion of all else -- because they actually got good at it -- and started shipping things that are useful to customers and then started seeing adoption. AWS, historically, has talked the most about that, which it is the most insecure about. So, the fact that they talk about it less is a strong signal that they actually know what they're up to now.</p> <p>Pariseau: Cool. OK.</p> <p>Quinn: And they can talk about things like databases again.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah.</p> <p>Quinn: And the actual production workloads that people care about.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right.</p> <p>Quinn: For our customers, somewhere between 5% and 7% aggregate is their AI services spend, if we're being honest about what AI service spend is. You can squint at anything hard enough these days and call it AI.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yes, for sure. I actually saw one of your recent last posts was about how AWS has to prove that they can still operate. Can you expound on that a little bit?</p> <p>Quinn: Sure, the part of the challenge that AWS has had has been that they're very good at the things that are very hard. With the overinvestment right now that we're seeing in 'We're building out AI data centers, it'll be done in a year' -- yeah, taking a warehouse and running two power lines to it, and then dragging some fiber and calling it good, back the truck full of servers up, does not a data center make. And there are a lot of things that are so into the weeds now that many companies are considering data center projects when they don't actually know what those things are.</p> <p>So, it's a lot of pretenders right now. AWS has always been great at this, and when they say that something is a data center, they mean it. There's a reason that building out a region is a multibillion-dollar investment, and it's not because AWS is bad at negotiating. It's because this stuff is really hard, particularly at scale.</p> <p>Everyone else who is not so diligent on this -- there are exceptions, Google is very good at this, Microsoft could be if they, you know, got out of their own way -- but a lot of the pretenders are not. All the Oracle stuff that they're talking about? OK, sure, that seems likely. They have a chance to shine from a reliability perspective. And that's the stuff they are good at.</p> <p>One of the counterpoints, of course, is that they are seeing a talent exodus. Morale is at a ridiculous low for a variety of reasons. Many of them appear to be unforced errors on the part of AWS. So, as institutional knowledge walks out the door, it's hard to backfill. So, what does that mean? You're going to find out.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right. And then, what stood out to you in databases with AWS last year?</p> <p>Quinn: They finally stopped with the cheap shots at Oracle. I mean, not that everyone doesn't love a good cheap shot at Oracle. The problem is everyone except AWS can make them because, in their case, it's punching down. It's giving too much attention to someone that's noisy.</p> <p>They are also doing some interesting stuff. Aurora DSQL is really neat. It's probably their second true serverless database, the first being DynamoDB. The problem is that it is impossible to understand the pricing. And the fact that I'm the person saying that should count for a lot.</p> <p>One of their great distinguished engineers, or senior principal engineers -- I'm sorry, they're both -- these are still people that should strap auxiliary brain packs on because they're too smart for a single brain, they're great at this. And I had a long conversation with one of them and read the blog post that he put out in his personal blog. Like, 'Here's how to do a quick test, and here's the pricing.' So, I did the exact same thing, and the numbers were different.</p> <p>Pariseau: No…</p> <p>Quinn: Yeah, it's non-deterministically priced, which means the only way to figure out what it's gonna cost for any, and on any axis is 'Well, we're gonna build on top of it and find out,' which is terrifying.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah.</p> <p>Quinn: Well, it turns out it was really expensive, oops.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right. Funny that.</p> <p>Quinn: Yeah.</p> <p>Pariseau: So, what do you think was the most overlooked story about AWS last year, infrastructure-wise?</p> <p>Quinn: That's a good one because I live in a very rarefied space, and I pay inordinate amounts of attention to things. You picked a heck of a day to have this conversation.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah?</p> <p>Quinn: They had a security issue with CodeBuild, where things weren't going super well, and a malicious prompt was injected into their VS Code tooling. Great.</p> <p>This morning, as we record this, Wiz found another issue where they could get admin access to the JavaScript SDK for AWS due to a bad regex parsing.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yikes.</p> <p>Quinn: And you'd think that after the first CodeBuild issue last year, they really would have gone over everything and touching it with a fine-tooth comb. And maybe they did, but they missed the thing again. And it starts to shake confidence.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, yeah. Although, it seems like every day there's some new breach, right?</p> <p>Quinn: There is, and it seems that companies are not responsible for this. I mean, look at how many breaches Azure has had over the years, and it seems like that's not something people talk about in polite company.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right, yeah. True. I've been asking for years what is it gonna take in cybersecurity, really? And I have yet to hear the answer or see the answer.</p> <p>Quinn: Strict liability? Jail sentences? I mean, there's not anything much shorter that matters. You take a look at any widely publicized breach, and look at the company a year or two later, their stock price is up. At this point, I'm set for credit monitoring if I live to be 300 years old.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, yeah, I mean it is funny from a consumer standpoint. It's like 'I never gave permission for this data to be collected in the first place' in many cases.</p> <p>So, anyhow, getting back to AWS, what should enterprise IT buyers know that they don't know about dealing with AWS?</p> <p>Quinn: Dear. They tend to be very cookie-cutter templated. When you're doing large-scale negotiations, they know exactly what you're likely to say, how they're going to respond to any exigency that comes out. There's a reason that we assess companies with the contract negotiation piece of it. There's also weird incentive structures at play, where just because AWS talks a lot about a thing, it doesn't mean that's a thing you need or should be working on, that it is not your to-do list.</p> <p>The majority of spend, overwhelmingly, is still the basic building blocks. It's EC2 instances, it's S3 storage, it's data transfer, it's RDS and it's disks. That's it. Everything else is sort of layered on top of that in nice-to-have kind of ways. People also tend to start by going deep into something like EC2, which is an enormous service, and they assume every service goes that deep. It doesn't. A lot of them, you can pick up what you need to know in less than a day. That is something that I think turns people off to it.</p> <p>AWS also is beset with bad user experience, and the natural takeaway from this is 'Oh, I'm dumb and bad at how the cloud is supposed to work.' No, you're not. It's just the interface is terrible, it's not intuitive, and they do you no favors. Stick with it, we all feel that way. There's a support group, it's called All of Us, and we meet at the bar.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, I've heard it described like Home Depot, you know? Every part you could possibly need is there, but you gotta know how to put them together.</p> <p>Quinn: Right, and it used to be that you could go and talk to the people at Home Depot, like 'Hey, I'm building a gazebo, can you help?' And now, instead of that, it's getting harder to do that because now they start shoving overconfident -- and also wrong -- robots at you.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yikes. You mentioned they kind of got things together with AI. I mean, is there anything that they're doing there that is helpful for people?</p> <p>Quinn: Yes. This is where I think the wheels fall off of a lot of their narrative. It's what I believe and not what they want to say. Something like Bedrock, which runs a bunch of different models as infrastructure, is terrific. It is where AWS is at its best, providing infrastructure-level platform things and APIs that are hardened that you can work with in a variety of ways that we're all sort of mostly used to.</p> <p>They are great at infrastructure. They are not going to be the ones that release models that change our lives. They are going to be where those models are trained and where those models are run. They are the infrastructure substrate for a lot of these things.</p> <p>I've been saying forever that Amazon's fate, that I don't believe they can escape, is to become the next generation of infrastructure backbone providers. If NTT goes dark for a day, the entire internet is having a bad day, but most people don't know who NTT is because all the stuff that we care about, all the stuff where the value is derived, rides on top of their rails. Similar to if the power company goes away for a while, we're all gonna have a bad time, but they don't capture the value either. Instead, at least where I live in San Francisco, they just try to burn the cities down from time to time.</p> <p>Pariseau: Every so often, just to mix things up</p> <p>Quinn: Just to keep us on our toes. It's basically to shore up the battery backup market.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, right. And so, as we enter this new year, aside from ongoing security breaches, is there any story about AWS that you're tracking so far?</p> <p>Quinn: Well, the one that came out today, which is still unfolding, is of interest. From a security perspective, I try and stay away from it these days just because there are people who cover that beat better than I do, and they -- and I tend to get ahead of my skis too easily on these spaces, but seeing the messaging around it is interesting. Seeing how there's an entire new field of, effectively, prompt injection as an attack. At least back when I was focusing on the security space, telling the computer, as a string literal, 'Trust me, bro,' was not a threat vector. It is now. And that's something that requires a fair bit of thought.</p> <p>Pariseau: It is, and at the same time, I think this happens with a lot of new technologies, but especially AI. A previous guest here talked about AI giving us 'security amnesia.' You know, all of a sudden it's all new again, you know? But the same principles should apply.</p> <p>Quinn: That's a fantastic perspective. The challenge, as well, is isolation of duties. Yesterday I wrote a blog post about how if you email me or my digital assistant, Billy the Platypus -- he's snarky and obnoxious and will just tear into you, that's sort of the point of this. I think it's funny and it's great that people have tried prompt injections, and they've failed. Great, because I do have some thought in how I build these things. But also, it's not hooked up to the client database, it doesn't have context into other emails in other threads that it can drag in for this -- just because that seems dumb.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right, and I would love to see some example replies from Billy, by the way.</p> <p>Quinn: Yeah, I need to do a follow-up on that. I think enough people have asked for this that it's worth doing.</p> <p>Pariseau: I really wanna see it. As someone who gets a lot of the similar emails myself, I would love to see what his replies are.</p> <p>Quinn: It was funny, my business partner saw this come out when I was testing it on him. He's like, 'Do you have an auto responder turned on in your email?'</p> <p>'No. Why?'</p> <p>'Are you sure?'</p> <p>It's like, oh no, I explicitly allow it to email you. It doesn't like you.</p> <p>Pariseau: Oh, I see.</p> <p>Quinn: It was great. And then he was trying to figure out like, 'This is great, what gating is there?' He was trying to figure out without insulting me -- 'Are you sending this to customers?' Usually no, but thank you for asking. I'm not completely around the bend yet. Ask again in a week.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, yep. Another question that I tend to ask folks that spend a lot of time looking at something, like you do with AWS, is what you hope will and won't happen with AWS in the coming year. So, what do you think?</p> <p>Quinn: AWS has gotten boring, and I kind of like that. I feel like they have mostly exhausted the problem space of the infrastructure platform offerings.</p> <p>I started <i>Last Week in AWS</i> in a time when there were big gaps in the platform that were being addressed at a pretty consistent clip. One week, you could not replicate encrypted RDS snapshots between regions, and then you could. That was a big unlock for people, and separating out that signal from noise was important.</p> <p>That doesn't happen nearly as much anymore. The platform is mature. The big news today that came out that -- not quite as big as a security breach -- is that they've gone generally available with their launch of their EU Sovereign region. OK, great. I'm not particularly worried about anything there. That is regulatory checkboxing and remarkably little else from where I see things.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right. OK, so what would be bad in 2026?</p> <p>Quinn: If AWS falls down the rabbit hole of trying to let marketing drive the bus instead of what actually is there. Whenever they get worried, they let marketing get ahead of their skis, and it ends in disaster because they're not good at messaging.</p> <p>If they lean too far into trying to do what all their other technical peers are doing, that becomes a problem. And I think that the corrosive force eroding Amazon in many ways is advertising. If we start seeing third-party ads in the console, for example, that becomes a problem. They experimented with this in marketplace search, and then I saw them stop doing it because apparently no one uses that for product discovery, surprise.</p> <p>I think that that is a challenge because it -- we've seen this with Amazon.com, where originally in the early days, it would, you search for a thing, and it would suggest the best thing for you. Now it suggests the best thing for Amazon, and those are not congruent all the time.</p> <p>Pariseau: So, you know, another kind of evergreen question that I have is what it's gonna take for people to actually implement multi-AZ or multi-region resilience, rather than considering that an insurance policy and being surprised when their cloud region goes down. Do you think that'll ever happen?</p> <p>Quinn: Does it need to? We take a look at individual AZ availability. It's been trending up and to the right, and not every workload needs to be highly available, highly durable. If I park my insane Billy-the-Platypus thing inside of a single AZ and it goes down for a few hours, does that really matter? I mean, I've gotta be honest with you, the front end lives on a container in the next room on my home Kubernetes cluster. It's a 10-node Raspberry Pi cluster, but it's all plugged into the same power strip, so let's not kid ourselves here about what the durability story really is on this. That's fine, I'm not directly deriving revenue from this thing, email is not expecting an instantaneous response to stuff.</p> <p>Not everyone's workload matches that. I think that people are getting it wrong when they start trying to go multi-region or multi-AZ or, heaven forbid, multi-cloud. And with a lot of work and at great expense, they have replaced a single point of failure with multiple single points of failure.</p> <p>Pariseau: Good point. Yeah, you had a session at KubeCon about multi-cloud being a myth that I unfortunately wasn't able to make it to, but I did note that. So, we hear a lot about multi-cloud becoming more of a thing because of AI. So, what's your take?</p> <p>Quinn: Yes, and.</p> <p>Pariseau: OK.</p> <p>Quinn: Individual workloads like training jobs, terrific. You need basically a bunch of very expensive GPUs, access to data and a network to get those things talking to each other. That is a highly portable workload. Most people's applications are not that. They're stateful data stores, databases, latency requirements and the rest that tie into it.</p> <p>So, when we see multi-cloud in the wild, which every company has some multi-cloud story going on, it's different workloads. It's different components living in different places, and that is normal. I'm not suggesting anyone should do otherwise in there. But 'I'm gonna build this one application that needs to run globally across multiple providers' -- you've got to design that in from the beginning, or you're never gonna get that.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And another thing that's making waves in infrastructure, which I'm covering, is the memory shortage and how that's affecting storage. Do you think any of that is gonna surface in the cloud?</p> <p>Quinn: There's already been a 15% hike in capacity for ML blocks that AWS charges. They update that on a quarterly basis. This is the first time I've seen it go up, so that's of interest.</p> <p>We will see how that shakes out. Earlier today in the news, I saw that they've taken a stake in an Arizona copper mine.</p> <p>Pariseau: Wow.</p> <p>Quinn: The fact that they're now controlling some of the raw materials to build the thing and -- OK, that is vertical integration at a scale I hadn't considered previously.</p> <p>Pariseau: True. So, I don't know, what am I thinking not to ask you about? I'm sure there's plenty that is on your mind these days.</p> <p>Quinn: I think that a question I've gotten a lot has been, alright, are we in a bubble? Obviously, yes, clearly. How is it going to end? I don't know, but I do see some of the early signs of it.</p> <p>I suspect OpenAI will not survive. I think that Anthropic is likelier to. But OpenAI has signed enormous cloud deals with every hyperscaler. It feels like they're trying to make themselves systemically important. Oh, OK, great, but if you do the numbers on this, I'm on the Anthropic side of the fence. I use Claude for a lot of stuff. I pay $200 a month for their max plan. And it's useful, I get value out of it all the time. I'm not gonna spend $5,000 a month on that. But I, and a lot of other people, would have to in order for that to start capturing a lot of the value.</p> <p>The unspoken -- and I believe will remain unfulfilled -- promise of a lot of this AI revolution has been pitching your boss that, 'All right, we're gonna lay you [off], we're gonna get rid of you, and then we're gonna take your salary and split it between the boss and the AI company.' And that doesn't really work. The companies I have seen that are charging salary-equivalent replacements for their AI tooling have a heavy row to hoe just because, out of the box, these models and tools are getting more capable almost by the week.</p> <p>Pariseau: And, well, but that would be, you know, good to hear for a lot of IT pros that are worried about job security.</p> <p>Quinn: Jobs change, they always change. But the industrial revolution did not lead to mass reductions in the number of people in the workforce; it shifted the nature of what a lot of that work was.</p> <p>We're seeing similar trends right now in the way that software development is being done. I would not want to be entering the space right now. I think it is so highly in flux that I don't know how you would get a toehold. I'm also not anywhere near that part of my career, so I'm not a good source of advice, so I don't sound off about it.</p> <p>I think that there are -- the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back.</p> <p>Pariseau: True.</p> <p>Quinn: Even if these companies go away, local models are good enough to get to the 80th percentile that frontier models can today, and that's not slowing down anytime soon. That is something that is going to be baked into a bunch of different workflows.</p> <p>So, how do we start reconciling that? How do we start grappling with that as a society? I don't know.</p> <p>What I haven't heard is a bunch of stories that, 'Well, if only we had several trillion dollars' worth of data centers doing more AI stuff, then we could solve problem X.' The AI capacity we have already seems like it's looking at striving for a business model. And a lot of them are effectively just wrappers around the foundation models that are gaining these capabilities pretty consistently.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah.</p> <p>Quinn: Every time they make an announcement and a swath of startups goes out of business.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, there are some people that I've talked to that think this is the year the rubber hits the road, at least in the enterprise in terms of needing to see some kind of real-world ROI.</p> <p>Quinn: Yeah, everyone talks about their big AI experiments and investments -- again, about 7% of spend -- and OK, we have a bunch of small pilots going, and if they work? Companies are not foolish; they will deploy these. I have several customers who have, but the majority of PoCs are, 'OK, this is interesting.' But the value is not necessarily there.</p> <p>There's also a social component to this. You can theoretically -- let's take the easy example. Let's talk about support. AWS has revamped some of its support to be AI-forward. Every customer I talked to, without exception, hates the thing when they have to talk to a chatbot about this. The right way, if I were building an AI-powered support offering, is that the AI agents would be assisting the human support rep on the other side.</p> <p>The one alternate approach I would take is, 'Hey' -- like almost a Clippy style -- 'it looks like you're about to submit a support ticket.' Perhaps 'it's broke' is not the best way to frame this in the way of a meaningful response. It provides, 'What are you doing? What are you expecting to happen and why, and what's happening instead? Give me those three things, and we can get there a lot faster.'</p> <p>Like that is a sort of assistance that becomes helpful. But people don't want to replace the humans that they interact with with computers, by and large.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right, because people loved Clippy so much.</p> <p>Quinn: Oh yeah. What's also weird is the blowback against AI in a lot of different places. I was reading a blog post I wrote, and I'm like, 'This does read heavily like AI wrote it.' But I published it in 2020. So, I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. I wasn't time traveling, but a lot of the things -- 'It's not X, it's Y,' I've been using em dashes for almost two decades now -- like, I'm not changing because AI does a thing.</p> <p>Pariseau: I mean, it didn't come up with any of that on its own.</p> <p>Quinn: Right.</p> <p>Pariseau: It probably saw that very post in some capacity.</p> <p>Quinn: Where people have a problem with AI is when it's trying to pass off as something else. I use it for my images for slide presentations all the time, and people don't object to it. Because what I have found is when you use AI images to replace stock photography of a picture of a landscape, great, crowd shot, whatever. That's just laziness.</p> <p>If you're gonna use AI, do the sort of thing that you're not gonna be able to create easily in any other way. Like, cool, I want a picture of a data center. It's currently on fire, and we're gonna put a giraffe right in the hot aisle. Because you can't get that in any reasonable other way. And if you're doing it for a quick slide presentation at a community event, I'm not gonna commission an artist to draw this thing eight weeks in advance because I don't plan that far ahead for anything.</p> <p>Pariseau: Sure, sure, and be transparent about it, you know?</p> <p>Quinn: Yes, exactly.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah, yeah. Well, interesting times, as they say.</p> <p>Quinn: Yeah, I had stickers I was giving away at my booth this year that was, like, pictures of five-legged dogs, people with extra hands, and it was all illustrated by a human that we hired to draw in the shape of crappy AI, and it was great. It needs a bit more exposition. We should have told the story a bit better because people just think it's AI-generated stickers. It's not.</p> <p>My wife gave me a calendar for the holidays where it was all AI-generated imagery. It's like, no, I want this taken back. And I'm more of a positive AI person than she is, not that I'm beyond the pale here. And she said, 'Well, I don't understand why you don't like that.' Because I can generate prompts and create calendars, too. This is just like the next stage of some random dropshipper. There's no creativity that went into it. Just printing it out and then selling it like this is not terrific. If we're going to do that, I'll do a custom one on Shutterstock or something like that, and we'll use inside jokes and pictures of our family and the rest, and we'll have real fun with it.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right.</p> <p>Quinn: That's how I would do it. But I'm not going to just pay some random slop merchant $20 for a calendar that they didn't care much to do anything with.</p> <p>Pariseau: Yeah. What's the enterprise cloud equivalent that you would warn people to stay away from that they're being sold right now?</p> <p>Quinn: An awful lot of, right now -- from my perspective, the rule of thumb that I'm taking on this is when people talk about their tool being an AI tool, tread cautiously. Because it's similar to when AWS was launching Graviton, their own custom Arm-based silicon processors. And they were talking about, 'Ooh, our managed database service now uses Graviton,' and it's, OK, slow your roll here.</p> <p>As a consumer of this, I'm calling a PostgreSQL API -- yes, that's how I pronounce it. And I don't care as long as it hits a price-performance window, whether it's done by Intel, by Arm or by an army of overworked elves who type very quickly and are good at doing math and retrieval. I just want the result. How you do the thing matters so much less to me than the value and the result that comes out of it.</p> <p>So, the companies that are doing good things with AI aren't slapping a 'Now with AI' label across the front of it. It's just how things get done. We're building a software platform at Duckbill. AI is not built into the platform itself, but we are using AI to build it on our side with AI-assisted coding, because that is how development is working across the board. We're still very careful what makes it into production. This is AWS billing and contract stuff. We're not foolish, and there are hard guardrails on what the AI can look at and not because we're, again, not fools.</p> <p>But we are not advertising that, it's just how business is being done these days. And if there is an AI story, given that we're targeting enterprises here, we'd have to obviously disclose that, and that becomes a whole series of conversations.</p> <p>Pariseau: Right.</p> <p>Quinn: But we're not training on their data, nor do we ever expect to. If it's 'We're gonna use AI to get this interesting result,' terrific. The way to position this, disclosures aside, is 'Here's an interesting result we can get. Is that of value?' Because how we do it on the back end is irrelevant. We do not care that a person or a robot did a thing, we care that a thing happened. When you talk about the how, you're generally talking to other practitioners and enthusiasts; when you talk about the result, you are talking to customers.</p> <p>Pariseau: We will end on that note. Thank you so much for taking the time, Corey. It's great to talk to you.</p> <p>Quinn: Thank you, Beth. It's always a pleasure.</p> <p>Pariseau: Thank you for tuning in to IT Ops Query. To learn more about enterprise software development and platform engineering, explore our content on Informa TechTarget sites. Find us on YouTube at our channel, Eye on Tech. Subscribe to our podcast to receive the latest episodes as they drop. And if you liked what you heard today, give us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you're listening. Thank you for joining us.