The migration to the cloud is well under way, but businesses are still leaving mountains of data behind on-premises. When we began building the Genesys® PureCloud® platform, we knew we needed to develop a way for our customers to pull their on-premises data into the platform. So we created the PureCloud Bridge, a gateway that connects PureCloud back to the data stores that reside in our customers’ data centers. But as more businesses adopt cloud contact center solutions, we’re exploring additional ways to help them easily transition to cloud software while covering these use cases securely and efficiently.

One mechanism we’re evaluating is Ngrok, a purpose-built piece of technology that’s focused on creating publicly accessible URLs for internal web servers. Ngrok has proven use cases with many leading cloud software providers, so it seems like a natural fit for PureCloud, too.

Ngrok has a lot of cool features, but those that are particularly useful with our platform include authenticated tunneling to local resources and a dashboard that lets you view requests and responses for auditing and troubleshooting. When coupled with PureCloud Data Action integrations, these features become powerful tools to securely access data that’s stored behind a corporate firewall.

Using Data Actions and Ngrok offers some distinct advantages over the Web Service Data Dip connector on the PureCloud Bridge. First, Data Actions allow for a flexible request and response structures that enable more complex web service calls to be made—without having to use middleware to translate. Next, Data Actions are structured to avoid logging request and response payloads, which means they can be used in workflows that handle sensitive information (i.e., PCI- or HIPAA-compliant call flows). Lastly, Data Actions and Ngrok provide a more transparent implementation that offers better visibility and control over data access patterns—a useful feature for IT admins and auditors in regulated environments.

For a technical look at implementing Ngrok and Data Actions together, read this PureCloud developer blog post on how to securely access a local service from the cloud.