Lifesize was recently awarded the 2016 IBM Beacon Award for outstanding service hosted on IBM® Cloud®, and we wanted to spend a little time talking about what that partnership means for the security, reliability and overall performance of the Lifesize network.

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When we first started our transition from an on-premise implementation to a cloud-hosted service two years ago, we wanted to find an infrastructure solution that aligned with our security requirements, would be easily accessible for management and deployment and, most importantly, capable of scaling globally to keep up with the growth of our business. IBM Cloud was a perfect fit for that partnership. It was created with scalability in mind and built to perform, providing the core connectivity, reliability and bandwidth needed to deliver a world-class video experience.

One of the major advantages of IBM Cloud is its global network of data centers that are all connected with a fast, private network. When you have Lifesize calls or meetings with participants located around the world, instead of making the entire distance on the public internet, the call is routed to the nearest IBM Cloud PoP (point of presence), where it jumps on their ultrafast 2,000 Gbps fiber network to traverse the globe with minimal handoffs between data providers. The call isn’t constantly hopping between different network switches and providers like it would on the public internet, which would increase latency and produce a much lower quality call.

What IBM Cloud Means for End Users

The user opens the app on their device of choice and clicks on a name in the directory, and the call just works — no matter where they are in the world.

What IBM Cloud Means for Account Admins

The account admin story is a bit more interesting. We know that once an organization adopts Lifesize, video becomes mission-critical for the business. If video is down, business stops and the help desk tickets roll in. That’s why we build our solutions to be highly resilient and fault-tolerant and utilize a network with best-in-class performance. The Lifesize architecture was also designed with redundancy so that if one of our data centers were to ever go down for catastrophic failure, the calls filtering through that center would immediately route to the next closest data center. And it’s transparent to end users. Check out our comprehensive guide to Lifesize architecture for more details on connectivity and data center locations.

Standing Behind the Service

With data centers strategically placed around the globe and an application designed to take advantage of the best-in-class performance of the IBM Cloud, we stand behind our service with a financially backed “three nines” service level agreement (SLA), covering the connectivity and availability of our cloud-based service. This agreement promises less than 0.1% unplanned downtime per month and is aimed at providing our customers with the most reliable video conferencing solution out there. All communication streams support 128-bit AES and TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption for all signaling by default, too. These are your business conversations were talking about, so we don’t mess around when it comes to security or service availability.

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We recently published a new guide to ID10t-proof video conferencing. In it, we walk through ID10t-proofing the notoriously ID10t error-ridden technology of video conferencing and provide a breakdown of the administrative features and services that make Lifesize a ridiculously reliable, stable, secure and simple-to-use experience. Download a copy to learn more.