</p> </transcript> In this episode of IT Ops Query, Duckbill's Corey Quinn discusses the highs and lows of last year in AWS, advice for enterprise IT buyers dealing with the cloud giant and more. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/video/Last-year-in-AWS-with-Corey-Quinn Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:34:00 GMT <p>Many company executives and contact center leaders know about the struggles to protect customer data. With increased distractions or assessing how new technology, like AI, can improve contact center services, company leaders can't lose focus on emerging security threats that could compromise data.</p> <p>Contact center security must remain a focal point to protect customer data and enhance customer confidence when interacting with an organization, which is key to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-improve-the-contact-center-experience-for-customers">better customer relationships and experiences</a>.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The increasing importance of contact center security"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The increasing importance of contact center security</h2> <p>Contact center security must be front and center when developing and implementing a strategic customer experience framework. Organizations that don't employ proper security controls could risk serious negative consequences, such as the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Financial.</b>&nbsp;A security or data breach can result in lost business revenue and fines levied by various entities that significantly affect the bottom line.</li> <li><b>Reputation.</b>&nbsp;Customers who feel their personal data isn't secure or who have been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/feature/10-types-of-security-incidents-and-how-to-handle-them">affected by security incidents</a>, such as identity theft, might no longer do business with the organization or post their concerns on various social channels. The goodwill and positive reputation an organization builds over time is one of the biggest drivers to acquiring and retaining customers.</li> <li><b>Business disruption.</b>&nbsp;Resources dedicated to running the business must be redirected to research and resolve the incident and improve security protocols.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Types of contact center security best practices"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Types of contact center security best practices</h2> <p>To avoid security problems, businesses need to implement a contact center security checklist that covers three categories: technology, customer and business best practices.</p> <h3>Technology best practices</h3> <p>In order to protect customer data and maintain security, companies and their contact centers should implement the following technology checklist:</p> <p><b>Encrypt data.</b>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/encryption">Encryption</a>&nbsp;translates an organization's stored or transmitted data into different forms, which require a specific key to translate it back into its original format. Organizations often encrypt data to protect specific customer records, including medical, credit card or personal information.</p> <p><b>Update technology.</b>&nbsp;Keeping technology current ensures systems and components have the latest safeguards in place. Bad actors continuously test systems, looking for cracks that let them access data. Key practices to update technology include antivirus software,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/answer/Testing-a-security-patch">installing software patches</a>&nbsp;and eliminating legacy systems that vendors no longer support.</p> <p><b>Minimize data availability and access.&nbsp;</b>More data is being stored each day. And, with more individuals given access to that information, an organization multiplies its risk of a potential data breach. Best practices to minimize availability and access to data include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Restrict the number of people who can access sensitive information.</li> <li>Use system permissions to manage who can access specific data.</li> <li>Automate session timeout rules.</li> <li>Delete employee access to accounts as soon as the person leaves the organization.</li> <li>Mask sensitive data to limit the information displayed to employees. For example, place asterisks over the first five digits of a Social Security number.</li> <li>Use alternate technologies to capture sensitive information. For example, send a caller to an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/Interactive-Voice-Response-IVR">interactive voice response</a>&nbsp;system to enter credit card information.</li> <li>Limit the storage of critical information. For example, delete data after a customer provides a credit card number in a transaction. This scenario represents a tradeoff between customer convenience and data security.</li> <li>Use firewalls and intrusion detectors to prevent and report attempted and unauthorized activity.</li> </ul> <p><b>Perform regular data backups.&nbsp;</b>Regular&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/backup">data backups</a>&nbsp;should be established to minimize data loss and provide the ability to recreate customer records in the event of a security breach.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/https://youtu.be/SuNtmCgIhiM?si=2yJAWZLY8lMdBmBy?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <h3>Customer best practices</h3> <p>Businesses should institute the following&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-fit-customer-experience-security-into-your-strategy">customer-related best practices to protect customer data</a>:</p> <p><b>Maintain transparency.&nbsp;</b>Companies must be transparent with customers, including telling them why the business requires sensitive data and how it uses and&nbsp;protects that information. Effective transparency goes beyond typical privacy statements, and organizations should share this information in an easy-to-understand format.</p> <p>Transparency improves customer confidence, which instills a higher level of trust in the organization. Additionally, if an organization can teach its customers how to protect themselves -- like how to monitor credit card usage -- they feel better about sharing information.</p> <p><b>Use authentication protocols.&nbsp;</b>Authentication aims to prove somebody is the person they claim to be. In the past, typical&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/Use-these-6-user-authentication-types-to-secure-networks">authentication protocols</a>&nbsp;used single-factor authentication that required users to enter a single piece of identifying information, such as a password. Many organizations have shifted to multifactor authentication, where users must enter multiple pieces of identifying information, like a password and an additional code. In many cases, the system sends the code to a user's mobile device.</p> <p>Voice authentication is a lesser-used technology. As the technology improves, it should become a more viable customer identification tool.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/call_center_compliance_checklist-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/call_center_compliance_checklist-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/call_center_compliance_checklist-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/call_center_compliance_checklist-f.png 1280w" alt="Contact center checklist for data security and compliance." height="266" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>This compliance checklist ensures contact center agents keep customer data safe. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>Business best practices</h3> <p>Organizations should adhere to the following business-related procedures to protect customer data:</p> <p><b>Train employees.&nbsp;</b>Organizations need to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-agent-training-programs">continuously train contact center agents</a>&nbsp;to ensure they understand how easily bad actors can steal customer data. Employee training should focus on specific behaviors to protect customer data along with understanding the process to communicate suspicious activity. Training should include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Follow smart practices to maximize password strength, like avoiding easily identifiable information.</li> <li>Shred documents with personal information and don't leave written notes around. Eliminate the need for paper documents wherever possible.</li> <li>Limit the information sent electronically to customers, like personal medical information.</li> <li>Don't open attachments or access links unless they come from a reliable source.</li> <li>Follow facility physical security protocols whether working on-site or remotely.</li> </ul> <p><b>Implement improved remote work practices.</b> Remote employees create new security gaps that can be addressed by the following measures:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Require the use of company-issued devices.</li> <li>Develop requirements and monitor compliance for home network security and data access.</li> <li>Don't allow third-party listening systems in the remote workplace.</li> </ul> <p><b>Share responsibility for data security.&nbsp;</b>Everyone, even individuals outside of the contact center, is responsible for customer data security. Organizations can practice broad ownership of customer data security in many ways, including the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Monitor and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-train-agents-on-call-center-fraud-detection">report suspicious activity</a>.</li> <li>Restrict unauthorized hardware or software and access to questionable websites and documents.</li> <li>Bring unattended sensitive documents to leadership.</li> </ul> <p><b>Use security expertise.&nbsp;</b>Security expertise is critical to stay ahead of malicious actors. Organizations must bring on staff or use consulting firms that specialize in cybersecurity and other security-related matters.</p> <p>Protecting an organization from security breaches and managing sensitive information isn't a part-time job, and ensuring the proper controls are in place -- and keeping an eye on the future -- requires dedicated effort and expertise.</p> <p><b>Test security controls.&nbsp;</b>Organizations must continuously test their technologies and processes to protect customer data. Business leaders should never assume everything will work as planned, especially when dealing with human behaviors and sophisticated bad actors. Examples of testing security controls include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Implement&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/security-audit">security audits</a>, including security log reviews if a breach occurs.</li> <li>Scan for malware and other unauthorized software regularly.</li> <li>Perform office and home workstation reviews to ensure agents follow security best practices.</li> <li>Include the testing of security controls and the recovery process as part of the overall business continuity planning.</li> </ul> <p><b>Prepare for a security breach.&nbsp;</b>Customers are more likely to feel confident in the recovery process if an organization quickly controls a breach and has an action plan to protect customers. Security breach preparation should be included in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/definition/Business-Continuity-and-Disaster-Recovery-BCDR">disaster recovery and business continuity plans</a>&nbsp;with specific actions outlining how and when to notify employees and customers, and how to support continued operations.</p> <p>Business executives and contact center leaders should not get distracted by other initiatives. As security threats become more sophisticated, CX leaders should always prioritize contact center security.</p> <p><i>Scott Sachs is president and founder of SJS Solutions, a consultancy that specializes in contact center strategy assessments and technology selection.</i></p> </section> Follow this comprehensive contact center security checklist that encompasses technology safeguards, customer data protection procedures and common business sense. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/security_a135187239.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Call-center-security-best-practices-to-protect-customer-data Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:30:00 GMT <p>Modern hybrid cloud frameworks extend public cloud services into private infrastructure. While these capabilities make building a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/hybrid-cloud">hybrid cloud</a> easier, the bigger challenge is assembling a tool set that enables effective management of hybrid cloud infrastructure and workloads over the long term -- specifically, by helping to streamline tasks such as hybrid cloud administration, performance optimization, cost management and security.</p> <p>Correct tools are essential, especially as hybrid cloud becomes the default deployment model. According to VMware's "Private Cloud Outlook 2025: The Cloud Reset" <a href="https://www.vmware.com/docs/private-cloud-outlook-2025">report</a>, 92% of enterprises run a blend of private and public clouds. Additionally, 75% of respondents said this blended approach is an intentional strategy, which suggests that organizations value the flexibility of a hybrid cloud environment to meet specific use cases.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Why hybrid cloud management matters"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Why hybrid cloud management matters</h2> <p>In recent years, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/public-cloud">public cloud</a> vendors have rolled out a new generation of frameworks for hybrid cloud creation -- most notably, Azure Stack Hub and HCI, Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Cloud Anthos. At the same time, more conventional hybrid cloud management platforms, such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Cisco Intersight, continue to thrive. In addition, Kubernetes can be useful as a platform for hybrid cloud management, especially for organizations that use Kubernetes services, like Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, to manage workloads deployed on private infrastructure using Amazon's managed Kubernetes service.</p> <p>These platforms provide a centralized way to deploy and administer workloads across a cloud environment that mixes private infrastructure with public cloud resources. Integration between these entities is a significant improvement over earlier hybrid cloud architectures, which more closely resembled a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/private-cloud">private cloud</a> and a public cloud running side by side. Modern tooling has made creating a hybrid cloud environment easier than ever.</p> <p>Yet, hybrid cloud management remains a major challenge, and the platforms and frameworks mentioned above don't fully solve it. They simplify and centralize the deployment of public cloud services on private infrastructure, but they don't always address hybrid cloud management requirements, such as workload provisioning, log aggregation and analysis, and governance enforcement. These tasks often require additional functionality beyond what's available in hybrid cloud frameworks.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zae3jApGq-U?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <h3>The importance of visibility in hybrid cloud</h3> <p>Hybrid clouds are, by their nature, especially complex and not fully centralized. Because they mix private and public cloud infrastructure and services, they make it harder to centralize monitoring and management than would be the case with a cloud environment that includes only private or only public resources.</p> <p>Hybrid cloud management demands an especially deep level of visibility. Visibility ensures that organizations have an accurate, continuously updated understanding of the status of all their cloud infrastructure and workloads, including both the private and public cloud components.</p> <p>The lack of effective hybrid cloud visibility can create challenges, such as the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Service disruptions resulting from failure to detect outages or performance anomalies across the various workloads hosted within a hybrid cloud.</li> <li>The inability to predict or optimize cloud spending due to poor visibility into the costs of both the private and public cloud infrastructure.</li> <li>Security risks, which could arise due to inconsistent access controls and governance policies across the private and public parts of the cloud environment.</li> <li>Difficulty modernizing or migrating hybrid cloud workloads because of a lack of understanding of where each workload resides, what its requirements are and so on.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="3 types of hybrid cloud management tools"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>3 types of hybrid cloud management tools</h2> <p>The hybrid cloud management landscape is complex. Tools have overlapping functionality. And, since there are multiple approaches to implementing a hybrid cloud architecture -- such as building it directly on top of cloud infrastructure or using a platform like Kubernetes as an abstraction layer -- not all tools apply to all hybrid cloud configurations.</p> <p>That said, hybrid cloud management tools are generally categorized as one of three types of tools:</p> <ol type="1" start="1" class="default-list"> <li>Native tools built into frameworks for building a hybrid cloud.</li> <li>Third-party tools that integrate with hybrid environments but are not natively included in them.</li> <li>Tools for managing the physical infrastructure that serves as the foundation for hybrid clouds.</li> </ol> <h3>1. Native hybrid cloud management tools</h3> <p>The first category of management tools consists primarily of public cloud services that can extend into hybrid cloud environments. For example, if AWS Outposts is used to build a hybrid cloud architecture, the AWS public cloud's standard management tools -- including CloudWatch and CloudTrail -- can be used to help monitor the hybrid environment and manage logs. The Azure Stack suite of products provides a similar experience by integrating with Microsoft Azure public cloud's standard monitoring tools. Anthos does this as well, using Google Cloud Console.</p> <p>Platforms such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes can be tied into some public cloud vendors' services, too. But, for the most part, they don't extend public cloud management tooling into hybrid environments. Instead, users manage hybrid environments via the native tooling that's built into the platforms, such as kubectl on Kubernetes. That said, some integrations between these platforms and public cloud platforms exist. For example, it's possible to use the AWS Identity and Access Management framework to govern some permissions within Kubernetes environments hosted by using Amazon EKS, a Kubernetes service available through the Amazon cloud.</p> <h3>2. Third-party hybrid cloud monitoring and management tools</h3> <p>Because of limitations in native hybrid cloud management tools, it's sometimes necessary to add third-party management tools. These tools can offer broader, richer functionality. They also offer the advantage of working across multiple cloud platforms at once, which is usually not the case when using cloud provider tools. This capability makes third-party hybrid cloud tools useful for businesses whose cloud strategy includes <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Multi-cloud-vs-hybrid-cloud-and-how-to-know-the-difference">multiple public clouds in addition to a hybrid cloud</a>.</p> <h3>3. Physical infrastructure integration and management</h3> <p>Hybrid cloud management isn't just about digital assets. It also extends to the physical hardware that hosts hybrid clouds. It's necessary to keep track of the servers, which hardware resources they provide and whether they're adequate to meet the hybrid cloud architecture's needs. Cloud providers have <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Evaluate-on-premises-vs-cloud-computing-pros-and-cons">extended their reach to on-premises</a> by bundling hardware with services and linking back up to their clouds. These products eliminate the need for an enterprise to manage physical infrastructure. But, sometimes, there are tradeoffs.</p> <p>For instance, with AWS Outposts, the servers must be acquired directly from AWS. On other hybrid cloud platforms, however, a company typically purchases and manages its own hardware.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/weighing_hybrid_cloud_connectivity_factors-f.png 1280w" alt="Six connectivity parameters when building and managing hybrid cloud architectures" height="426" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Six connectivity parameters when building and managing hybrid cloud architectures. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Top hybrid cloud management tools"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Top hybrid cloud management tools</h2> <p>Hybrid cloud management tools represent a complex ecosystem that has evolved significantly in recent years through acquisitions and new product launches. The evolution is likely to continue, making it important to keep up to date with the hybrid cloud tooling landscape.</p> <p>At present, key vendors and offerings include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Amazon (CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail).</b> These cloud services integrate with Amazon's hybrid cloud frameworks -- particularly Outposts and EKS Anywhere -- to provide visibility and monitoring capabilities. Turnkey integration among AWS services makes them especially easy to deploy.</li> <li><b>Broadcom (VMware Tanzu CloudHealth and Tanzu Observability).</b> Originally built to help administer VMware-centric private and hybrid cloud environments, these offerings are now part of the Broadcom portfolio and support virtually all types of hybrid environments, not just those built using VMware and Broadcom technology.</li> <li><b>CloudBolt Software.</b> Offers a suite of products for hybrid cloud monitoring, reporting and compliance management, with particularly strong capabilities in automated governance policy enforcement.</li> <li><b>CloudSphere (Illuminate360).</b> A holistic IT monitoring and visibility offering that can deliver visibility into hybrid cloud environments as well as on-premises, private clouds and public clouds.</li> <li><b>Flexera (Snow Commander).</b> Built up through a series of acquisitions, Snow Commander aims to provide a highly automated approach to hybrid cloud management and monitoring. User self-service capabilities further reduce the administrative burden placed on IT staff.</li> <li><b>Google Cloud (Google Cloud Operations).</b> A visibility tool complete with monitoring, logging, debugging and tracing capabilities that integrates easily with hybrid clouds built on top of Google Cloud using Anthos.</li> <li><b>HPE (HPE Morpheus).</b> Creates a centralized control plane for monitoring and tracking hybrid cloud environments built using virtually any underlying platform, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, Kubernetes and others. It is notable for strong vendor agnosticism.&nbsp;</li> <li><b>IBM Cloud Pak for Multi Cloud Management.</b> A hybrid cloud management and monitoring service that integrates most tightly with Red Hat OpenShift -- a Kubernetes-based management platform owned by IBM. Although the product is tightly coupled with IBM's native cloud offerings, it can support third-party environments so long as they also run a version of OpenShift.</li> <li><b>Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX).</b> Provides a highly centralized approach to managing and monitoring workloads across virtually any hybrid or multi-cloud environment, with a strong focus on compliance and cost management.</li> <li><b>Microsoft (Microsoft Azure Automation and Azure Monitor).</b> These services integrate seamlessly with hybrid clouds constructed using Azure Arc or Hub solutions.</li> <li><b>Scalr.</b> Aims to centralize hybrid cloud and multi-cloud management by using infrastructure as code to automate workload deployment, provisioning and governance. It offers a few native monitoring and observability capabilities but can integrate with third-party tools to fill this gap.</li> </ul> <p>The tools should work with all parts of the IT infrastructure and cover all related management needs -- something that native management tools built into hybrid cloud frameworks sometimes can't do.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Evaluation criteria for hybrid cloud management tools"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Evaluation criteria for hybrid cloud management tools</h2> <p>Given the wide selection of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-management-tooling" rel="noopener">hybrid cloud management tools available</a> and the varying use cases they support, organizations should weigh a range of factors when considering options. These are some key areas of evaluation:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Platform support.</b> Not all hybrid cloud management tools work with all types of cloud platforms. For instance, some logging and monitoring tools might work with the public cloud platform on which the hybrid cloud is partly based. But they might not work well -- or at all -- with the abstraction layer, such as Kubernetes or Cloud Foundation, that runs on top of it.</li> <li><b>Tool integrations.</b> Consider how well the tools integrate with other offerings. For instance, if a hybrid cloud management tool automates log and metric collection, does it integrate well with analytics tools to help interpret them?</li> <li><b>Centralized visibility and operations.</b> Some management platforms are stronger than others regarding their ability to support all aspects of hybrid cloud administration, asset tracking, workload deployment and so on via a single, centralized vantage point.</li> <li><b>Prescriptive and predictive capabilities.</b> In addition to providing visibility into hybrid cloud environments, some tools offer features to predict how workloads will evolve over time and provide recommendations to support goals such as cost optimization.</li> <li><b>Security monitoring.</b> While performance and availability monitoring are the main focus of most hybrid cloud management tools, some also offer security monitoring and threat detection capabilities.</li> </ul> <p><i>Chris Tozzi, senior editor of content and a DevOps analyst at Fixate IO, has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator with particular interest in open source Agile infrastructure and networking.</i></p> <p><b><i>Editor's note:</i></b><i>&nbsp;This article originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to include more hybrid cloud management tools.</i></p> </section> The techniques used to build hybrid cloud architectures have come a long way, but managing these environments long term is plenty more complex without the right software. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_g1183958722.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Top-enterprise-hybrid-cloud-management-tools-to-review Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:15:00 GMT <p>Customer relationships with a business often deepen after a purchase, through ongoing service and support interactions handled by the contact center.</p> <p>Contact center agents are on the front lines, representing the organization when customers encounter problems that require timely, effective resolution. And customers want their issues solved quickly, efficiently and with a smile.</p> <p>When agents don't perform at their best, customers can get a bad impression of the organization, which might translate into a loss of revenue if customers decide to take their business elsewhere. On the flip side, agents well versed in their job can turn irate customers into loyal ones, increasing customer retention and profit.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What factors contribute to declining agent performance?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What factors contribute to declining agent performance?</h2> <p>There are many reasons agents don't perform at their best, many of which also contribute directly to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/contact-center-burnout">contact center burnout</a> and attrition. Some of those reasons include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Outdated or obsolete contact center technology.