How to Boost Performance, Enhance User Experience and Maintain Network Efficiency
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) combines various communication services, such as voice, video, messaging, and collaboration tools, into a single platform, accessible over the internet.
UCaaS helps organisations to increase productivity and improve collaboration among employees, suppliers and partners in our day-to-day business operations, and at a very low and predictable cost.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global UCaaS market is expected to grow to $24.8 billion by 2024, up from $15.8 billion in 2019. This growth must be supported by reliable and consistent connectivity. If enterprises don’t act now to streamline their connectivity, they risk losing the competitive advantages that UCaaS applications provide them with.
While the use of UCaaS is on the rise in the workplace, decision makers still have concerns about the reliability of network connections in their day-to-day operations.
In this blog, we will discuss how Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD WAN) can help to overcome common UCaaS challenges, enhances connectivity performance, and creates a superior end-user experience.
Common UCaaS Challenges
Despite the huge opportunities that UCaaS can bring to enterprises in terms of productivity and collaboration, there are some common challenges.
If an enterprise’s internet connection or underlying network is not capable of the latencies required for cloud-based UCaaS solutions, they may experience:
- Packet Loss – causes pixelation during video calls which lead to a poor customer experience. This could potentially drive an enterprise customer to call another competitor with better video call quality, leading to loss of business for the enterprise.
- Jittery Voice Calls – Jitter refers to the variation in the delay of data packets arriving at their destination. Inconsistent delay can disrupt real-time communication and lead to choppy audio, pixelated video and dropped calls.
- Latency/Packet Loss – data, including file sharing, failing to reach its destination. This is also the cause of poor voice/video calling.
- Legacy Network Costs – expensive and unagile legacy networks are often incapable of keeping up with customer demands.
- Unresponsive Screen Sharing – slow and unresponsive screen sharing during presentations and demos to customers.
Streamlining Connectivity with SD WAN
SD WAN is a virtual WAN architecture that manages an enterprise’s network connectivity across dispersed office sites, data centres and clouds. It can either work as a standalone network technology or enhance existing network infrastructure such as MPLS to ensure performance for latency-sensitive UCaaS applications. It also has the ability to control traffic routing and add network security functions.
One use case for SD WAN is using it for local internet breakout from an enterprise branch office. This creates an internet access point positioned as close to the user as possible, which can intelligently route traffic for different UCaaS applications.
Standard WAN routers are usually incapable of distinguishing between different applications’ data packets, which means they are all in the same queue despite some being higher priority in terms of latency and QoS. Epsilon SD WAN can intelligently map out and prioritise routing for latency-sensitive UCaaS applications, to ensure end user experience.
As shown in the diagram, Epsilon’s SD WAN can work hand-in-hand with Epsilon’s wider global network fabric for more advanced use cases.
Cloud-first enterprises can overlay SD WAN with hybrid and multi-cloud environments for better WAN performance, simplified WAN management and increased WAN availability.
Benefits
- Performance – enterprises can increase the performance and availability of their UCaaS applications on any type of transport with integrated WAN optimisation. This helps with latency-sensitive applications like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video conferencing, for a seamless calling experience.
- Quality of Service – enterprises can deliver optimal application performance and QoS under any network condition, even during interrupted periods. SD WAN’s capabilities like path conditioning, intelligent routing and load balancing help to provide the best end user experience around the clock.
- Security – a comprehensive SD WAN solution will unify firewalls, analytics, threat detection, intrusion and application control with UCaaS applications for optimal security. This can help to keep UCaaS applications running smoothly without the risk of threats.
- Cost-Efficiency – SD WAN allows UCaaS traffic to be routed directly to the internet from branch office and remote worker, reducing the bandwidth needed across the whole enterprise WAN.
- Agility – SD WAN is highly agile and better designed to meet the changing needs of businesses in fast-paced environments. It’s much easier to scale SD WAN up or down as required for different UCaaS applications, compared to legacy networks.
Meeting the Connectivity Demands of Tomorrow
There is huge potential for SD WAN to have a real business impact and secure the performance of UCaaS applications for enterprises globally. Enterprises need to take a closer look at their WAN to streamline their network and ensure reliable connectivity for UCaaS applications, without lags, downtime or jitter.
With SD WAN, having better control and visibility helps to maximise their investment into these cloud-based applications. As a result, enterprises can deliver better user experiences through seamless voice and video calling, file and screen sharing as well as other collaboration tools.This increases employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
As enterprises continue to embrace UCaaS to foster efficient communication and collaboration, addressing network challenges becomes imperative. The dynamic nature of SD WAN offers an ideal solution to optimise UCaaS network performance while ensuring security, reliability, and a superior user experience.
In the long-term, enterprises will gain new levels of agility and flexibility by transforming their network with SD WAN. They can be sure that their network will utilise the best connectivity paths and add on new network services as their business grows. Get in touch with Epsilon to find out how SD WAN can help to meet their connectivity demands of today, as well as being prepared for the demands of tomorrow.
