You may have heard the terms “Zero Trust” or “Zerotrust” being tossed around in marketing materials, but what does Zero Trust really mean?  Is it just a trendy word, or words?

The traditional castle and moat security model doesn’t work in modern cybersecurity as so many of us are now telecommuting and working in the cloud. A more recent paradigm called Zero Trust is trending. 

The Zero Trust movement being lead in some part by the U.S. Government. In 2020 the director of DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, laid out three main tenets of Zero Trust, “Never trust, always verify; assume breach; and verify explicitly.”

As you are aware, this is a data-driven world. Activity data is used everywhere to help shape products, cities, experiences, and just about everything you can think of. Sensor and GPS technology, software interfaces, and smartphones are the catalysts for much of it, but in the workplace, there are other methods for collecting information and gaining insights.

For instance, companies have used occupancy sensors for years to understand building usage patterns better, manage capacity planning, and create more energy-efficient environments. In today’s hybrid work environments, they are even more useful. Now, companies can measure how much to stock the snack areas based on heat maps showing the space's usage. Similarly, companies can also gauge the use of attractive common areas and other perks. Armed with data, they make better decisions on the usage of space, specific facilities, and plan for future needs. 

Nowhere is data more useful than in the planning for meeting and collaboration spaces. Today’s systems measure how much rooms are used, what equipment, how many people are in a meeting, and more. With hybrid work environments, the future for balancing in-office versus remote work is being defined in real-time. With advanced workplace analytics, a company in Scottsdale or anywhere in the world can study usage and create more adaptable and optimized environments. Keep reading below to learn more about how analytics can shape your workplace.

This quarter we took it back to an organization we have worked with in the past, Feed My Starving Children! FMSC is a nonprofit organization empowering volunteers to pack meals for the malnourished in nearly 70 countries, hungry in body and spirit. With most of our team working remote now, we saw this as a great opportunity to gather our colleagues, friends and family members and work together in support of a wonderful cause. Through our donation efforts we were able to cover the costs of 3,200 meals, feeding 8 children for a year! Through our volunteer efforts, we were able to help pack 28,080 meals, feeding 76 children for a year!

Is your business equipped for hybrid meetings? 

Whether your office is adopting a hybrid work model or is entirely in-person, video calls are here to stay. As remote meetings with clients, contractors, job applicants, and training personnel become more convenient, video calls will remain ‘the norm.’

So how will your teams gather in conference rooms to join meetings—while ensuring everyone is seen and heard clearly? As many business owners and integrators are realizing, it’s not as simple as putting a laptop at the head of the table.

Luckily, tools like Teams Rooms and Teams-certified hardware open the doors to collaborative, easy-to-use conferencing spaces. If you’re curious about hybrid conferencing solutions, continue reading to learn how Teams Rooms work and what options are best for your business.

As we move into an increasingly digital and hybrid world, audio-video systems now encompass a wider range of technology than ever. We use IP-based systems that connect touch screens, displays, conferencing devices, and more. Across a large scale, these AV systems require the same level of security and monitoring as other IT systems. But in most IT departments, there simply isn’t the capacity to adequately handle AV.

Instead, many companies are switching to managed AV services to ease the burden on their organization. A managed service provider supplies the network, application, and system management through a subscription model that suits your business’s needs. 

To ensure you’re receiving the highest level of assistance, your AV service provider should offer service delivery management. Service delivery management is a process that guarantees the network will perform well and correspond to your service level agreement. 

We get it—terms like “service delivery management” and “AV services” may sound abstract. In this article, we’ll break down what managed AV services do, why service delivery management is important, and how it can enhance and simplify your business’s technology experience.

Is there anything more annoying than listening to a wonderful podcast with great audio where the talent sounds crisp and clear, only to be interrupted by some low-budget advertisement where the hiss in the recording is nearly as loud as the speech? I’m all for supporting artists, but if you’re going to interrupt my show, the LEAST you can do is pay attention to the audio quality of the content. I know I sound like a grumpy old man, “Back in my day, advertisements were recorded in a professional broadcast or recording studio where they knew a thing or two about signal to noise.” The point is, that hiss that creeps up every now and again is representative of an audio system that is not meeting user expectations. If users can hear that hiss, something is not right in the gain structure of the system. The system signal (the sounds we want) are not playing at levels far enough away from the system noise (the sounds we don’t want). This difference is called a signal to noise ratio, and it’s what we’ll be discussing today.

Whether you’re an IT manager or an AV integrator working with corporate businesses, you’ve surely noticed that software as a service (SaaS) is more in demand than ever. In the past seven years, the SaaS industry has grown by 500%. And today, organizations with more than 1,000 employees will routinely use more than 150 SaaS applications. 

To use the majority of AV software products, you need to host them. Off-the-shelf software solutions like Slack and Google Workspace are easy to implement, but they don’t leave room for customized accounts, and if you run into any issues, you’ll have little support. 

An alternative is to privately host your software with SaaS. Cloud hosting requires servers and maintenance that is out of scope for most AV integrators. But luckily, a managed service provider like Level 3 Audiovisual can supply your business with privately managed SaaS. You’ll still access the software through a web browser, but the infrastructure and applications are privately operated and hosted. 

Read on to learn how SaaS will work for your business and make your software experience simpler, more secure, and cost-effective.

Once a term previously only used in business and production discussions, it seems that everyone is now acutely aware of the global supply chain. The pandemic shutdowns caused production and logistical disruptions usually only seen in wartime situations. While everyone has heard of automobile production slowdowns due to a critical shortage of specialty semiconductor chips, those in the AV and IT spaces also know it’s affected AV systems that don’t get as much attention as automobiles. 

What does this mean? Just like Ford cars sitting in vast lots waiting for chips that enable them to work, specialty AV solutions have also experienced production and availability delays. Whether it's room control systems or integrated AV soundbar solutions for meeting rooms, the deployment of video conferencing and collaboration solutions is challenged in many organizations. 

As workforces return to offices, this presents more of a challenge. With hybrid work environments, the need to reimagine communication and collaboration between in-office and remote workers is even more important, yet the latest technology that facilitates it is not readily available. 

Fortunately, there are alternatives. While there’s no substitute for the specialized chipsets that provide critical functionality that make cars run, there are solutions to integrate software with commodity hardware to provide the missing pieces in the deployment of communication and collaboration solutions. Let’s explore how a managed services model can help your Scottsdale, AZ organization meet its hybrid workforce technology challenges.