</li> <li>Poor agent training and onboarding.</li> <li>Inefficient processes.</li> <li>Overworked agents due to inadequate staffing.</li> <li>Lack of communication from leadership.</li> <li>No advancement opportunities.</li> <li><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Signs-of-toxic-workplace-culture">Toxic work environment</a>.</li> <li>Low employee morale.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="10 strategies to help contact center agents perform at their best"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>10 strategies to help contact center agents perform at their best</h2> <p>Keeping contact center agents productive -- especially as more of them work from home -- is difficult, but not impossible. Businesses can improve contact center agent performance in several ways. The goal is to assist agents in meeting their performance goals while enhancing overall customer satisfaction.</p> <h3>1. Diagnose underlying performance issues</h3> <p>Contact center managers should analyze the data gathered from an <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-contact-center-quality-assurance">agent's evaluation in quality assurance forms</a> to determine where performance opportunities exist and identify any trends. These forms will show whether an agent consistently receives low or failing scores in certain metrics or from <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-monitoring">data collected in a call monitoring program</a>.</p> <p>Managers should also determine if there are multiple agent performance issues, such as problems with communication skills, adhering to processes, accessing customer data and processing transactions.</p> <p>Another way to gain insights is by conducting side-by-side sessions with agents working in the office to see firsthand where and when challenges arise or if work habits contribute to their performance issues. Based on the results of the trend analysis and observations from side-by-side sessions, contact center managers can identify the underlying causes of performance problems.</p> <p>Patterns that appear across multiple agents often indicate process or technology gaps rather than individual performance problems.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f.png 1280w" alt="List of challenges and remedies to address the demands of complex contact centers." height="487" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Today's contact center presents numerous challenges for agents and their managers, but there are remedies. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>2. Record and monitor calls</h3> <p>Contact center software often includes a call monitoring feature, enabling contact center managers to review recorded calls or listen to them in real time. Monitoring calls lets managers identify customer pain points and where agents need additional training.</p> <p>Contact center managers increasingly use AI-based call analysis tools to review large volumes of interactions and surface patterns that manual monitoring would miss. Managers can <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Important-contact-center-AI-features-and-their-benefits">use AI to comb through customer contact data</a> -- recorded calls, emails, chat logs and customer feedback -- to uncover patterns and trends, improve contact center operations and better serve the customer.</p> <h3>3. Review key performance indicators</h3> <p>If management finds multiple agents are failing <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-7-call-center-agent-performance-metrics-to-track">according to the same performance metrics</a>, it might be time to take a closer look.</p> <p>Average handling time is one <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/key-performance-indicators-KPIs">KPI</a> that businesses might need to address. If AHT is too short, agents might be rushing through customer interactions to meet their goals. Customers will also often end up with unresolved issues and be forced to reach out again.</p> <p>If AHT is too long, there could be longer wait times for customers. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Long AHT might be due to new or upgraded business products or services that customers need assistance with, technical difficulties that require more time or a focus on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/first-call-resolution-FCR">first contact resolution</a>.</p> <p>Issues with AHT are best addressed by setting acceptable ranges instead of rigid targets, balancing efficiency with first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.</p> <h3>4. Create an action plan</h3> <p>An action plan should address underlying issues while clearly defining expectations, support resources and success criteria. Contact center managers should identify all available resources to support the agent's skill development, including the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Provide additional agent training or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-agent-training-programs">goal-oriented uptraining sessions</a>.</li> <li>Make reference materials or job aids available.</li> <li>Offer additional system or communication skills training.</li> <li>Regularly assign time for the agent to sit with an overperforming colleague to learn the proper way to handle customer interactions.</li> </ul> <figure class="main-article-image half-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter_half_column_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter_half_column_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/searchcrm_callcenter.jpg 1280w" alt="Photo of two agents engaging in a side-by-side call center session." data-credit="Steve Debenport/Getty Images" height="186" width="279"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Side-by-side sessions can be key to improving agent performance. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>5. Communicate with agents</h3> <p>Depending on the structure of an organization, the quality assurance or the contact center manager should discuss performance issues with the agent. Be sure the agent understands the quality of evaluation metrics and how calls are scored.</p> <p>The assessment must be constructive and include recognition of the agent's strengths and performance opportunities. Review the action plan with the agent and emphasize that the program's intent is to provide help and support. It's also important for contact center managers to communicate any policy changes immediately so that agents know what's expected of them and they don't fall behind from the get-go.</p> <h3>6. Provide consistent feedback and reward improvements</h3> <p>The most effective agent performance improvement programs provide continuous, constructive feedback that reinforces progress and builds confidence. When an agent struggles to perform, it's important for managers to recognize and praise incremental improvement.</p> <p>Managers should conduct routine evaluations of the agent's contacts and provide timely feedback. Provide additional targeted coaching sessions to address the agent's specific needs to reinforce what they're doing right. These actions will improve overall contact center performance and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-improve-the-contact-center-experience-for-customers">create a better customer experience</a>.</p> <p>But employee recognition shouldn't just be limited to job improvement. Recognition can include employment anniversaries, birthdays or a simple thank-you to employees during a company celebration. It can improve employee engagement, individual well-being and company culture.</p> <h3>7. Implement a knowledge base</h3> <p>Implementing a customer service <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/knowledge-base">knowledge base</a> benefits customers and agents. An external, or public-facing, knowledge base enables customers to find answers to basic questions without the need for human assistance, which can increase customer satisfaction. In return, it eliminates unnecessary customer contacts and frees up agents for more important customer issues.</p> <p>When well maintained, knowledge bases reduce handle times and cognitive load for agents while improving consistency for customers.</p> <p>An internal knowledge base accessed by agents enables them to quickly find answers to questions and accurately resolve customer problems. Internal knowledge bases can also store training materials on contact center software and processes for agents who need a quick brushup.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-call_center_agent_characteristics.png 1280w" alt="List of top qualities of a contact center agent." height="288" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>A successful contact center agent communicates effectively and calmly, providing a positive customer experience. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>8. Empower agents</h3> <p>Contact center agents need to feel valued and part of the team. Managers can take several steps to empower agents, including the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>Involve agents in decision-making and ask for their feedback. They are on the front lines and often know where to make changes.</li> <li>Provide agents with the proper tools. Be sure they have access and can log in to all the necessary software to do their job. Also consider upgrading to the latest technologies. If agents are forced to use obsolete tech, their job could be more difficult and compound the frustration for agents and customers.</li> <li>Enable agents to make decisions. Provide agents with a certain amount of funds, for example, to credit a customer's account, eliminating supervisor involvement and expediting the process, or let agents deviate from their scripts when it's necessary to resolve a customer problem.</li> </ul> <h3>9. Provide customer self-service channels</h3> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/customer-self-service-CSS">Customer self-service</a> channels can reduce pressure on frontline agents, but only when customers can easily escalate to a human if self-service fails. CSS is also available 24/7 so that customers can contact a company at a convenient time. Types of CSS channels include the following:</p> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li>FAQ pages are connected to a knowledge base on the company website. They should include information like operating hours, return policies, shipping information, contact information and how to make a payment.</li> <li><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/Interactive-Voice-Response-IVR">Interactive voice response</a> systems eliminate the need for a switchboard operator. When customers call in, the IVR presents a menu of options that attempts to answer FAQs.</li> <li>Online chatbots on a company's website can be connected to a knowledge base or use AI and machine learning. AI chatbots use natural language processing and natural language understanding to interpret customer queries and respond. They can also use machine learning and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/large-language-model-LLM">large language models</a> to provide better service.</li> <li>Video tutorials can be helpful to customers who are troubleshooting a product or service by providing simple instructions on how to do basic tasks.</li> </ul> <p>CSS tools won't always address a customer's needs, so it's important to provide an easy way out of the self-service loop for customers who need to speak with a human agent.</p> <h3>10. Use skills-based routing</h3> <p>Poor distribution of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchunifiedcommunications/definition/inbound-call">inbound calls</a>, emails, chat messages and texts can irritate customers and reduce agent productivity. Skills-based routing, or skills-based distribution, directs a customer call to an agent with the most relevant skills, expertise and language fluency. Customers who speak Portuguese, for example, can be matched up with an agent fluent in that language, or a customer with a billing problem can be routed to an agent who specializes in billing.</p> <p>This approach increases first-contact resolution, reduces unnecessary transfers and improves both agent confidence and customer experience. Agents also feel more confident in their abilities when customers are matched with their skill sets.</p> <p>Across these strategies, the common theme is enabling agents with better context, clearer expectations and tools that reduce friction rather than add complexity. Improving contact center agent performance requires more than monitoring metrics or adding new tools. Organizations that invest in training, feedback, routing and self-service -- while giving agents the context and authority to resolve issues -- are better positioned to improve customer satisfaction, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nice.com/info/5-employee-retention-strategies-to-reduce-contact-center-agent-attrition" rel="noopener">reduce attrition</a> and strengthen long-term customer relationships.</p> <p><i>Sarah Amsler is a senior managing editor for the IT strategy team at TechTarget.</i></p> </section> Contact center agent performance improves when organizations combine training, feedback, routing and self-service with the right data, tools and support. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/customer_service02.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT <p>Contact centers sit at the intersection of customer experience, brand trust and operational efficiency. As customer expectations rise and AI becomes embedded in service operations, the challenges facing contact centers have grown more complex -- and more consequential.</p> <p>Customer service has moved beyond single-channel support, with contact centers now expected to manage interactions across voice and digital channels while maintaining consistency, context and speed. Contact centers have <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Call-center-vs-contact-center-Whats-the-difference">evolved beyond mere call-handling hubs</a> into sophisticated, multichannel engagement centers that play a vital role in shaping customer experiences. With the advent of digital transformation, contact centers now integrate various communication platforms, including phone calls, email, chat, social media and video conferencing.</p> <p>The commercial landscape for businesses and customers is rapidly changing, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Important-contact-center-AI-features-and-their-benefits">driven by technological advancements</a>, evolving customer expectations and the increasing importance of personalized service. Enterprises are under pressure to deliver consistent, high-quality customer interactions over different modes of communication, while managing costs and maintaining operational efficiency.</p> <p>Customer interactions now span multiple channels, yet customers expect consistent context, personalization and responsiveness regardless of how they engage. This complex environment necessitates a strategic approach to managing contact centers, addressing inherent challenges and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/How-to-choose-a-contact-center-software-system">using technology to enhance customer service capabilities</a>.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Key contact center challenges and remedies"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Key contact center challenges and remedies</h2> <p>Providing different modes of interaction is among the many challenges for modern contact centers. Other issues include agent attrition, increased customer expectations, ever-growing customer queues, generalization of content, barriers to understanding and security.</p> <h3>1. Meeting customer expectations</h3> <p>Customers expect quick, personalized and seamless interactions across all channels. They also expect an interaction in one channel to be consistent with the experience they've had in other channels. They increasingly demand high levels of service and are less tolerant of delays, repeating their information and impersonal responses.</p> <p>Advanced CRM systems and AI-driven analytics can help understand, contextualize and anticipate customer needs, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-comprehensively-personalize-the-customer-experience">enabling more personalized and consistent interactions</a>. Regularly updating service protocols to align with customer feedback is equally important.</p> <p>Meeting these expectations increasingly depends on how well organizations unify customer data and govern AI-assisted interactions across channels, not just on agent performance alone.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/addressing_the_demands_of_todays_complex_contact_centers-f.png 1280w" alt="Contact center challenges and remedies" height="487" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>For every challenge confronting contact centers, there's a remedy. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>2. High contact volumes and longer wait times</h3> <p>Managing the high volumes of customer contacts, especially during peak times, can lead to long wait times and customer dissatisfaction. When customers call into contact centers of certain businesses, the first response they might typically get is a recording, "We're currently experiencing high call volumes" -- at least during normal business hours. This kind of experience, exacerbated by limited staffing and inefficient call routing, frustrates customers.</p> <p>Implementing intelligent call routing and queuing systems can optimize resource allocation and reduce wait times. Most new systems <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-manage-remote-call-center-agents">enable contact center agents to work from home</a>, which increases the flexibility of companies deploying agents globally. Self-service options, such as chatbots and automated responses, can reduce contact volumes, but they also raise expectations for the quality and efficiency of the interactions that reach live agents.</p> <p>Chatbots can handle routine types of interactions, like password resets, quick orders and simple questions, but complex situations that require empathy and understanding are still best left to humans. Improvements in machine learning and AI can also help mitigate high contact volumes and wait times and provide customers with other ways to resolve their queries independently.</p> <h3>3. Personalization shortfalls and content generification</h3> <p>Generic responses and interactions usually fail to meet customer expectations for personalized service. This lack of personalization inevitably results in decreased customer satisfaction and loyalty.</p> <p>Using <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Customer-interaction-analytics-spurs-better-business-results">customer data and analytics to tailor interactions</a> and recommendations can improve personalization, but doing so effectively requires strong data governance and consistent context across channels. Training call center agents to express empathy and use customer information effectively during their interactions is especially important. New large language models can improve the quality of agent responses by combining the specifics of customer data with best practices in knowledge bases.</p> <h3>4. Language barriers</h3> <p>Contact centers often serve a diverse, global customer base. Language barriers can impede effective communication, leading to misunderstandings and frustration. Any enterprise that aspires to be global must deal with this issue. Even companies that see themselves as local will become global when they put their presence on the web.</p> <p>Hiring multilingual agents and providing language training can bridge communication gaps. Additionally, real-time translation services and AI-powered language tools have come a long way and can facilitate smoother interactions.</p> <h3>5. Agent attrition</h3> <p>High turnover rates among contact center agents <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Why-contact-centers-have-high-turnover-and-how-to-combat-it">pose a significant challenge</a>. Increased job openings and competition for talent in good economies can only make this problem worse. Attrition is usually costly, impacting operational efficiency and the quality of customer interactions. Factors contributing to high attrition include job stress, lack of career advancement opportunities and inadequate compensation.</p> <p>In many environments, tool sprawl and cognitive overload also contribute to burnout, making technology simplification as important as compensation and career development.</p> <p>Good customer service is vital to retention and brand loyalty. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-agent-training-programs">Implementing comprehensive training programs</a>, offering competitive salaries and creating clear career progression paths can help reduce attrition. Providing a supportive work environment and recognizing agent contributions also play a crucial role in retaining talent. Technology has made it possible for more agents to work remotely, enabling companies to find the best qualified representatives wherever they're located.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/average_call_center_agent_salaries-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/average_call_center_agent_salaries-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/average_call_center_agent_salaries-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/average_call_center_agent_salaries-f.png 1280w" alt="Contact center agent salaries in the U.S." height="403" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Contact center agents in some regions demand higher than average salaries. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <h3>&nbsp;6. Lack of subject matter expertise</h3> <p>Agents often face complex queries requiring specialized knowledge. As the "first line of defense" in resolving customer inquiries, it's often difficult, if not impossible, for contact center agents to achieve mastery or even appear to be knowledgeable in all aspects of company products. The result could be incorrect or inadequate information conveyed to the customer.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance">Continuous training and access to a centralized knowledge base</a> can empower remote work agents with the necessary information to handle complex queries effectively. Encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing among agents can also enhance overall understanding.</p> <h3>7. Quantitative and qualitative performance metrics</h3> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-7-call-center-agent-performance-metrics-to-track">Accurately measuring and analyzing contact center performance</a> is essential for continuous improvement. Traditional metrics often don't fully capture the quality of customer interactions or agent performance since measuring customer satisfaction can often be subjective.</p> <p>Adopting a comprehensive set of KPIs that include quantitative <i>and</i> qualitative metrics can provide a more accurate picture of performance. Incorporating customer feedback and sentiment analysis into performance reviews can also provide valuable insights and a more holistic view of contact center effectiveness.</p> <h3>8. Data access vs. protection</h3> <p>Contact centers store and handle sensitive customer information, making data security a foundational requirement for customer trust rather than a secondary compliance concern. As the types and frequency of interactions increase, breaches are becoming more frequent and consequential, leading to significant financial and reputational damage. More sophisticated deep fakes are rendering voice recognition ineffective as a method of customer verification.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Call-center-security-best-practices-to-protect-customer-data">Implementing comprehensive cybersecurity measures</a>, including encryption, multifactor authentication, and regular security audits, safeguard customer data. Sensitive customer data can be better protected through advanced security protocols, security tools such as system scanners with <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/How-to-train-agents-on-call-center-fraud-detection">data loss prevention, and fraud detection</a>. Most companies need to adopt zero trust architectures and principles, and agents need to be trained on data protection protocols. It should be standard practice to have a culture of security awareness, including periodic companywide security training.</p> <p>Across these challenges, AI increasingly acts as both a solution and a source of new complexity, raising the bar for data quality, governance and trust in contact center operations.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-contact_centers.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-contact_centers_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-contact_centers_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/crm-contact_centers.jpg 1280w" alt="Multifunctional contact centers" height="288" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Contact centers are evolving into complex facilities that meet business and customer needs. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Build on flexibility, scalability and humanity"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Build on flexibility, scalability and humanity</h2> <p>Addressing contact center challenges requires more than incremental tooling changes. As customer expectations rise and AI reshapes service interactions, contact centers must balance efficiency with empathy, automation with oversight, and data access with security. Organizations that approach these challenges strategically -- rather than tactically -- are better positioned to turn their contact centers into long-term assets rather than ongoing cost centers.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b><i>&nbsp;This article has been updated to reflect the changing nature of modern contact center challenges.</i></p> <p><i>Jerald Murphy is senior vice president of research and consulting at Nemertes Research. He has more than three decades of technology experience, including neural networking research, integrated circuit design, computer programming, global data center designing and CEO of a managed services company.</i></p> </section> Modern contact centers face persistent challenges around customer expectations, staffing and data access. Addressing them requires more than incremental operational fixes. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1250576636.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Contact-center-challenges-and-how-to-overcome-them Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>Contact center software has existed since the dawn of digital contact centers decades ago. But, in recent years, the contact center software industry has changed significantly.</p> <p>New technologies, such as generative AI, have spawned powerful and innovative contact center features. Hyperscalers, too, like Microsoft and Amazon, have entered the space, hoping to use their command of adjacent markets to claim a slice of the contact center software ecosystem.</p> <p>All these developments prompt a re-evaluation of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/The-ultimate-guide-to-contact-center-modernization">modern contact center platform options</a>. Below, we identify the leading contact center platforms and summarize their key features and drawbacks so businesses can make informed decisions when evaluating these products.</p> <p>In developing this list, we examined research and independent user reviews from leading analyst firms and buyer intelligence platforms. Based on this analysis, we created an unranked list of the top 19 contact center platforms. The list is in alphabetical order.</p> <p>The software providers range from new players to more established vendors. While they all deliver <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/How-to-choose-a-contact-center-software-system">core contact center software capabilities</a>, they vary in areas like major features, pricing, AI capabilities, scalability and integrations.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="1. 8x8"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>1. 8x8</h2> <p>Founded in 1987, 8x8 has built up its contact center platform over many years, largely through acquisitions. What began as a basic voice calling tool has evolved into a full-fledged platform for multi-channel customer interaction.