Fraud in the cloud communications space is increasing; in 2018 alone, we saw a 60% rise year-on-year in fraud targeting new communications platforms. Enterprises hit by fraud often experience losses in revenue, reputation, and brand loyalty and have to deal with a reduced Quality of Experience (QoE), customer churn, strained customer service resources, and potential regulatory penalties.
Cloud communications fraud is growing much faster than ‘traditional’ telecom fraud for several reasons. The most important is that enterprises and cloud communications service providers are relatively inexperienced in detecting and tackling telecom fraud. Other factors, such as the drive to provide an extremely frictionless authentication process – which can leave the door open to fraudsters – and a multi-layered business and customer ecosystem also play a role in exposing cloud communications platforms to fraud.
Developing fraud protection expertise from scratch is expensive and requires a long lead time. It might be most efficient for enterprises and cloud communications service providers to work in partnership with telecom operators, who have been fighting fraud for years. There are a few compelling reasons for this:
- Broad expertise – Telecom operators typically have operations that span across a number of communications segments, from voice and roaming to cloud communications, machine-to-machine communications, and more. The fraud knowledge emerging from this broad spectrum of solutions is often rich enough to cover an ever-growing range of sophisticated fraud types, methods, and figures. Both enterprises operating their own cloud platforms and cloud communications service providers stand to benefit from this knowledge and experience, to achieve effective and proactive prevention of fraud attacks.
- 24x7 monitoring – Fraud is a 24x7 industry, and criminals often time their attacks for non-working hours or holidays. On the other hand, most enterprises and cloud communications platform providers don’t have the resources to proactively monitor fraud on their platform on a 24x7 basis. For example, an enterprise or UCaaS provider can’t monitor every virtual number they utilize across their network every single hour of the year. On the other hand, a telecom operator will typically already have either an in-house or outsourced dedicated fraud team monitoring their networks around the clock.
- Increased visibility – Geographically dispersed teams and remote working present many advantages for enterprises in terms of cost and productivity. However, this dispersed environment typically leaves networks and cloud platforms vulnerable to fraud attacks. For example, without knowing where a virtual number is being used across an organization and its customer base, enterprises can’t protect it. A traditional telco partnered with a UCaaS provider can ensure increased visibility with a proactive fraud solution.
When enterprises or cloud communications platform providers collaborate with established telecom operators, there is far greater scope to tackle fraud intelligently, proactively and effectively. BICS’ FraudGuard solution offers the expertise, monitoring capabilities and visibility that businesses require to protect their assets against the rising threat.
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