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Analytics.</b> Detailed analytics and reporting provide real-time feedback on customer interactions.</li> <li><b>Intelligent call routing.</b> Interactive voice response and customized call routing help to personalize the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/customer-experience-CX">customer experience</a> (CX).</li> <li><b>Extensive CRM integration.</b> Integrations with popular CRM platforms make it easy to use CRM data during customer interactions.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>8x8's cloud-based hosting model allows the platform's software to scale easily. Flexible licensing also helps enable scalability from a purchasing standpoint.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>8x8 integrates by default with major CRM and communications platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. An API enables custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Pricing varies widely depending on feature selection, and 8x8 offers custom quotes rather than publishing pricing details publicly. As a baseline, however, pricing generally starts around $20 per user per month, although it can extend above $100 per user per month for feature-rich plans.</p> <p>8x8 is most notable for its affordable pricing for basic plans and easy integration with external platforms.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="2. Amazon Connect"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>2. Amazon Connect</h2> <p>Introduced in 2017, Amazon Connect offers a centralized hub from which <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/5-ways-to-improve-call-center-agent-performance?Offer=ab_MeteredFormCopyEoc_var3">contact center agents</a> can engage with customers across multiple channels, including voice, chat and messaging. It also integrates with other Amazon products and services. In 2023, Amazon Connect incorporated several AI-based capabilities, such as support for creating virtual assistants.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Centralized interface.</b> Contact center agents can handle interactions via voice, chat, email and text through a centralized channel.</li> <li><b>No-code flow builder.</b> To configure workflows for different types of interactions or customer needs, businesses can use a visual workflow builder.</li> <li><b>AI-driven automation.</b> Partly via integrations with other Amazon services -- such as Lex, which powers AI chatbots -- Amazon Connect enables the automation of some interactions using AI. For example, users can use Amazon Q in Connect to deploy GenAI chatbots. AI features can also automatically route requests to agents.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>As a platform hosted across multiple regions in the AWS cloud, Connect is a highly scalable and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Compare-high-availability-vs-fault-tolerance-in-AWS?Offer=ab_MeteredFormCopyEoc_var3">fault-tolerant service</a>. It can support a virtually unlimited volume of agents or interactions.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Connect integrates most closely with other services within the Amazon cloud. However, it supports limited integrations with external platforms, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, which businesses can use to look up or import data during customer interactions.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Connect pricing is based mostly on volume usage. It starts at around $0.018 per minute for voice calls and $0.004 per chat message. Additional fees apply for using optional features, like Amazon Q.</p> <p>Amazon Connect is most notable for hyperscale-level scalability and availability, as well as tight integration with other Amazon services.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_sharpens_contact_center_features_and_actions-f.png 1280w" alt="Integrating AI in contact center software" height="355" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>AI and generative AI integration is remaking contact center software. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="3. Avaya"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>3. Avaya</h2> <p>Traditionally, Avaya focused its contact center software on <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/On-premises-vs-cloud-contact-center-Whats-the-difference">on-premises hosting models</a>. However, it has expanded into cloud-based options that support public and private cloud deployments. Avaya provides all the core capabilities that businesses expect from a modern contact center platform as well as certain innovative features like AI-based virtual assistants.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Flexible deployment options.</b> Avaya offers on-premises and cloud-based contact center products. The on-prem offering may be an advantage for organizations that, due to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Call-center-compliance-checklist-for-hybrid-workforces">compliance or privacy concerns</a>, can't or don't want to store contact center data on third-party infrastructure.</li> <li><b>Process optimization.</b> Native features assist with the optimization of tasks such as scheduling and agent training.</li> <li><b>Real-time reporting.</b> Continuous analytics further assist with the identification of opportunities to optimize.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>While the scalability of Avaya's on-premises offering is limited by the scope of the host infrastructure, its cloud-based platform can scale virtually without limit.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Avaya integrates with popular CRM platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Custom integrations are available through an API.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>The cost of Avaya starts at $20 per user per month for the Core plan. The highest-cost plan is priced at $35 per user per month. These prices reflect a 20% discount for a yearly contractual commitment.</p> <p>Avaya is most notable for its on-premises deployment option and competitive pricing.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="4. Cisco Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>4. Cisco Contact Center</h2> <p>Although Cisco is best known for its networking and communications tools, it has also invested significantly in the contact center space. Its Contact Center product employs Webex, a meeting and collaboration application, as the foundation for omnichannel customer interactions.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Security.</b> Cisco Contact Center goes <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Call-center-security-best-practices-to-protect-customer-data">above and beyond in the security realm</a>, offering advanced capabilities like endpoint hardening and data masking.</li> <li><b>Enterprise scalability.</b> While the product can work for small businesses, it's designed especially for large-scale, enterprise-grade communications.</li> <li><b>Customer sentiment analysis.</b> The platform uses AI to assess customer reactions to interactions.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Cisco Contact Center scales especially well for large enterprises.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Cisco Contact Center integrates tightly with other Cisco tools, particularly the Webex and Jabber communication apps. In fact, to some extent, the contact center service depends on these integrations with other Cisco tools. Integrations are also available for major CRM and IT ticketing platforms.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Cisco doesn't publish pricing details for its contact center service, and costs vary depending on features and usage. As a rough baseline, expect to pay anywhere in the range of $30 to $200 per user per month.</p> <p>Cisco Contact Center is most notable for its security features and enterprise-grade scalability.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="5. CloudTalk"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>5. CloudTalk</h2> <p>CloudTalk is most notable for its heavy focus on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cloudtalk.io/blog/call-center-analytics-guide/" rel="noopener">automation and analytics features</a> designed to streamline contact center performance and increase operations efficiency. It also offers innovative AI-powered features, such as topic extraction, which automatically monitors conversational topics.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Agent collaboration.</b> In addition to supporting multi-channel customer engagement, CloudTalk offers native features for agent collaboration, like internal call conferencing and shared workspaces.</li> <li><b>Advanced analytics.</b> CloudTalk offers particularly detailed reporting on engagement metrics and agent performance.</li> <li><b>Extensive integrations.</b> The platform provides a broad range of integrations that include major CRM platforms and communication and automation tools like Slack and Zapier.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>As a cloud-based offering, CloudTalk works well at virtually any scale. Flexible pricing terms also enable easy scalability.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>As noted above, CloudTalk integrates out-of-the-box with a particularly wide range of external platforms. It also provides an API for custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>CloudTalk pricing starts around $25 per user per month. The most feature-rich plan costs about $50 per user per month.</p> <p>CloudTalk is notable for its advanced analytics and broad integrations.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="6. Content Guru"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>6. Content Guru</h2> <p>Launched in 2005, Content Guru offers a contact center and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/customer-engagement">customer engagement</a> service tailored for verticals that require high availability and security, like government and finance. Although the service can be and is used by all types of businesses.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI-powered automation.</b> Content Guru makes extensive use of AI to automate tasks like call routing. It also supports AI-powered virtual agents.</li> <li><b>Workforce management.</b> Native capabilities assist with scheduling contact center agents and managing workflows.</li> <li><b>Video call support.</b> Supports customer engagement via video as well as more conventional channels, such as voice and text.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Cloud-based deployment enables easy scalability up and down.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Content Guru integrates with major CRM platforms out-of-the-box, and an API is available for developing custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Content Guru pricing varies based on total agent count, type and feature availability. It starts at $22 per digital-only agent per month. Voice agents cost at least $70 per month.</p> <p>Content Guru is most notable for AI-powered automation and workflow optimization capabilities.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="7. Dialpad"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>7. Dialpad</h2> <p>Dialpad initially focused on providing internal communications software for businesses and added contact center software capabilities in 2018. Dialpad is most notable for its extensive investment in AI-based capabilities, such as AI-driven voice analysis and call summaries, as well as AI-powered <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/virtual-agent">virtual agents</a>.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI capabilities.</b> Dialpad makes especially extensive use of AI to provide capabilities like real-time transcription and sentiment analysis.</li> <li><b>Collaboration.</b> Built-in chat, file sharing and other collaboration tools help agents communicate.</li> <li><b>Broad integrations.</b> Dialpad integrates with external productivity and collaboration platforms like Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams in addition to CRM tools.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Cloud-based deployment and multiple pricing plans make Dialpad easy to scale for businesses of virtually all sizes.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>As mentioned, Dialpad is notable for integrating with popular CRM platforms, like Salesforce and Zendesk, and productivity and collaboration suites, like Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams. Customers can also build custom workflows.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Dialpad pricing starts at $15 per user per month for the Standard plan. The Pro plan is $25 per user per month. An Enterprise plan is also available.</p> <p>Dialpad is most notable for advanced AI features, extensive integrations and competitive entry-level pricing.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="8. Five9"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>8. Five9</h2> <p>Five9 provides a fully cloud-based call and contact center platform. It also places special emphasis on transparency and security for businesses concerned with <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/answer/How-do-companies-protect-customer-data">protecting sensitive customer data</a> or meeting strict compliance mandates related to customer calls.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Dynamic routing.</b> Five9 offers a particularly powerful routing tool that can route calls based on a variety of factors, such as priority level, agent expertise and geographical location.</li> <li><b>Workforce management.</b> Built-in capabilities, including forecasting and automated scheduling, assist with agent workforce management.</li> <li><b>AI capabilities.</b> Five9 includes advanced AI features such as speech recognition and predictive dialing.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Five9 is highly scalable because of its cloud-based deployment model and its flexible pricing terms and plans, which cater to a wide range of business sizes.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Five9 integrates with CRM platforms as well as popular IT management suites, like ServiceNow.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Five9 doesn't publish full pricing details of all its plans, but its most basic plan starts at $119 per user per month. Its Core plan, which has more features, is $159 per user per month.</p> <p>Five9 is most notable for especially efficient and flexible call routing capabilities and advanced AI features.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/basic_contact_center_business_goals-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/basic_contact_center_business_goals-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/basic_contact_center_business_goals-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/basic_contact_center_business_goals-f.png 1280w" alt="Business goals for contact center software" height="260" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Today's contact center software must satisfy several business goals. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="9. Genesys"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>9. Genesys</h2> <p>Founded in 1990, Genesys has spent decades building a feature-rich contact center and customer engagement platform. The company caters especially to medium-size and large businesses.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>On-premises option.</b> An on-premises deployment option is available, as well as a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Evaluate-on-premises-vs-cloud-computing-pros-and-cons">cloud-based offering</a>.</li> <li><b>Virtual agents.</b> AI capabilities include virtual agents.</li> <li><b>Collaboration.</b> Internal screen sharing and conferencing capabilities help agents collaborate.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Genesys can operate on any scale, but it focuses especially on deployments for midsize and enterprise customers.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Out-of-the-box integrations focus mostly on CRM platforms. An API is available for custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Costs start at $75 per user per month and range up to $240 per user per month.</p> <p>Genesys is most notable for its on-premises deployment option and extensive collaboration capabilities.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="10. Google Cloud Contact Center as a Service"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>10. Google Cloud Contact Center as a Service</h2> <p>Google Cloud Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) -- also referred to as Google's Contact Center AI Platform (CCAI Platform) -- is among the newer cloud-based contact center products and is focused on AI capabilities such as virtual agents. Behind the scenes, however, Google's contact center offering is powered largely by UJET, an independent contact center platform known for its analytics features and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Contact-center-back-end-integrations-drive-revenue-growth">integration with CRM systems</a>.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI capabilities.</b> Advanced AI capabilities include chatbots and virtual agents.</li> <li><b>Speech recognition.</b> AI also enables real-time speech transcription and sentiment analysis.</li> <li><b>Google Cloud integrations.</b> Google's contact center integrates tightly with other Google Cloud services.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Although designed especially for large enterprise customers, Google Cloud's CCaaS can also support smaller teams.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>The contact center integrates most seamlessly with other Google Cloud products and services, as well as popular CRMs like Salesforce. An API is available for developing custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Pricing is mostly a pay-as-you-go model and starts at around $0.06 per chat session and $0.05 per voice minute. Some capabilities cost extra, like Conversational Insights, which provides engagement analytics.</p> <p>The CCAI Platform is most notable for its close integration with Google Cloud services and enterprise-grade scalability.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="11. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>11. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center</h2> <p>Microsoft developed the Microsoft Dynamics contact center platform in-house and released it in July 2024. Microsoft emphasizes self-service on a customer-preferred channel as well as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Best-practices-for-call-center-monitoring">monitoring and reporting features to improve operational efficiency</a>.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Workforce management.</b> Built-in tools assist with agent scheduling and performance assessment.</li> <li><b>Microsoft integrations.</b> Dynamics 365 Contact Center connects to other Microsoft tools and platforms, like Teams, Outlook and Power BI.</li> <li><b>AI features.</b> Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses GenAI services hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud to enable virtual agents and chatbots.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>As a hyperscale-based service, Dynamics 365 offers immense scalability from an infrastructure perspective. That said, its pricing models are flexible enough to accommodate the needs of smaller teams as well.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>The contact center service integrates most tightly with other Microsoft products, as well as popular CRM platforms. Custom integrations are possible through an API.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Costs begin at $95 per user per month. A free trial is also available.</p> <p>Dynamics 365 Contact Center is most notable for integration with other Microsoft products, which facilitates integrating contact center capabilities into broader Microsoft software suites.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="12. Nextiva"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>12. Nextiva</h2> <p>Nextiva offers all the key features that businesses need to operate an effective contact center, such as<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/skill-based-routing-SBR"> skills-based call routing</a> and advanced call management. Nextiva has invested in AI-based capabilities and places special emphasis on platform reliability and a fast response to service requests from its customers.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Intelligent call routing.</b> Nextiva provides highly flexible and efficient call routing capabilities based on criteria defined by users.</li> <li><b>AI capabilities.</b> The platform uses AI to generate call summaries. An AI answering feature is also available.</li> <li><b>High availability.</b> Nextiva's platform is cloud-based, and the company focuses on achieving particularly high availability through a multi-site hosting model.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Multi-site hosting and flexible pricing plans enable a high degree of scalability.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Nextiva connects to major CRM platforms. An API supports custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Costs start at $15 per user per month, and increase to $75 per user per month for more features geared toward small businesses. Larger enterprise plans are also available.</p> <p>Nextiva is most notable for reliability and affordable entry-level pricing.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="13. NiCE CXone Mpower"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>13. NiCE CXone Mpower</h2> <p>Launched in 2024, CXone Mpower from NiCE is one of the newest contact center platforms on our list. The company promotes CXone Mpower as a "CX-aware" service because it uses AI to inject <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/transform-customer-experiences-real-time-using-contextual-goyal-hlw8c/" rel="noopener">context into customer interactions</a>.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI integrations.</b> The platform makes extensive use of AI to help optimize workflows and generate context for customer integrations.</li> <li><b>Chatbots and virtual agents.</b> AI also supports chatbots and virtual agents within CXone Mpower.</li> <li><b>Scalability.</b> The platform is particularly notable for its ability to cater to customers of all types and sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>As noted above, CXone Mpower is an especially scalable service due to its cloud-based hosting model and the ease of accommodating increased customers or communication channels.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Core integrations support major CRM platforms. Custom integrations are possible through an API.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Costs range from $110 to $249 per user per month.</p> <p>NiCE CXone Mpower is most notable for AI-enhanced efficiency capabilities.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="14. RingCentral"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>14. RingCentral</h2> <p>Founded in 1999, RingCentral originally specialized in on-premises phone connectivity. Since then, it has expanded into a broad set of business communication and collaboration services, including a contact center platform.&nbsp;</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Mobile app for agents.</b> A mobile app allows agents to engage with customers from virtually any location.</li> <li><b>Collaboration.</b> Internal video calling, team messaging and file sharing help agents collaborate.</li> <li><b>Analytics.</b> RingCentral supports both real-time and historical reporting on agent performance and service levels.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>A cloud-based deployment model enables a high degree of scalability.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>RingCentral integrates with major CRM platforms as well as certain business productivity suites, such as Google Workspace.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>RingCentral's RingCX product features a Standard plan at $65 per user per month. The Professional plan is $95 per user per month, and the Elite plan is $145 per user per month. An enterprise package is also available.</p> <p>RingCentral is most notable for its agent <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/7-reasons-why-businesses-need-mobile-apps">mobile app option</a>, collaboration features and scalability.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="15. Salesforce Service Cloud Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>15. Salesforce Service Cloud Contact Center</h2> <p>Although Salesforce is best known for CRM, its Service Cloud platform includes a contact center offering to pull customer data into contact center engagements and tightly integrate with the Salesforce product ecosystem.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI features.</b> Using Salesforce's Einstein AI tools, Service Cloud uses AI to automate tasks like routing.</li> <li><b>Custom chatbots.</b> Businesses can also use Einstein AI to configure custom AI chatbots to serve as virtual agents.</li> <li><b>Knowledge management.</b> Built-in knowledge management capabilities aim to accelerate the rate at which agents can solve customer requests.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Service Cloud can support businesses of all sizes, but it's geared especially toward large, enterprise-scale customers.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Salesforce contact center integrates most tightly with other Salesforce products but also provides core integration with certain third-party platforms, such as Zendesk and HubSpot.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Salesforce offers one pricing plan, at $150 per user per month, for its contact center software.</p> <p>The Salesforce contact center is most notable for enterprise-grade scalability and extensive Salesforce integrations.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="16. Talkdesk"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>16. Talkdesk</h2> <p>Talkdesk promotes its CX automation via its AI multi-agent workflows and AI-first <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/5-customer-journey-phases-for-businesses-to-understand">customer journey</a>. Talkdesk also emphasizes its capabilities across several vertical industries. The product -- dubbed Customer Experience Automation, or CXA -- is known for its ease of use, intuitive interface and call routing capabilities.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>Virtual agents.</b> Talkdesk offers GenAI-powered virtual agents to automate customer interactions.</li> <li><b>No-code workflow management.</b> A visual interface enables workflow configuration and modifications.</li> <li><b>Hybrid cloud deployment option.</b> While Talkdesk can't run fully on-premises, a hybrid deployment model is available that allows businesses to route communications through on-prem telephony infrastructure, which can be advantageous from a privacy and compliance standpoint.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>A flexible deployment architecture enables a high degree of scalability, making Talkdesk appropriate for small businesses and large enterprises.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Integrations focus mostly on CRM platforms, but Google Workspace is also supported, and a custom integration API is available.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Costs range from $85 to $225 per user per month.</p> <p>Talkdesk is most notable for its feature-rich virtual agents and hybrid deployment option.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="17. Vonage Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>17. Vonage Contact Center</h2> <p>Vonage Contact Center's natively built features, including AI-powered virtual assistants, rely on integrations with external platforms, particularly Salesforce, to power some of its capabilities and access customer data. Vonage also emphasizes <a target="_blank" href="https://www.vonage.com/resources/articles/video-contact-center/" rel="noopener">video-based customer engagement</a>.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI-based sentiment analysis.</b> Vonage uses AI to evaluate customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice, text and social media.</li> <li><b>Virtual agents.</b> AI also powers virtual agents, which businesses can configure to perform a range of custom tasks.</li> <li><b>Business continuity.</b> Vonage offers business continuity and disaster recovery features, such as emergency call routing options.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Cloud-based deployment provides a high degree of scalability.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Integrations focus mostly on CRM platforms, with an API available for custom integrations.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Vonage does not list pricing information on its website specifically for its contact center plans, which include a Priority plan, Premium plan and add-on options. It offers volume-based API pricing with rates at $0.00809 per SMS and $0.01446 per minute for voice calls. Additional capabilities, like anti-fraud features and customer identification, cost extra.</p> <p>Vonage is most notable for omnichannel sentiment analysis, affordable volume-based pricing and business continuity features.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="18. Zendesk Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>18. Zendesk Contact Center</h2> <p>Although primarily a CRM platform, Zendesk also provides a dedicated contact center offering. The company first entered the call center space in 2011, but it completed a major overhaul of its customer communications and engagement platform in 2025, which now features cutting-edge AI capabilities.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI-powered automation.</b> Zendesk contact center makes extensive use of AI to automate virtually all core tasks, from routing to agent response.</li> <li><b>Chatbots.</b> AI-powered chatbots can perform custom tasks.</li> <li><b>Knowledge management.</b> Native knowledge management tools assist agents in finding the information they need to address customer requests.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Zendesk contact center can support businesses of all sizes, but it caters especially to midsize and enterprise organizations.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Core integrations support other Zendesk products and other popular CRMs, including Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as communications platforms like Slack.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Price plans start at $19 per user per month. The Suite Enterprise plan is $169 per user per month for enterprise-grade capabilities. Other plans are priced at $55 and $115 per user per month.</p> <p>Zendesk is most notable for its AI capabilities and a broad set of pricing options.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="19. Zoom Contact Center"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>19. Zoom Contact Center</h2> <p>Best known for its teleconferencing software, Zoom launched a contact center platform originally called Video Engagement Center and rebranded as Zoom Contact Center. The platform offers all core contact center software features with a focus on video-based customer meetings, while supporting other communications media over multiple channels.</p> <h3>Key features</h3> <ul type="disc" class="default-list"> <li><b>AI agent assist.</b> AI capabilities help guide human agents by suggesting actions and providing information during customer interactions.</li> <li><b>Virtual agents.</b> Fully independent, AI-powered agents are also available for engaging customers.</li> <li><b>Video support.</b> Zoom Contact Center supports customer engagement via video as well as more traditional channels.</li> </ul> <h3>Scalability</h3> <p>Zoom Contact Center provides a high degree of scalability due to its cloud-based deployment model, although its pricing plans are geared mainly toward midsize and larger organizations.</p> <h3>Integrations</h3> <p>Zoom Contact Center integrates with popular CRM platforms as well as other Zoom software.</p> <h3>Pricing</h3> <p>Pricing ranges from $69 to $149 per user per month.</p> <p>Zoom is most notable for its video calling support and AI capabilities that can assist human agents as well as power autonomous virtual agents.</p> <p>Clearly, the contact center market is crowded with many options for contact center buyers and C-suite decision-makers. Many of the platforms have similar and overlapping features, especially around AI capabilities, integrations with adjacent products and scalability performance. Contact center buyers need to evaluate these platforms carefully to find the right one for their organization.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b>&nbsp;<i>This article was updated to reflect recent developments in contact center platforms and the market in general.</i></p> <p><i>Chris Tozzi is an adjunct research adviser at IDC as well as an adviser for Fixate IO and a professor of IT and society at a polytechnic university in upstate New York.</i></p> </section> By now, many contact center software providers offer similar features. But large and small enterprises should consider some key differences among vendors. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/chatbot_g1206801125.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/Top-10-contact-center-platforms Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT <p>Data can reside just about anywhere in the cloud, making it critical to find the right enterprise cloud backup service for your company's data protection needs.</p> <p>Organizations typically store their data in a combination of on-premises data centers, cloud platforms and SaaS applications. Doing so requires a versatile backup offering that covers hybrid and multi-cloud environments and executes fast recoveries across them. To meet these demands, many enterprise cloud backup service providers now offer various types of AI functionality; stronger ransomware defenses, such as immutable storage, and other heightened security features, such as zero‑trust policies and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Backup-and-AI-work-together-to-enhance-protection">AI-based threat detection.</a></p> <p>This guide highlights 12 enterprise cloud backup services, detailing their notable features, key integrations and pricing. The list is based on Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant report on backup and data protection platforms, but it's unranked and presented in alphabetical order.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Arcserve"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Arcserve</h2> <p>Arcserve offers several data protection products; Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) is the primary service. The company once marketed UDP primarily to enterprises but has pivoted to also focus on small and midmarket customers.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Like many enterprise-class products, Arcserve UDP combines backup, replication, high availability and data immutability. Recent updates add AI‑based ransomware detection and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/tip/Data-governance-roles-and-responsibilities-Whats-needed">policy‑based data governance</a> to assist organizations with compliance.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Arcserve UDP protects physical and virtual Windows and Linux servers both on-premises and in the cloud. It is compatible with virtualization platforms, including Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and VMware. Arcserve UDP connects to Arcserve Cloud Storage and Arcserve Cyber Resilient Storage, and supports object storage on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Wasabi.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> Arcserve offers subscription and per‑socket licensing. Arcserve's online store lists UDP from $19.99 per month per each front‑end terabyte of data. Costs for licenses from channel partners or for fixed-term licenses vary by data capacity and edition.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Cohesity"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Cohesity</h2> <p>Cohesity offers DataProtect, NetBackup -- acquired from Veritas in December 2024 -- and FortKnox. Its most comprehensive data protection product is DataProtect, a cloud‑native platform that protects on‑premises, public cloud and SaaS workloads, simplifying backup and recovery through a single control plane.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Cohesity DataProtect emphasizes simplicity and extensibility with broad workload integrations, API support and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/The-7-critical-backup-strategy-best-practices-to-keep-data-safe">pre‑built automated workflows</a>. It includes a single management interface and an open API, allowing users to automate backups through custom scripts or third-party tools. The system stores backups as ready-to-use copies for instant recovery for VMs, files and application objects at scale.</p> <p>Cohesity's unified management platform consolidates backup, disaster recovery, search and threat detection with capabilities for multi-cloud backup and recovery.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> DataProtect supports numerous integrations in a variety of areas. It protects virtualization platforms such as VMware, Hyper‑V, Nutanix AHV and Kubernetes, as well as Windows, Linux, AIX and Solaris servers. Supported applications and databases include Microsoft 365, SAP HANA, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server; specific releases cover other databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra. The service also integrates with storage platforms such as Pure Storage, NetApp, HPE and Dell.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> Cohesity does not publicly disclose pricing for its products.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Commvault"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Commvault</h2> <p>Commvault Cloud Unity is a cloud‑native platform that unifies data security, identity resilience and recovery across on‑premises, multi-cloud and SaaS environments.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Cloud Unity uses AI to detect unusual activity across data platforms, applications and identity management systems; it also integrates with third-party threat databases and finds clean recovery points to help restore data from known‑good backups.</p> <p>The service supports isolated environments for recovery testing and forensics, plus automated backup and recovery workflows at enterprise scale. It provides full or partial application and infrastructure recovery. For example, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Key-takeaways-from-Commvault-Shift">full Active Directory forest recovery</a> is possible, as well as restoration of individual directory objects and attributes.</p> <p>Commvault consolidates operations through a single management console and claims it can deliver rapid recovery at cloud scale.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Commvault Cloud Unity supports a wide range of integrations for identity providers, enterprise databases, storage platforms, enterprise applications and even infrastructure as code. The company currently only lists support for three SaaS apps: Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> Commvault does not publicly disclose the pricing for its plans and services.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lc-hY-uHgUU?si=XcZdVpWfsTLQvOaF?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Dell Technologies"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Dell Technologies</h2> <p>Dell's Data Protection Suite consists of a portfolio of products designed for on-premises and cloud-based data protection. The products in this portfolio include PowerProtect Data Manager, NetWorker, Avamar, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and Data Protection Advisor. Customers must choose the offerings that provide the required level of protection. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is the core product that enables on-premises and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/answer/How-do-I-know-if-multi-cloud-backup-is-the-right-approach">multi-cloud data protection</a>.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> PowerProtect Data Manager automatically discovers and protects resources such as VMs, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/How-to-get-the-most-out-of-cloud-database-backups">databases</a> and containers. Users can store <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/news/366545197/Dell-PowerProtect-line-increases-features-and-update-cadence">backups to PowerProtect appliances</a> and the cloud.</p> <p>The service is designed for centralized governance and control via the IT team, but Dell also offers a self-service feature that enables data owners to recover their own data.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Dell PowerProtect Data Manager supports VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV and protects Windows and Linux file systems. The software performs application-based backups for enterprise workloads, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange Server and SAP HANA.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> Dell does not publicly disclose pricing for PowerProtect Data Manager.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Druva"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Druva</h2> <p>Druva Data Security Cloud is a SaaS backup platform that centralizes the management of data protection; eDiscovery and regulatory compliance; cybersecurity response and recovery; and governance of sensitive data. Druva said it designed its platform to be secure by design with autonomous features, such as auto-tuning and self-healing.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Druva's cloud-based backup and data protection service emphasizes simplified management through a single console without any appliances to administer. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/news/366556333/Druva-adds-gen-AI-assistant-to-cloud-backup-tools">Backup and disaster recovery operations are automated</a>, further reducing complexity. The company provides tools for forecasting resource requirements and can scale the service up or down based on the customer's needs.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Druva supports a variety of clouds, applications and platforms, including SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce and Google Workspace. For identity and access management, the platform integrates with Okta and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchwindowsserver/tip/Understand-the-basics-of-Microsoft-hybrid-identity">Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory.</a><u> </u>For security, Druva integrates with platforms that include Splunk, Palo Alto Networks and FireEye to support automated log exports and coordinated incident response.</p> <p><b>Pricing: </b>Druva's pricing varies widely based on the resources being protected. For many resources, Druva offers multiple protection tiers -- Business, Enterprise and Elite -- with different features and pricing.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Huawei"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Huawei</h2> <p>Huawei's Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR) is optimized to back up data in the Huawei cloud, but this service is also capable of handling file- and image-level backups within competing clouds or on local servers.</p> <p><b>Notable features: </b>Huawei said CBR provides gigabit transfer speeds and a recovery time objective measured in minutes. The service also offers multi-layer ransomware protection that includes AI-based threat detection and cross-region replication for backup and disaster recovery.</p> <p>Huawei CBR bases its backups on a vault system. The server backup vault protects entire cloud servers, while disk backup vaults keep individual disks safe. A locking feature <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/9-data-backup-trends-to-watch">treats the vaults as immutable storage</a> to prevent unauthorized changes.</p> <p><b>Integrations: </b>Huawei supports integration of CBR with on-premises VMware environments and local file systems, as well as MySQL and SAP HANA databases. It provides an SDK for customized application integration. Policy automation provides centralized administration of backups across multiple clouds.</p> <p><b>Pricing: </b>Huawei uses a consumption model for on-demand usage and also offers yearly and monthly billing.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="HYCU"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>HYCU</h2> <p>HYCU Data Resiliency Cloud, known as R-Cloud for short, is a SaaS-based backup and recovery platform designed for on-premises, cloud and SaaS environments, using centralized management to maintain visibility.</p> <p><b>Notable features: </b>HYCU R-Cloud's most interesting feature is R-Graph, an analytics and visualization tool that tracks data and applications in both public and private clouds, as well as traditional applications, databases and SaaS applications. The tool displays the protection status for each application to identify unprotected resources.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> HYCU supports more than 80 workloads, with an emphasis on SaaS apps, such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Trello, Google Workspace and Monday.com. R-Cloud also protects DevOps and identity platforms, including Okta and GitHub. It integrates with virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV, as well as public clouds that include AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> HYCU offers subscriptions per user or per workload, with specialized protection suites for platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Atlassian. The pricing ranges from $1.20 to $4 per user per month. However, enterprises and certain on-premises workloads will typically require a custom quote.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="IBM"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>IBM</h2> <p>IBM Cloud Backup is a cloud- and agent-based backup tool designed to protect physical and virtual workloads across environments.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> IBM Cloud Backup works with on-premises data and is capable of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/cloud-to-cloud-backup">cloud-to-cloud backup</a>. Users can schedule backups according to the organization's needs and manage these jobs through a browser-based GUI. If a restoration is required, an organization can perform a granular recovery or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Image-based-vs-file-based-backup-Key-comparisons">restore an entire system image</a>. Data deduplication and compression features help to expedite backup and recovery operations.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> IBM Cloud Backup is an agent-based service. To protect a particular workload, customers must purchase an agent as an add-on to their IBM Cloud Backup service. IBM does not list all the available agents, but it does mention the ability to protect Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. Agents are also available for both Windows and Linux.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> IBM does not publicly disclose pricing for IBM Cloud Backup.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="OpenText"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>OpenText</h2> <p>OpenText Data Protector is a consolidated backup and recovery product designed to protect virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> The OpenText service includes a smart scheduling feature that prioritizes important data and uses automation to run backup jobs outside of peak usage times. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Full-incremental-or-differential-How-to-choose-the-correct-backup-type">Backups can be full, differential or mirror copies.</a> A backup health monitor checks the status and alerts admins to problems.&nbsp;</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> OpenText Data Protector integrates with several hypervisors, including Nutanix, KVM and Citrix. It supports cloud and container platforms, such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, and integrates with Ceph storage, Oracle databases and Microsoft 365.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> OpenText does not publicly disclose pricing information.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Rubrik"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Rubrik</h2> <p>Rubrik Zero Trust Data Protection is part of Rubrik Security Cloud, a SaaS platform designed to protect data across on‑premises, cloud and SaaS environments</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Rubrik's backup platform follows zero-trust principles, including the use of immutable storage to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Enterprise-data-backup-challenges-and-how-to-overcome-them">prevent unauthorized changes or deletion</a>, even by ransomware. A role-based access control feature segments administrative permissions and supports multifactor authentication. Organizations can require multiple administrators to approve policy changes and other significant actions.</p> <p>Fast recovery from data loss events is another key feature. An integrated search engine directs users to locate the data they need to recover. This data can then be mounted directly on the backup server<b>.</b></p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Rubrik provides numerous integrations for major workloads, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP HANA and NoSQL databases. Supported clouds include AWS, Azure, Microsoft 365, Google Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS. The service also integrates with vRealize Automation and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchvmware/definition/VMware-vCloud-Director-VMware-vCD">VMware Cloud Director</a>.</p> <p><b>Pricing:</b> Rubrik does not publicly disclose pricing for its services.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Unitrends"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Unitrends</h2> <p>Unitrends provides <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/The-pros-and-cons-of-on-site-backup">physical or virtual backup appliances</a> designed to automate many manual backup tasks. Customers can also deploy its software to AWS or Azure. A single console provides centralized management of the on-premises appliances and the cloud backup software.</p> <p><b>Notable features: </b>Like many enterprise backup providers, Unitrends offers ransomware detection to alert admins to early warning signs of an attack. The platform features "self-healing" capabilities to automatically diagnose and resolve issues that might corrupt backups.</p> <p>Unitrends also supports instant recovery for VMware and Hyper-V workloads. The software creates standby replicas of VMs that can be activated for use until the problem is resolved. Additionally, an automated feature tests runbooks to verify application recovery.</p> <p><b>Integrations: </b>Unitrends supports backups of popular SaaS applications, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. It can also protect VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs, as well as workloads running in AWS and Azure.</p> <p><b>Pricing: </b>Unitrends does not publicly disclose pricing information.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Veeam"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Veeam</h2> <p>Veeam Data Platform is Veeam's enterprise backup and recovery tool for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/hybrid-cloud">hybrid and multi-cloud environments</a>. It offers native protection for a wide variety of workloads and also provides an API for customers who want to tailor the product to their needs.</p> <p><b>Notable features:</b> Veeam Data Platform offers all the standard <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/How-to-safely-and-securely-back-up-data">backup and encryption</a> capabilities expected in an enterprise backup product, with an emphasis on quick recovery times and backup verification. It uses AI to detect and remediate issues, and to determine optimal recovery procedures if necessary.</p> <p>Veeam backups can create a test lab for patch testing and other tasks that would otherwise have the potential to disrupt IT operations. Veeam said the service's nondisruptive tests ensure that data is recoverable and, if necessary, that customers can direct recovery operations to a different location, such as a cloud.</p> <p><b>Integrations:</b> Veeam Data Platform features numerous integrations, including protection for cloud and virtualization platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix. Some of the supported applications and databases include Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, SAP HANA, Oracle, SharePoint, Exchange Server and PostgreSQL. Veeam also supports IBM AIX, Oracle Solaris, Windows, Linux and macOS.</p> <p><b>Pricing: </b>Veeam offers three Data Platform editions -- Secure Foundation, Cyber Resilience and Enterprise Resilience -- with capabilities increasing by edition. It does not publicly disclose pricing.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b><i> This article was updated in January 2026 to provide new information and improve the reader's experience. </i></p> <p><i>Brien Posey is a former 22-time Microsoft MVP and a commercial astronaut candidate. In his more than 30 years in IT, he has served as a lead network engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense and a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America.</i></p> </section> These cloud-based backup products offer a variety of features, such as AI and enhanced security measures, to help enterprises reduce risk and meet their compliance needs. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_g943065362.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/feature/Top-20-cloud-backup-services-for-2019 Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT <p>AWS re:Invent 2025 took place Dec. 1-5 in Las Vegas, bringing over 2,000 learning sessions geared toward DevOps novices, IT decision-makers and everyone in between.</p> <p>Matt Garman, AWS CEO, delivered the opening keynote on how AWS innovations are guiding the cloud's future -- with AI playing a starring role. The technology permeated many of the hyperscaler's announcements at this year's show, which notably included the launch of a new class of AI agents for software development, security and DevOps.</p> <p>Multi-cloud also took focus this year. While this marks a shift in rhythm for the cloud giant, it reflects customer concerns surrounding recent major cloud outages and the proliferation of AI-related data.</p> <p>Dive into our conference coverage to read more on these major announcements, plus all other news and expert analysis from AWS re:Invent 2025.</p> This updating guide to AWS re:Invent 2025 provides coverage of major announcements and product releases from the show. Stay tuned for news analysis, expert opinions and more. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/conference/A-conference-guide-to-AWS-reInvent Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT <p>Whether you're planning your first migration or looking to refine your existing cloud deployment, your business needs a thoughtful strategy. Cloud migration is more than just moving data. It's about reimagining workflows, enhancing security and unlocking new business opportunities. In order to stay competitive, businesses need to move beyond traditional on-premises infrastructure to meet rapidly changing customer demands.</p> <p>Among those new demands is the rise in AI services, which are enabling businesses to unlock new insights, improve decision-making and deliver personalized experiences to customers. However, scaling out this AI infrastructure is expensive. Cloud instances optimized for AI give IT teams the flexibility to scale infrastructure to meet growing demand without having to worry about upfront capital costs.</p> <p>Even with these unprecedented levels of scalability, cloud cost management has emerged as a critical focus. New tools and services have made it easier to monitor and optimize cloud spending, ensuring businesses can achieve their goals without exceeding budgets.</p> <p>The cloud is not just a technology; it's a catalyst for change. As the IT landscape continues to evolve, businesses that leverage the cloud effectively will be better positioned to thrive in a competitive and dynamic environment.</p> In today's rapidly changing tech landscape, cloud strategy is more important than ever. This guide explores how to best use your cloud environment to create a competitive advantage. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/essentialguide/Unlocking-the-clouds-potential-Strategies-for-migration-AI-scalability-and-cost-optimization Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT <p>The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has concluded the North American leg of its flagship conference, bringing breakout sessions and more engaging experiences for CNCF's open source and cloud-native community.</p> <p>KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America took place in Atlanta Nov. 10-13. The event offered more than 10 different session tracks across various topics for attendees of all expertise levels. AI development, and how it ties into cloud-native infrastructure, proved to be a common theme throughout the event's programming, from keynotes to co-located events.</p> <p>Informa TechTarget's editorial team was on-site, providing live updates from the show floor. Explore this conference guide to catch up on the announcements, plus expert analysis and a look back on previous show highlights.</p> This guide to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 features updates from the event, related news to prep for the show and highlights from this year's European conference. https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/conference/KubeCon-CloudNativeCon-news-coverage Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT <p>Application owners must ensure a secure exchange of information and resilience against a wide range of security threats and attacks. To protect applications against unwanted and malicious internet traffic, AWS offers three services: Shield, Web Application Firewall (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Web-application-firewall-WAF">WAF</a>) and Firewall Manager.</p> <p>These AWS services, combined, offer protection on layers 3, 4 and 7 of the OSI model. They cover multiple AWS services, such as CloudFront, Route53, Global Accelerator, API Gateway, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), among others. This includes protection against DDoS attacks, malicious HTTP and HTTPS requests, as well as simplifying the automation and release of configurations across organizations with many AWS accounts and resources.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is AWS Shield?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is AWS Shield?</h2> <p>AWS Shield protects AWS components against&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/distributed-denial-of-service-attack">DDoS attacks</a>. These attacks produce a large number of artificially generated requests to disrupt public applications. Shield is available in two presentations: Standard and Advanced.</p> <h3>AWS Shield Standard</h3> <p>AWS Shield Standard is enabled by default in CloudFront, Route 53 and Global Accelerator at no extra cost.</p> <p>AWS Shield Standard offers protection against certain attacks but lacks flexibility for custom configurations. Shield Advanced integrates with the AWS WAF service to configure specific protection rules. It also protects against additional AWS charges that could be incurred due to increased usage resulting from a DDoS attack. Affected customers can request credits.</p> <h3>AWS Shield Advanced</h3> <p>AWS Shield Advanced is available for CloudFront, Route 53 and Global Accelerator, as well as ELB, Elastic IPs and EC2.</p> <p>AWS Shield Advanced costs $3,000 per month and it requires a 1-year subscription commitment. It provides access to the AWS Shield Response Team, a 24/7 support group available for emergencies, but this is only for AWS accounts that also have AWS Premium Support with Enterprise or Business Support levels, which are support plans that have an additional cost depending on the monthly AWS bill.</p> <p>There is an additional data transfer fee, which varies depending on the protected resource type and the amount of data transferred (for example, &lt;100 TB, 400 TB and 500 TB). The Shield Advanced data transfer fee could be between $25 to $50 for 1 TB of data transferred within the initial 100 TB bracket, depending on the protected resource type. This is in addition to the data transfer fees applicable to each protected resource. The monthly fee is applicable per AWS Organization. Therefore, deployments across <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/What-you-need-to-know-to-manage-multiple-AWS-accounts">multiple AWS accounts</a> within one Organization would pay only a single fee.</p> <p>While Shield Standard protects against attacks on layers 3 and 4,&nbsp;Shield Advanced expands the number of supported AWS services and integrates with WAF to provide coverage against attacks on layer 7.&nbsp;</p> <p><iframe title="Compare AWS Shield vs AWS WAF vs AWS Firewall Manager" aria-label="Table" id="datawrapper-chart-bwitT" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/bwitT/2/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="874" data-external="1"></iframe></p> <p> <script type="text/javascript">window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});</script> </p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is AWS WAF?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is AWS WAF?</h2> <p>The Web Application Firewall service focuses on Layer 7 protection. WAF's configurable feature set detects and blocks specific traffic patterns trying to reach your application in real time. It interacts with CloudFront distributions,<u>&nbsp;</u><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/application-load-balancer">Application Load Balancers</a>, Cognito user pools, AWS Verified Access instances, AppSync GraphQL APIs and API Gateway REST APIs. A WAF can be configured to detect traffic from the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Specific IPs.</li> <li>Cross-site scripting.</li> <li>SQL injection attacks.</li> <li>IP ranges or country of origin.</li> <li>IPs exceeding rate-based rules.</li> <li>Content patterns in request bodies, paths, JA3/JA4 fingerprints, queries, headers and cookies.</li> </ul> <p>With Firewall Manager, application owners can configure rules that apply to all accounts within an AWS Organization. When incoming traffic matches any of the configured rules, WAF can reject requests, return custom responses or simply create metrics to monitor applicable requests. Additional rules are also available in the AWS Marketplace.</p> <p>It has two main features:</p> <p><b>AWS WAF Bot Control.</b> It provides rules focused on identifying and taking measures against requests that follow patterns commonly used by pervasive bots. It can also be configured to allow traffic from search engines or uptime status monitoring tools. For common bot traffic, it costs $1 per million requests evaluated. For rules that target specific bots, it is $10 for each million of inspected requests.</p> <p><b>AWS WAF Fraud Control.</b> It protects login and user creation pages against fraudulent requests. Fraud Control can cost $1,000 per million requests analyzed for deployments that have between 10 thousand and 2 million requests per month.</p> <p>Both Bot Control and Fraud Control support configuring rules that display CAPTCHA challenges. These challenges incur an additional cost of $4 per 10,000 attempts analyzed for Bot Control Common, with no additional cost for Bot Control Targeted and Fraud Control.</p> <p>WAF charges $5 a month per web Access Control List (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/access-control-list-ACL">ACL</a>) and $1 a month per configured rule in the web ACL. A web ACL can be associated with multiple resources; <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/web-acl-processing.html">check the documentation</a>&nbsp;for details.</p> <p>WAF charges $0.60 per 1 million requests. For example, an application that handles 10 requests per second will cost approximately $15 per month. Plus, factor in any charges related to the number of rules and web ACLs.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is AWS Firewall Manager?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is AWS Firewall Manager?</h2> <p>AWS Firewall Manager is intended for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Implement-these-4-AWS-Organizations-best-practices">centralized management across multiple AWS accounts</a>&nbsp;and resources. It supports the following services:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>WAF.</li> <li>Shield Advanced.</li> <li>Network Firewall.</li> <li>VPC security groups.</li> <li>Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall.</li> </ul> <p>With Firewall Manager, application owners can configure rules that apply to all accounts. Owners can configure rules for all resources of a certain type within an account or organization, such as applying rules to all CloudFront distributions. It also supports applying configurations based on resource tags. When you add new resources to an account, you can automatically assign specific protection rules to them, which enhances security by simplifying and automating the configuration of critical protection features across multiple AWS resources in one or more AWS accounts.</p> <p>Large organizations sometimes struggle to protect their growing number of configurations and resources, Firewall Manager assists with that. It charges $100 a month per configured policy per region. Plus, factor in any charges related to created resources, such as WAF webACLs, WAF rules, AWS Config rules and so on. Customers with Shield Advanced can configure Firewall Manager with no additional cost per policy.</p> <p>Combining AWS Shield Standard and WAF is a great option for small or medium deployments. AWS Shield Advanced and Firewall Manager, together with WAF, are a suitable option for large deployments.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How to decide which tool is right for your organization"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How to decide which tool is right for your organization</h2> <p>While all three cloud security services deliver very important features for most AWS cloud deployments, it is important to evaluate if they are a good fit for specific application needs. Protected OSI Layers are an important area to evaluate, as well as the required services to protect in a particular application.</p> <p>Cost is also an important factor, particularly for AWS Shield Advanced, given its monthly fee of $3,000 and the required 1-year commitment. Large organizations with numerous accounts and cloud resources should really consider a service such as Firewall Manager, given it simplifies management for many cloud components.</p> <p>Given the high priority that security represents in modern cloud deployments, it is highly recommended to evaluate these AWS security services and configure them according to specific application and compliance requirements.</p> <p><b><i>Editor's note:</i></b><i>&nbsp;This article originally published in 2022 and was updated in 2025 to include updated features and pricing information.</i></p> <p><i>Ernesto Marquez is owner and project director at Concurrency Labs, where he helps startups launch and grow their applications on AWS. He enjoys building serverless architectures, building data analytics solutions, implementing automation and helping customers cut their AWS costs.</i></p> </section> AWS Shield, WAF and Firewall Manager form a powerful security trio to defend applications from cyber threats. Discover how they differ and determine which combination best suits your needs. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/security_g1185245180.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Which-should-I-choose-AWS-Shield-vs-WAF-vs-Firewall-Manager Mon, 03 Nov 2025 16:33:00 GMT <p>Google Cloud Storage enables customers to store and retrieve any amount of data as often as needed, but it can come with complex costs.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/tip/Compare-Google-Cloud-Storage-vs-Google-Drive-for-enterprises">Google Cloud Storage</a> is a managed service for unstructured data storage. The platform offers features such as automatic storage class transition, data replication, transfer services, machine learning and AI tools. Google offers these features across four&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/tip/Explore-Google-Cloud-Storage-classes">storage classes</a>: Standard, Nearline, Coldline and Archive.</p> <p>To manage Google Cloud Storage costs for the platform's various uses -- such as data processing, content delivery, disaster recovery, archiving and backup -- best practices include determining traffic, storage and availability needs, as well as recognizing Google's quotas.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Pricing of Google Cloud Storage"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Pricing of Google Cloud Storage</h2> <p>Google bases Cloud Storage pricing on factors relating to the individual customers' choices or needs, including data storage, data processing and network usage.</p> <h3>Data storage</h3> <p>Google calculates pricing based on the amount of data stored, the storage class, the location of the buckets and custom&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/6-best-practices-for-metadata-storage-and-management">metadata for the uploaded objects</a>.</p> <p>The location adds another layer to storage pricing as it's based on whether the data resides in a single region (North/South America, Europe, Asia, etc.), dual-region (two locations within one region, such as two in North America or Asia) or multi-region (multiple European or Asian countries).</p> <h3>Data processing</h3> <p>Pricing also varies with the amount of data processing users conduct in Google Cloud Storage. This includes additional factors such as operation rates, data retrieval and inter-region replication.</p> <h3>Network usage&nbsp;</h3> <p>Google charges for network use -- the amount of data users read from or move between buckets. Pricing depends on the location of the buckets, the storage class and whether users send the data outside of Google Cloud.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Google Cloud Storage pricing examples"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Google Cloud Storage pricing examples</h2> <p>The following Google Cloud Storage pricing examples outline what a company would pay in each scenario. For full details, use Google's <a target="_blank" href="https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/" rel="noopener">pricing calculator</a> for exact costs.</p> <h3>Simple Google Cloud pricing situation</h3> <p>Suppose your company had the following storage pattern for a single data bucket in a month:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Data storage.</b> Standard storage in the US-east1 region of 75GB of data.</li> <li><b>Data processing.</b> 25,000 Class A operations and 85,000 Class B operations.</li> <li><b>Network usage.</b> 19 GB of data transfer to the Americas and EMEA.</li> </ul> <p>Assuming there are no always free discounts -- available to all new customers -- pricing is as follows:</p> <p><iframe title="[ Insert title here ]" aria-label="Table" id="datawrapper-chart-PeStY" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/PeStY/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="358" data-external="1"></iframe></p> <p> <script type="text/javascript">window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});</script> </p> <h3>Complex Google Cloud pricing situation</h3> <p>This more complex situation incorporates storage with multiple storage classes and increased bandwidth that spans multiple tiers. The following specifications might be reflective of a larger, multinational corporation's data storage needs:</p> <p><b>Data storage:</b></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Standard storage in a multi-region of 75 TB of data.</li> <li>Standard storage in the NAM4 dual-region of 55 TB of data.</li> <li>Nearline storage in a multi-region of 165 TB of data.</li> </ul> <p><b>Data processing:</b></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Class A operations on the Standard storage data of 150,000 operations.</li> <li>Class B operations on Nearline storage data of 3,275,000 operations.</li> </ul> <p><b>Network usage:</b></p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Data transfer to the Americas and EMEA of 35 TB.</li> <li>Dual-region inbound data transfer of 21 TB.</li> <li>Multi-region inbound data transfer from Asia-Pacific of 12 TB.</li> </ul> <p>Assuming there are no always free discounts -- available to all new customers -- the monthly bill would be as follows:</p> <p><iframe title="[ Insert title here ]" aria-label="Table" id="datawrapper-chart-yBPH8" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/yBPH8/1/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;" height="712" data-external="1"></iframe></p> <p> <script type="text/javascript">window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});</script> </p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Early deletion example"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Early deletion example</h2> <p>Customers are charged early deletion fees when they delete data before the minimum storage duration for a given storage class. Early deletion fees apply to deleting an object, overwriting an object with new object data or rewriting an object -- such as when changing its storage class.</p> <p>Suppose you store 1,000 GB <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Google-Cloud-Storage-Coldline">Coldline storage</a> in the US multi-region on Day 1 and delete all the data on Day 60. Coldline storage has a 90-day minimum storage duration, so customers are charged as if the data was stored for the entire 90-day period. The fee calculation is divided into two parts:</p> <ol class="default-list"> <li>The at-rest storage cost of the 60 days the data existed in the bucket: $0.007 per GB per month X 1,000 GB X 2 months = $14.</li> <li>A prorated early-deletion fee for Coldline storage, since you didn't abide by the 90-day minimum: $0.00023333 per GB per day X 1,000 GB X 30 days = $7.</li> </ol> <p>The total cost of Coldline storage for this data for 60 days is $21. This is the same cost as storing it for the full 90-day minimum and deleting it on Day 90. In that case, you'd have saved the early deletion fee but paid the full fee of Coldline at-rest storage.</p> <p>Google Cloud Storage fees vary based on several factors and can change based on your company's behavior and usage of the storage they have over the month.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Additional Google Cloud Storage fees to consider"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Additional Google Cloud Storage fees to consider</h2> <p>Google charges for data operations separately from storage fees. Operations include actions that change or retrieve information about data -- such as buckets and objects. Google divides operations into two tiers and prices them according to the storage tier and region.</p> <p>Additional costs for operations and other data processing include fees for retrieval, inter-region replication and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/news/252524729/Storage-backup-services-to-expand-on-Google-Cloud-Platform">Cloud Storage Autoclass management</a>.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/compare_google_cloud_storage_classes-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/compare_google_cloud_storage_classes-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/compare_google_cloud_storage_classes-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/compare_google_cloud_storage_classes-f.png 1280w" alt="Chart comparing Google Cloud Storage classes." height="290" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Each storage class has a different minimum storage duration and price per GB per month. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Best practices to manage Google Cloud Storage costs"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Best practices to manage Google Cloud Storage costs</h2> <p>Given how quickly Google Cloud Storage costs can increase with more complex options, it's essential to get it right from the start.</p> <h3>1. Estimate how much traffic you'll consume</h3> <p>The amount of traffic organizations consume can affect the pricing. Estimate the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Operations per second.</b> How many operations per second do you expect for both buckets and objects? What about for create, update and delete operations?</li> <li><b>Bandwidth.</b> How much data will you send and in what time frame?</li> <li><b>Cache control.</b> Defining metadata on certain objects can affect read latency on hot data, so <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/5-tips-for-improving-data-storage-efficiency">understand if you're using it</a>.</li> </ul> <h3>2. Understand your storage location needs</h3> <p>Google Cloud Storage is redundant across at least two zones within one location. With a dual- or multi-region location type, Google stores objects in at least two locations separated by at least 100 miles. The location affects the recovery time objective (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/What-is-the-difference-between-RPO-and-RTO-from-a-backup-perspective">RTO</a>) in the event of an outage. If you always rely on sensitive or business-critical data, this factor is especially important to consider.</p> <p>Dual- and multi-region location pricing is marginally more than single-region pricing, but it could increase if storage increases. For example, dual-region Standard storage globally costs between $0.022 and $0.0506 cents per GB per month, while multi-region costs are roughly the same globally, at 2.6 cents per GB per month.</p> <h3>3. Know your data availability needs</h3> <p>Is it hot data that users must access multiple times daily? Or is it archive data only for compliance purposes? If you&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/3-best-practices-to-achieve-high-availability-in-cloud-computing">need high availability</a>, consider a dual- or multi-region location for your Google Cloud Storage. That way, you'll always have access to the data without changing storage paths and have a zero RTO in most circumstances.</p> <h3>4. Align Cloud Storage quotas and limits with your needs</h3> <p>Google Cloud Storage has quotas and request limits on buckets, objects, bandwidth usage and API requests. These prevent data bottlenecks across the storage network, which helps ensure smooth operations and performance. Customers can request increases to some quotas but not to limits.<br><br><i>Julia Borgini is a freelance technical copywriter, content marketer, content strategist and geek. She writes about B2B tech, SaaS, DevOps, the cloud and other tech topics.</i></p> </section> The cost of Google Cloud Storage isn't just about stored data. Administrators must also consider processing, network usage, retrieval and replication. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/storage_g1226966455.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/tip/How-to-handle-Google-Cloud-Storage-costs Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:20:00 GMT <p>A cloud access security broker (CASB) is a software tool or service that sits between an organization's on-premises <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/infrastructure">infrastructure</a> and a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitchannel/definition/cloud-service-provider-cloud-provider">cloud provider's</a> infrastructure. A CASB tool provides a unified and consistent method of delivering cloud security for an organization to access cloud resources.</p> <p>CASBs are designed to combine and enforce an organization's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/security-policy">security policies</a> when accessing cloud-based resources. They help prevent potential threats that can occur when an organization adds cloud-based networking to its IT infrastructure. CASBs are particularly important for maintaining data security, compliance and threat protection.</p> <p>CASBs combine security policies, such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/authentication">authentication</a>, authorization, role-based access control, credential mapping, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/encryption">encryption</a>, logging and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/malware">malware</a> detection. A CASB tool sits between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, ensuring that all traffic sent to the cloud complies with security policies before being sent, minimizing the security risk.</p> <p>CASBs are available as on-premises and cloud-based software, as well as software as a service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Software-as-a-Service">SaaS</a>).</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How does a CASB work?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How does a CASB work?</h2> <p>CASBs ensure network traffic between on-premises devices and the cloud provider complies with an organization's security policies, such as controlling access and identifying suspicious activity.</p> <p>The value of cloud security brokers stem from their ability to deliver <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/Ways-to-use-AI-for-cloud-infrastructure-management">insight into cloud application use</a> across cloud platforms and identify unsanctioned use. This is especially important in regulated industries.</p> <p>CASBs work in a discovery, classification and remediation process. The discovery process identifies in-use cloud applications, the classification process assesses each application and creates a risk factor, and the remediation process identifies and resolves detected threats based on the organization's security policy.</p> <p>CASBs use auto-discovery to identify cloud applications in use, high-risk applications, high-risk user devices and other key risk factors. Cloud access security brokers enforce several different security access controls, including encryption and device profiling. They can also provide other services, such as credential mapping when single sign-on (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/single-sign-on">SSO</a>) isn't available and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/threat-intelligence-cyber-threat-intelligence">threat intelligence</a>.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/cloud_security-casb_cloud_access_security_broker.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/cloud_security-casb_cloud_access_security_broker_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/cloud_security-casb_cloud_access_security_broker_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineImages/cloud_security-casb_cloud_access_security_broker.jpg 1280w" alt="Diagram of a Cloud Access Security Broker." height="297" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>CASBs sit between an organization's on-premises software and a cloud service infrastructure. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>CASBs sit between an organization's on-premises software and a cloud service's infrastructure.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="4 pillars of CASB"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>4 pillars of CASB</h2> <p>A CASB acts as a gatekeeper, enabling organizations to extend the reach of their security policies beyond their own infrastructure.</p> <p>The core components of a CASB are the following:</p> <ol class="default-list"> <li><b>Visibility.</b> <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/feature/Security-observability-vs-visibility-and-monitoring">Visibility</a> is an important aspect of creating a secure environment. In a cloud environment, organizations typically have limited visibility and insight into the cloud provider's underlying infrastructure. CASBs improve visibility for cloud usage with access logs that provide insights on corporate cloud infrastructure and attempted attacks. CASBs can also help detect instances of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/shadow-IT-shadow-information-technology">shadow IT</a>.</li> <li><b>Compliance.</b> Different regional regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhealthit/definition/HIPAA">HIPAA</a>) or the General Data Protection Regulation (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/General-Data-Protection-Regulation-GDPR">GDPR</a>), mean organizations must make sure their cloud provider complies with any regulations that might apply to the organization and its customers. CASBs define strict access controls to help comply with data regulations.</li> <li><b>Threat protection.</b> Employees might unintentionally introduce malware-based threats to cloud-based services. A CASB tool can detect and prevent potential threats. Any file upload, for example, can be inspected before it's sent to the cloud.</li> <li><b>Data security.</b> CASBs provide <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/Data-security-guide-Everything-you-need-to-know">data security</a> through access management and data loss prevention (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/data-loss-prevention-DLP">DLP</a>) processes that help secure an organization's cloud-based data.</li> </ol> <p>I</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_computing-casb_core_features.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_computing-casb_core_features_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_computing-casb_core_features_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloud_computing-casb_core_features.png 1280w" alt="Chart outlining the four core features of cloud access security brokers." height="314" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>A CASB tool provides four core security features to users. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Key benefits of a CASB"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Key benefits of a CASB</h2> <p>The principal benefit of a CASB is that it facilitates secure connections between users and cloud services. To achieve a secure environment, CASBs offer the following features:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Authentication to check users' credentials and ensure they only access appropriate company resources -- this is meant to complement identity and access management (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/identity-access-management-IAM-system">IAM</a>) tools.</li> <li><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Web-application-firewall-WAF">Web application firewalls</a> to thwart malware designed to breach security at the application level rather than at the network level.</li> <li>DLP to ensure users cannot transmit sensitive information outside the organization.</li> <li>Shadow IT discovery to identify all unauthorized cloud applications in use and to evaluate the risks associated with each.</li> <li><u><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/access-control">Access control</a></u> to set restrictions on what users can see and do within company applications, helping users gain access to the resources they need.</li> <li>Visibility features to identify all the cloud services being used within an organization and offer user and data activity monitoring.</li> <li>Threat protection features, which include <a href="https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/behavioral-analytics-cybersecurity-who-benefits-most">behavioral analytics</a> and malware detection to help restrict access by <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/threat-actor">threat actors</a>.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Challenges of using a CASB"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Challenges of using a CASB</h2> <p>Despite the many important benefits of a CASB, a few challenges need to be considered.</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Difficulty identifying devices not in a corporate infrastructure.</li> <li>Integration issues with other tools such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) or software-defined WAN (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/SD-WAN-software-defined-WAN">SD-WAN</a>).</li> <li>Potential difficulty integrating CASB into an existing infrastructure.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Use cases for CASBs"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Use cases for CASBs</h2> <p>CASB tools have evolved to include, or work alongside, other IT security services -- although some vendors still offer standalone tools. CASBs are particularly useful in organizations with <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/tip/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-shadow-IT">shadow IT operations</a> or liberal security policies that allow operating units to procure and manage their own cloud resources.</p> <p>Potential uses for CASB tools include the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Data security.</b> CASBs collect and configure granular access to data. DLP features also enable users to protect <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/sensitive-information">sensitive data</a> that is transferred to or from a cloud service.</li> <li><b>Protection against malware.</b> CASBs can protect against cloud-based malware threats that users might accidentally introduce to the environment.</li> <li><b>Monitoring.</b> CASBs can continuously monitor users by activity, application, cloud service usage and identity. CASBs can also be used for budgeting purposes.</li> <li><b>Compliance.</b> Organizations can use CASBs to assess <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/definition/compliance">compliance</a> with security, regulatory and legal standards.</li> <li><b>Cloud application usage tracking.</b> CASBs can provide a way to view cloud application usage, making it easier to identify abuse and usage patterns.</li> <li><b>User behavior analytics (UBA).</b> Usage tracking serves as a foundation for more sophisticated behavior tracking, as the same data is subjected to more detailed analysis.</li> <li><b>Integrations.</b> CASBs can integrate with other tools, such as firewalls, IAM and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/What-is-endpoint-security-How-does-it-work">endpoint security</a>.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Inline vs. API-based CASBs"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Inline vs. API-based CASBs</h2> <p>CASBs can be based on an inline proxy or an application programming interface (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/definition/application-program-interface-API">API</a>). Each provides the necessary security to protect the data heading to a cloud service.</p> <p>Before data traffic reaches a cloud vendor, an inline proxy-based CASB captures the transaction and provides the required security protection. The proxy helps facilitate the CASB connection. It is also the way early CASBs handled data traffic.</p> <p>API-based CASBs, by contrast, deliver security activities on data heading to the cloud through APIs already in place in SaaS cloud services. This way a separate arrangement for handling proxies can be eliminated.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Cloud access security broker vendors and resources"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Cloud access security broker vendors and resources</h2> <p>There are numerous vendors that provide CASBs. The following is just a sample of vendors and tools in the cloud access security space:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Broadcom Symantec CloudSOC CASB.</b> The system provides tools for ensuring compliance, DLP and a variety of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/business-analytics-BA">analytics</a>.</li> <li><b>Cisco Cloudlock.</b> An API-based CASB that uses <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/machine-learning-ML">machine learning</a> for threat identification.</li> <li><b>Forcepoint CASB.</b> Provides services including behavior analysis and enforcement of security policies.</li> <li><b>Fortinet FortiCASB.</b> Cloud-native service that delivers security, threat detection, visibility and compliance.</li> <li><b>Lookout CASB (Now Fortra CASB).</b> Secure access controls and extensive threat protection.</li> <li><b>Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.</b> Integrates with Microsoft 365 and Azure, providing a wide range of security features.</li> <li><b>Netskope One CASB.</b> Delivers visibility into cloud environments, DLP and protection from cyberthreats.</li> <li><b>Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud.</b> Driven by <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/AI-Artificial-Intelligence">AI</a>, delivers consistent security across cloud activities.</li> <li><b>Proofpoint CASB.</b> Integrates with email security elements and detects potential breaches.</li> <li><b>Skyhigh CASB.</b> Provides support for compliance and delivers advanced threat protection and access management.</li> <li><b>Zscaler CASB.</b> Delivers inline and API-based CASB support using a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/zero-trust-model-zero-trust-network">zero-trust security framework</a>.</li> </ul> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/STv9iiJXZdo?si=k33SgdF1rZE_YnoV?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <p>To meet the needs of infrastructure-as-a-service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS">IaaS</a>) and platform-as-a-service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Platform-as-a-Service-PaaS">PaaS</a>) users, CASB vendors have added or expanded functionality for security tasks, such as the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Single sign-on.</b> Enables employees to enter their credentials one time and access several applications.</li> <li><b>Encryption.</b> Encrypts information from the moment it's created until it's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/data-at-rest">at rest</a> in the cloud.</li> <li><b>Compliance reporting tools.</b> Ensures the company's security systems <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/tip/Top-cloud-compliance-standards-and-how-to-use-them">comply with corporate policies and government regulations</a>.</li> <li><b>User behavior analytics.</b> Identifies aberrant behavior that could indicate an attack or data breach.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Future of CASB in SASE"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Future of CASB in SASE</h2> <p>CASBs will continue to be adopted in secure access service edge (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/Secure-Access-Service-Edge-SASE">SASE</a>) architectures. SASE is a cloud architecture model that bundles network and cloud-native security technologies to deliver them as a single cloud service. A SASE solution helps an organization unify its network and security tools in one management console. These tools typically bundle SD-WANs with network security measures, such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/firewall-as-a-service-FWaaS">firewall as a service</a>, secure web gateways, zero-trust network access and CASBs.</p> <p>CASBs are commonly included in SASE tools, as they provide the access control, policy enforcement, threat prevention and visibility features that are essential to protecting cloud-based resources. Alongside other security and cybersecurity services CASB solutions will likely become a core component of SASE architectures.</p> <p>The future of CASBs also depends on the increase and severity of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/34-Cybersecurity-Statistics-to-Lose-Sleep-Over-in-2020">cyberthreats</a>, such as ransomware; their ability to comply with key regulations, such as the GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA; and their ways of managing deployment costs.</p> <p><i>Learn more about </i><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/The-complete-Secure-Access-Service-Edge-SASE-guide"><i>SASE and its use cases, as well as benefits and issues</i></a><i> it presents for organizations.</i></p> </section> A cloud access security broker (CASB) is a software tool or service that sits between an organization's on-premises infrastructure and a cloud provider's infrastructure. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/digdeeper/2.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-access-security-broker-CASB Wed, 15 Oct 2025 09:00:00 GMT <p>Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-computing">cloud computing</a> that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS is one of the three main categories of cloud computing services, alongside software as a service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Software-as-a-Service">SaaS</a>) and platform as a service (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Platform-as-a-Service-PaaS">PaaS</a>).</p> <p>In the IaaS model, the cloud provider manages IT infrastructures, such as storage, server and networking resources, and delivers them to subscriber organizations through virtual machines (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/virtual-machine-VM">VMs</a>) accessible through an internet connection. IaaS has many benefits for organizations, such as making <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/workload">workloads</a> faster, easier, more flexible and more cost-efficient.</p> <p>The easiest way to visualize IaaS is to think of a well-equipped kitchen. All the tools, utensils, raw ingredients and cooking devices are in place. It is up to the chef (e.g., the user) to select which cooking resources will be used for a specific meal.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Why IaaS is important"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Why IaaS is important</h2> <p>Infrastructure as a service has risen to prominence as enterprises have sought alternatives to deploying and maintaining their own on-premises <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/infrastructure">infrastructures</a>. Cloud services have provided an alternative to the high-cost computing equipment required for in-house data centers. Before cloud computing, organizations had few options besides investing in their own servers, networking equipment and storage devices, with the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/CAPEX-capital-expenditure">Capex</a> and maintenance costs that entailed.</p> <p>Now, when tasks require high-power computing, companies can simply purchase services from a cloud provider, often at a lower cost than equivalent in-house infrastructure. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitchannel/definition/cloud-service-provider-cloud-provider">Cloud service providers</a> procure, manage and secure the required hardware and infrastructure. This leaves their customers free to collect, process, store and retrieve data, but without having to buy and manage the computing hardware. This is especially useful for small and midsize companies that can't afford to implement their own infrastructure.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="IaaS architecture"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>IaaS architecture</h2> <p>In an IaaS service model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components that are traditionally present in an on-premises data center. This includes physical servers, storage and networking hardware as well as the virtualization or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/hypervisor">hypervisor</a> layer.</p> <p>IaaS providers also supply a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/IaaS-vs-PaaS-options-on-AWS-Azure-and-Google-Cloud-Platform">range of services</a> to accompany those infrastructure components. These can include detailed billing, monitoring, log access, cloud security, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/load-balancing">load balancing</a>, clustering, and storage resiliency, such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/backup">backup</a>, replication and recovery.</p> <p>These services are increasingly policy-driven, enabling IaaS users to implement greater levels of automation and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/cloud-orchestrator">orchestration</a> for important infrastructure tasks. For example, a user can implement policies to drive load balancing to maintain application availability and performance.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rIlC8aUusmA?si=OIpyiJOr6XHrNY3w?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How does IaaS work?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How does IaaS work?</h2> <p>IaaS customers access resources and services through a wide area network (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/WAN-wide-area-network">WAN</a>), such as the internet, and use the cloud provider's services to install the remaining elements of an application stack.</p> <p>For example, the user can log into the IaaS platform and do the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Create VMs and install operating systems in each VM.</li> <li>Deploy middleware, such as databases.</li> <li>Create storage buckets for workloads and backups.</li> <li>Install the enterprise workload into that VM.</li> </ul> <p>Customers can then use the provider's services to track costs, monitor performance, balance network traffic, run applications and troubleshoot issues, and manage disaster recovery and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/definition/business-continuity">business continuity</a>.</p> <p>Any cloud computing model requires the participation of a provider. The provider is often a third-party organization that specializes in selling IaaS. Amazon Web Services (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/Amazon-Web-Services">AWS</a>), <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Windows-Azure">Microsoft Azure</a> and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Google-Cloud-Platform">Google Cloud</a> are examples of independent IaaS providers. A business might also opt to deploy a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/private-cloud">private cloud</a> or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/hybrid-cloud">hybrid cloud</a>, becoming its own provider of infrastructure services.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How do you implement IaaS?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How do you implement IaaS?</h2> <p>When implementing an IaaS product, there are important considerations. Use cases and infrastructure needs must be defined to determine the technical requirements and providers to consider. The areas to examine include the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>General manageability.</b> Understand which features of the IaaS the user controls, and how easy they are to control and manage.</li> <li><b>Networking.</b> Ensure the provisioned cloud infrastructure can be easily and efficiently accessed.</li> <li><b>Storage.</b> Consider requirements for storage types, performance levels, space needed, provisioning and potential options such as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/object-storage">object storage</a>.</li> <li><b>Compute.</b> Assess the implications of different servers, VM, CPU and memory options that cloud providers offer.</li> <li><b>Disaster recovery.</b> Examine disaster recovery features and options so you know what to expect in the event of a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/failover">failover</a> on VM, server or site levels.</li> <li><b>Server size.</b> Check out options for server and VM sizes, how many CPUs can be placed on servers, as well as other CPU and memory details.</li> <li><b>Network throughput.</b> Ensure speed between VMs, data centers, storage and internet is adequate.</li> <li><b>Security.</b> Make data security a top priority when evaluating cloud-based services and providers. Questions about data encryption, certifications, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloud-compliance">compliance</a> and secure workloads should be pursued in detail.</li> </ul> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloudcomputing-iaas_security_checklist-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloudcomputing-iaas_security_checklist-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloudcomputing-iaas_security_checklist-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/cloudcomputing-iaas_security_checklist-f.png 1280w" alt="Info box highlighting security tasks on an IaaS security checklist." height="246" width="559"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>There are five essential security tasks an organization using IaaS must perform. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>During the implementation process, organizations should consider how the technical and service offerings of different providers fulfill business-side needs and specific use requirements. IaaS vendors and products <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/post/What-to-consider-when-selecting-an-IaaS-provider">should be carefully evaluated</a>, because there's considerable variance within their products, and some are apt to align better with business needs than others.</p> <p>Once a vendor and product are selected, it's important to review all fine-print details and negotiate <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitchannel/definition/service-level-agreement">service-level agreements</a>. End-user organizations must assess the capabilities of their IT departments to ensure they're equipped to deal with the demands of an IaaS implementation and to determine what additional <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Top-7-cloud-computing-careers-and-how-to-get-started">training might be needed</a>.</p> <p>In the IaaS model, the cloud provider is responsible for its own infrastructure, including technical maintenance such as software patches, upgrades and troubleshooting. The end-user organization's in-house IT department is responsible for managing its own computing infrastructure. This personnel assessment is needed to ensure the organization is equipped to maximize value on all fronts from an IaaS implementation.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are the advantages of IaaS?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are the advantages of IaaS?</h2> <p>Organizations choose IaaS models because they offer multiple advantages, including the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Alleviating infrastructure burdens.</b> It's often easier, faster and more cost-effective to use IaaS to operate and optimize a workload without having to buy, manage and support the underlying infrastructure. With IaaS, a business simply rents or leases the infrastructure from another business.</li> <li><b>Accommodating changing business needs. </b>IaaS is an effective cloud service model for temporary, experimental or unexpectedly changing workloads. For example, when developing new software, a business might host and test the application using an IaaS provider. Once the software is tested and refined, it can be moved to a more traditional in-house deployment. Conversely, the business could commit the software to a long-term IaaS deployment if the costs of a long-term commitment make more sense.</li> <li><b>Reducing upfront capital expenditures.</b> In general, IaaS customers pay on a per-user basis, typically by the hour, week or month. Some IaaS providers also charge customers based on the amount of VM space they use. This <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/pay-as-you-go-cloud-computing-PAYG-cloud-computing">pay-as-you-go model</a> eliminates the upfront capital expenses of deploying in-house hardware and software. When a business can't use third-party providers, a private cloud built on-premises can offer IaaS's control and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/scalability">scalability</a>, though not the cost benefits.</li> <li><b>Flexibility with IT management responsibilities. </b>Enterprises' infrastructure management responsibilities might change, depending on whether they choose an on-premises, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/SaaS-vs-IaaS-vs-PaaS-Differences-Pros-Cons-and-Examples">IaaS, PaaS or SaaS</a> deployment. This is often where cloud-based as-a-service offerings demonstrate their flexibility.</li> </ul> <div class="articleVideoFullWidth "> <video id="singlePlayer-0" class="video-js" data-account="1367663370" data-player="241dc03c-5fb7-411b-a162-bdf807c489ba" data-embed="default" data-video-id="5670228585001" controls=""></video> <div class="video-title"> <a href="https://players.brightcove.net/1367663370/241dc03c-5fb7-411b-a162-bdf807c489ba_default/index.min.js">IT management responsibilities</a> </div> <div class="video-summary"> <p>Enterprises' infrastructure management responsibilities change, depending on whether they choose an on-premises, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS deployment.</p> </div> <script src="//players.brightcove.net/1367663370/241dc03c-5fb7-411b-a162-bdf807c489ba_default/index.min.js"></script> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are the disadvantages of IaaS?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are the disadvantages of IaaS?</h2> <p>IaaS also comes with some potential disadvantages:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Long-term cloud computing costs.</b> Despite its flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing model, IaaS billing can be a problem for some businesses. Cloud billing is extremely granular because it's broken down to reflect the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/tip/When-to-use-AWS-Compute-Optimizer-vs-Cost-Explorer">precise services used</a>. Users sometimes experience higher costs than expected when reviewing the bills for every resource and service involved in application deployment. Users must monitor their IaaS environments and bills closely to understand how the service is being used and avoid being charged for unauthorized services.</li> <li><b>Potential vendor lock-</b><b>in.</b> Signing on with a single vendor can result in being locked into that vendor, making it more difficult to change vendors at a later date.</li> <li><b>Lack of visibility.</b> Because IaaS providers own the infrastructure, the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/tip/How-to-approach-IT-logging-in-the-cloud-vs-on-premises">details of their infrastructure configuration and performance</a> are rarely transparent to IaaS users. This lack of transparency and insight can make systems management and monitoring more difficult for users.</li> <li><b>Security breaches.</b> While cloud vendors are typically diligent when it comes to preventing <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/6-common-types-of-cyber-attacks-and-how-to-prevent-them">cyberattacks</a>, users might have little to no influence on or insights into how the vendor handles security. Rogue employees who gain access can pose a threat if they are undetected.</li> <li><b>Disruptions.</b> Service resilience can also be an issue. A workload's availability and performance are highly dependent on the provider. If an IaaS provider experiences network bottlenecks or any form of internal or external downtime, the users' workloads are affected. In addition, because IaaS is a multi-tenant architecture, the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/noisy-neighbor-cloud-computing-performance">noisy neighbor</a> issue can negatively impact users' workloads.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How are IaaS responsibilities shared between vendors and users?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How are IaaS responsibilities shared between vendors and users?</h2> <p>IaaS is considered a shared responsibility model. This means that cloud service provider takes responsibility for managing its in-house hardware and infrastructure resources, including all security precautions. Providers must also ensure the connectivity and reliability of their networks, so users don't experience downtime or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/definition/Data-loss">data loss</a>.</p> <p>On the other hand, user organizations are responsible for securing their own applications and data, as well as using security measures such as encryption and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/identity-access-management-IAM-system">identity and access management</a>. They must also manage their own network configurations, which can introduce complexities.</p> <p>However, the advantage is that users are free to customize their network as they see fit. As a result, IaaS gives users more control over their processes than PaaS or SaaS. This level of control is just one of multiple differences between IaaS and the other two categories.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="IaaS vs. SaaS vs. PaaS vs. MaaS"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>IaaS vs. SaaS vs. PaaS vs. MaaS</h2> <p>IaaS is only one type of cloud computing model. It can be complemented by combining it with PaaS, SaaS and <a target="_blank" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-models-as-a-service-maas" rel="noopener">MaaS</a> (model as a service).</p> <h3>IaaS vs. PaaS</h3> <p>PaaS builds on the IaaS model because, in addition to the underlying infrastructure components, providers host, manage and offer operating systems, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchapparchitecture/definition/middleware">middleware</a> and other runtimes for cloud users. While PaaS simplifies workload deployment, it also restricts a business's flexibility to create the environment that it wants.</p> <h3>IaaS vs. SaaS</h3> <p>With SaaS, providers host, manage and offer the entire infrastructure, as well as SaaS applications for users. SaaS users don't need to install anything. They simply log in and use the provider's application, which runs on the provider's infrastructure. Users have some ability to configure the way the application works and which users are authorized to use it. But the SaaS provider is responsible for everything else.</p> <h3>IaaS vs. MaaS</h3> <p>MaaS technology helps bring the power of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/AI-Artificial-Intelligence">AI</a> to business users by delivering ready-to-use machine learning (ML) resources that can be applied to a variety of AI applications.</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/itops-pizza_as_a_service.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/itops-pizza_as_a_service_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/itops-pizza_as_a_service_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/itops-pizza_as_a_service.png 1280w" alt="Diagram of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models and levels of stack ownership." height="312" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models entail different levels of software stack ownership. The differences can be compared with different pizza services. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What are IaaS use cases?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What are IaaS use cases?</h2> <p>IaaS and the compute resources it provides are used for a variety of purposes:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Testing and application development environments.</b> IaaS offers organizations flexibility when it comes to different test and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/definition/development-environment">development environments</a>. They can be easily scaled up or down as needed.</li> <li><b>Hosting customer-facing websites.</b> This can make it more affordable to host a website, compared to traditional means of hosting websites.</li> <li><b>Data storage, backup and recovery.</b> IaaS can be the easiest and most efficient way for organizations to manage data when demand is unpredictable or might steadily increase. Furthermore, IaaS reduces the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/Data-storage-management-What-is-it-and-why-is-it-important">data storage management</a>, legal and compliance requirements on customers.</li> <li><b>Web applications.</b> IaaS provides the infrastructure needed to host web apps. Therefore, if an organization is hosting a web application, IaaS can provide the necessary storage resources, servers and networking. Users can access these applications through a web browser, allowing quick deployments and easy scalability according to the application's demand.</li> <li><b>High-performance computing (HPC).</b> Certain workloads, such as scientific computations, financial modeling and product design work, might demand <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/high-performance-computing-HPC">HPC</a>-level computing.</li> <li><b>Data warehousing and big data analytics.</b> IaaS can provide the necessary processing and compute power for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/big-data-analytics">big data analytics</a> to comb through big data sets.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Major IaaS vendors and products"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Major IaaS vendors and products</h2> <p>There are many IaaS vendors and products that cloud service providers of different sizes offer. Following is a brief list of major cloud service providers, each of which offers IaaS solutions:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>AWS offers cloud storage applications and services such as Simple Storage Service, also known as <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/Amazon-Simple-Storage-Service-Amazon-S3">S3</a>, and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/Glacier-Amazon-Glacier">Glacier</a> as well as compute services, including its Elastic Compute Cloud.</li> <li>The Google Cloud platform offers storage and compute services through <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchaws/definition/Google-Compute-Engine">Google Compute Engine</a>.</li> <li>Microsoft Azure VMs offer cloud virtualization for many different cloud computing purposes.</li> <li>IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise provides a full suite of IaaS services.</li> <li>Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers many different cloud services, including IaaS.</li> </ul> <p>Other IaaS offerings can include <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/serverless-computing">serverless</a> functions, such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions; database access; big data compute environments; and monitoring and logging.</p> <p>Users must carefully consider the various providers' services, reliability and costs before choosing one. They should also be ready to select an alternate provider and have a plan for redeploying to the alternate infrastructure if necessary.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The Future of IaaS"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The Future of IaaS</h2> <p>IaaS growth in the coming years is projected to be strong, based on several important trends:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>AI is expected to be a key delivery tool of the future, impacting many different aspects of cloud-based services, such as security management and governance.</li> <li>The need for performance monitoring will be enhanced through <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/tip/Tips-for-reaching-full-stack-observability">full stack observability</a>, which looks at all levels of cloud service, delivering greater performance analytics, and event predictability and management.</li> <li>Growth of serverless platforms is expected to streamline IaaS deployment.</li> </ul> </section> Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/digdeeper/6.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT <p><strong><a href="#A-C">A-C</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#D-F">D-F</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#G-I">G-I</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#J-L">J-L</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#M-O">M-O</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#P-R">P-R</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#S-U">S-U</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#V-X">V-X</a></strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <strong><a href="#Y-Z">Y-Z</a></strong></p> <p>Ensuring the health of people, the planet and even businesses rests on more sustainable practices, which depend on understanding core concepts and terms.</p> <p>Many individuals, businesses, nonprofits and government entities are working hard to quickly create and execute specific sustainability strategies and environmental, social and governance (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/environmental-social-and-governance-ESG">ESG</a>) initiatives. Everyone has a role to play. Learning about sustainability and ESG concepts ensures that critical stakeholders have productive conversations that avoid term misuse and oversimplification.</p> <p>Climate disruption is having and will continue to have a negative impact on life across the globe. It's imperative that business leaders, private citizens and governments take immediate and decisive <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements" rel="noopener">action</a>.</p> <p>Here are some fundamental sustainability terms and ESG concepts that provide a foundation for taking action.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The 50-plus sustainability and ESG terms you should know"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The 50-plus sustainability and ESG terms you should know</h2> <ol class="default-list"> <li><b>business sustainability</b>. Also known as corporate sustainability, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/business-sustainability">business sustainability</a> is the ethical and responsible management of an organization's continued success with environmental, social and financial concerns.</li> <li><b>carbon credit</b>. When companies create carbon offsetting initiatives, they receive a transferable or tradeable carbon credit, or token. The credit represents the right to emit greenhouse gases and offset them elsewhere. One credit represents one ton of carbon dioxide reduced or removed from the atmosphere. In practice, taking advantage of these credits lets owners reduce greenhouse gas emissions to get closer to net zero. The term also refers to purchased credits that will fund emission-reducing projects.</li> <li><b>carbon footprint</b>. A <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/carbon-footprint">carbon footprint</a> measures the amount of carbon dioxide and methane produced by individuals, organizations, products or practices.</li> <li><b>carbon neutral</b>. The ideal balance between carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activity and carbon absorption by the atmosphere; the calculation should come to zero.</li> <li><b>carbon offset</b>. A <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/carbon-offset">carbon offset</a> is an activity or purchase intended to compensate for carbon emissions produced by individuals and organizations. Carbon storage through tree planting or land restoration is a common example. Businesses with carbon offset programs receive carbon tokens.</li> <li><b>carbon token</b>. A digital asset governed by a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Examples-of-smart-contracts-on-blockchain">smart contract on blockchain</a> that represents a real-world reduction in one metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions. The asset exists to verify ownership and simplify the carbon credit trading process. Another example is a non-fungible token, or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/nonfungible-token-NFT">NFT</a>, representing a single, unique share of captured carbon dioxide associated with a specific time and place. The dependence on blockchain technology to administer carbon tokens is controversial due to blockchain's energy-intensive processes.</li> <li><b>circular economy</b>. The <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/circular-economy">circular economy</a> keeps products in circulation to the fullest extent possible by reducing material consumption, streamlining processes and collecting waste for reuse.</li> <li><b>clean tech</b>. Sometimes referred to as green technologies or eco-technologies, this term refers to technologies and processes designed to limit negative environmental impacts, such as waste and carbon emissions, especially compared to fossil fuels. Examples of clean technologies include solar power, wind power, biofuels, recycling and smart lighting.</li> </ol> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dg8nTJ0cHVI?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.techtarget.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> <ol start="9" class="default-list"> <li><b>climate adaptation</b>. The act of preparing for and adjusting to climate change's current and projected consequences. For example, cities can build seawalls to protect from rising sea levels.</li> <li><b>climate change</b>. The shifts over time in the average temperature and weather patterns that define specific locations. In particular, climate change has come to mean the rise in global temperatures from heat-trapping gases resulting from mining and using oil, coal and other fossil fuels. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/How-does-climate-change-affect-businesses-Financial-impacts">Climate change indicators</a> include rising sea levels; an increase in the severity of extreme weather, such as hurricanes, droughts and floods; and ice loss at the Earth's poles.</li> <li><b>climate mitigation</b>. The process of decreasing the flow of heat-trapping pollution. For example, reducing fossil fuel burning by using renewable energy sources may help.</li> <li><b>climate resilience</b>. The ability to support a community, company or the natural environment before, during and after a climate event in a timely, efficient manner. Climate resilience differs from climate adaptation, although the two terms are often used interchangeably.</li> <li><b>climate</b><b> risk.</b> As wildfires, droughts, food scarcity, hurricanes and other climate change effects happen, businesses become more vulnerable. Climate risk describes that vulnerability. It is the potential for climate change to create negative effects on human or ecological systems. Risks fall into two main categories: risks based on the transition to a greener economy, such as losing market share by moving away from fossil fuel-based products, and risks related to the physical effects of climate change, such as flooded offices.</li> <li><b>closed-loop</b>. A production process that reuses material waste to create additional products or repurposes recycled materials.</li> <li><b>conscious capitalism</b>. Conscious capitalism is a socially responsible framework for capitalism in the corporate and political spheres. It emphasizes creating human value alongside profit value.</li> <li><b>corporate social responsibility (CSR)</b>. For-profit companies use the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/corporate-social-responsibility-CSR">CSR</a> business model to gauge social and environmental benefits alongside organizational goals, such as profitability.</li> </ol> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/esg_vs_csr_vs_sustainability-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/esg_vs_csr_vs_sustainability-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/esg_vs_csr_vs_sustainability-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/esg_vs_csr_vs_sustainability-f.png 1280w" alt="ESG vs. CSR vs. sustainability: what's the difference?" height="262" width="560"> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <ol start="17" class="default-list"> <li><b>digital carbon footprint</b>. The digital carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions digital devices, tools and platforms produce. All tech, from cloud computing to mobile phones to internet usage, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/tip/Ways-to-reduce-an-organizations-digital-carbon-footprint">produces a digital carbon footprint</a>.</li> <li><b>digital sobriety</b>. Digital sobriety aims to limit the harmful environmental impact of smartphones, internet usage, digital media and other tech in both large and small ways on a daily basis. Moving toward digital sobriety includes a wide range of actions: buying fewer devices, deleting emails, opting for lower-definition media consumption, sustainably developing software and buying less-powerful machines.</li> <li><b>drawdown</b>. A drawdown is the point at which atmospheric greenhouse gas levels stop climbing and start declining.</li> <li><b>electronic waste (e-waste)</b>. Electronics at or nearing the end of their useful life. Green tech and sustainability approaches seek to extend the useful life of devices and use circular economy principles to keep the amount of e-waste to an absolute minimum. The priority is to first reduce waste, then refurbish devices, then move toward recycling.</li> <li><b>energy efficiency</b>. The same task or result is achieved with less energy. For example, heating, cooling and operating appliances and electronics are less energy-intensive in energy-efficient homes and buildings.</li> <li><b>environmental justice</b>. Environmental justice seeks to ensure fair treatment of all people regardless of race, color, national origin or income equally, regarding environmental laws, regulations and policies. The approach holds that no group should bear a disproportionate share of negative environmental consequences.</li> <li><b>environmental, social and governance</b>. Sustainable and ethical interests that can be central to an organization's financial and corporate interests. Otherwise known as ESG.</li> </ol> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_pillars_of_esg-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_pillars_of_esg-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_pillars_of_esg-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/3_pillars_of_esg-f.png 1280w" alt="An explanation of the three pillars of ESG: environmental, social and governance." height="286" width="560"> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p></p> <ol start="24" class="default-list"> <li><b>ESG framework</b>.&nbsp;A set of objectives companies can use in their&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/definition/ESG-reporting" rel="noopener">ESG reporting</a>. A variety of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Top-ESG-reporting-frameworks-explained-and-compared">ESG frameworks</a> exist to help companies evaluate their environmental and social impact and assess their internal governance policies, as well as their risks and opportunities.</li> <li><b>ESG reporting</b>. A disclosure that an organization must provide to show how it works to fulfill its ESG promises and efforts. Some organizations are required to report on ESG, depending on the laws and regulations of the country or countries in which they operate.</li> <li><b>feed-in tariff</b>. A policy designed to accelerate investments in renewable energy. A policy of this type usually involves long-term government contracts.</li> <li><b>global warming</b>. Global warming refers to the heating of the Earth's surface from trapped greenhouse gases resulting from human activities, such as transportation, agriculture, overfishing, fossil fuel energy production and overconsumption. Unless companies, governments and consumers make major shifts, global warming and climate change will heat the planet so much that it will be unlivable in the near future.</li> <li><b>green cloud</b>. The <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/definition/green-cloud">green cloud</a> refers to the possible environmental benefits of IT services delivered over the internet. Typically seen as a buzzword, reliance on the alleged benefits can lead technologists to believe that further efforts to reduce carbon footprints are unnecessary.</li> <li><b>green computing</b>. The sustainable approach to using computing devices and equipment is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/definition/green-computing">green computing</a>. Some methods include reducing resource use, responsible disposal of e-waste and deploying energy-efficient IT equipment.</li> <li><b>green IT</b>. The practice of designing, manufacturing, operating and disposing of IT products and devices to minimize the negative effects of IT operations on the environment is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/green-IT-green-information-technology">green IT</a>.</li> <li><b>green premium</b>. Coined by Bill Gates, green premium refers to the economic and environmental costs of choosing clean tech over financially sound options with higher greenhouse gas emissions.</li> <li><b>green software</b>. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsoftwarequality/definition/green-software">Green software</a> refers to applications that are designed, developed and implemented in ways intended to minimize energy consumption and environmental effects.</li> <li><b>greenhouse effect</b>. The result of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides in Earth's atmosphere trapping the sun's heat.</li> <li><b>greenhouse gas emissions</b>. The sum of emissions of various heat-trapping gases. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and fluorinated gases such as hydrofluorocarbons.</li> <li><b>Greenhouse Gas Protocol</b>. A globally recognized set of reporting and accounting frameworks for managing greenhouse gas emissions from private and public sector operations, value chains and mitigation actions.</li> <li><b>greenhushing</b>. Greenhushing involves companies intentionally hiding sustainability goals. Companies may do this out of fear of greenwashing accusations or falling short of stated goals.</li> <li><b>greenwashing</b>. Deceptive, misleading or false claims or actions that an organization, product or service has a positive environmental effect is called <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/greenwashing">greenwashing</a>. Whether intentional or unintentional, the practice is detrimental.</li> </ol> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/beware_of_greenwashing-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/beware_of_greenwashing-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/beware_of_greenwashing-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/beware_of_greenwashing-f.png 1280w" alt="Beware of greenwashing and bluewashing, advice on how to select an ecolabel and understand the social responsibility of an organization's supply chain." height="361" width="560"> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p></p> <ol start="38" class="default-list"> <li><b>high emitters</b>. A designation given to companies or countries that emit comparatively high volumes of greenhouse gas. Per capita emissions are used to measure the emissions of nations.</li> <li><b>impact investing</b>. An investing strategy that directs money toward companies that create a measurable, positive change in the world. This may also be called socially responsible investing.</li> <li><b>impact sourcing.</b> A sourcing strategy that directs employment and career development opportunities toward people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.</li> <li><b>Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).</b> The United Nations' body for evaluating scientific climate change information. The IPCC releases regular reports on climate impacts and risk, and offers options for mitigation and adaptation.</li> <li><b>loss and damage</b>. Climate-related consequences that people are unable to adapt to, either because the consequence is too severe or the affected community lacks access to the resources to adapt. Loss and damage result from sudden natural disasters, such as floods, or gradual change, such as desertification.</li> <li><b>materiality assessment</b>. A materiality assessment is a formal way of assessing stakeholders' commitment to specific ESG issues and calculating an organization's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/definition/ESG-score">ESG score</a>. It identifies the effect of a certain issue on a company's performance and competitiveness in the market.</li> <li><b>net zero</b>. The result of lowering greenhouse gas emissions as close to zero as possible and balancing remaining emissions with removals.</li> <li><b>Paris Agreement.</b> The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that aims to limit global warming to a 1.5°C temperature increase by the end of the century. The Agreement was adopted at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference.</li> <li><b>recycling</b>. The process of collecting and processing waste materials, ideally to make new products.</li> <li><b>responsible innovation</b>. Responsible innovation prioritizes ethics and social responsibility in the research, design and production of new technologies or evolutions of existing technology. Responsible innovation posits ethics as a design problem.</li> <li><b>scope 1, 2, 3 emissions</b>. Developed by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Scope-1-2-and-3-emissions-Differences-with-examples">scopes give organizations a way to categorize</a> their emissions. Organizations may find it easier to control scopes 1 and 2, but scope 3 emissions are the most difficult to track.</li> </ol> <ul class="default-list"> <li style="list-style-type: none;"> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>scope 1 emissions</b>. The direct emissions generated by an organization's operations. Running machinery, manufacturing products, driving vehicles, heating buildings and providing power to devices generate emissions.</li> <li><b>scope 2 emissions</b>. The indirect emissions generated by an organization's energy purchase and usage. Investment in renewable energy sources may help lower these emissions.</li> <li><b>scope 3 emissions</b>. The indirect emissions generated by an organization's customer and supplier activities.</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <ol start="49" class="default-list"> <li><b>supply chain traceability</b>. In sustainability, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/definition/traceability">traceability</a> not only identifies, tracks and traces materials and commodities, but it also verifies sustainability claims across the value chain.</li> </ol> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3>For more on ESG strategy and management, read the following articles:</h3> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/5-ways-organizations-can-address-the-social-factors-of-ESG">The social 'S' in ESG: Examples, factors and best practices</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/A-timeline-and-history-of-ESG-investing-rules-and-practices">A timeline and history of ESG investing, rules and practices</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/ESG-audit-checklist-steps-for-success">ESG audit checklist: Steps for success</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/ESG-marketing-Why-its-important-and-how-to-draft-a-plan">ESG marketing: Why it's important and how to draft a plan</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/ESG-materiality-assessments-What-CIOs-others-need-to-know">ESG materiality assessments: What businesses need to know</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/ESG-metrics-Tips-and-examples-for-measuring-ESG-performance">ESG metrics: Tips and examples for measuring ESG performance</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/10-key-ESG-and-sustainability-trends-for-business-IT">Key ESG and sustainability trends, ideas for companies</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/ESG-vs-CSR-vs-sustainability-Whats-the-difference">ESG vs. CSR vs. sustainability: What's the difference?</a></p> </div> </div> <ol start="50" class="default-list"> <li><b>sustainability</b>. The ability to meet present needs without compromising the needs of future generations. In practice, sustainability aligns environmental protection, human well-being and economic development.<b></b></li> <li><b>triple bottom line (TBL)</b>. According to the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/triple-bottom-line-3BL">TBL</a> accounting framework, the bottom lines calculate financial performance alongside environmental and social effects.</li> <li><a id="V-X"></a><a id="Y-Z"></a><b>zero waste</b>. The concept of managing products, packaging and materials responsibly to minimize environmental harm.</li> </ol> <p><b>Editor's note: </b><i>This article was updated to reflect changes in terminology around ESG and sustainability topics.</i></p> <p><i>Guilliean Pacheco is a former associate site editor for TechTarget Editorial's CIO, ERP and Sustainability &amp; ESG sites.</i></p> <p><i>Ben Lutkevich is site editor for TechTarget's IT Infrastructure group. Previously, he wrote definitions and features for Whatis.com.</i></p> </section> Sustainable strategies require a basic understanding of the fundamentals. Business and IT leaders can benefit from this list of essential sustainability terms and ESG concepts. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/esg_a468795958.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/sustainability/feature/Sustainability-and-ESG-glossary-Terms-to-know Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT 60 webmaster@techtarget.com