SD-WAN Product Guide: Why SD-WAN for UCaaS Is the Perfect Office Gift
Phones. Tablets. Game consoles. During the holidays, people ask for high-tech toys first. But what if there were a way to treat your workplace to a little tech-infused magic, too? What if it made collaborating, communicating, and staying productive that much easier year-round?
Well, it's possible, and it's the kind of gift techies, bean-counters, customer-facing front-liners, and pretty much every other role within an organization will love. Enter SD-WAN for UCaaS, a leading SD-WAN product gaining increasing traction in multiple verticals. Using the tool, enterprises have optimized the bandwidth their communications solutions use, while improving quality of experience (QoE), all leading to increased profitability.
That's the kind of gift anyone can get behind. Here are just a few reasons why SD-WAN products like SD-WAN for UCaaS make the perfect holiday upgrade:
1. Quality and Consistency
In a nutshell, SD-WAN for UCaaS works by educating network connections to differentiate between different types of traffic. Following that, it gives the traffic generated by unified communications solutions — a bandwidth-intensive class of products that includes VoIP calling, videoconferencing, collaborative digital environments, and beyond — preferential treatment, ensuring top-notch quality and consistency.
Of course, this isn't to say modern voice and video solutions are unreliable. To the right organization, however, extra quality and consistency are necessary. If a single hiccup or dropped call represents an unacceptable loss of revenue, an SD-WAN product can derive MPLS-or-better levels of quality from commercial broadband and cellular connections. For many offices, that's a wonderful holiday gift.
2. More Options
Consider the number of networking hoops your organization jumps through as it moves more solutions and processes to cloud. Chances are that increased reliance on one end has limited the number of networking options available to you on the other. For example, organizations with a non-negotiable need for call quality and uptime have generally turned to MPLS, as some believe it is the only viable answer for sequence-sensitive real-time communication data.
Why SD-WAN for UCaaS, then? It negates this line of thinking by "squeezing" better use out of the network. Let's say an enterprise with a significant rural presence (and resultant lack of high-bandwidth connectivity options) is skittish about moving to cloud communications. With SD-WAN for UCaaS, they could use a combination of broadband and cellular service to carry their calls, all without sacrificing performance from other cloud-based tools and processes. If your employees are struggling with a phone system that doesn't play nice with more modernized tools, why not gift them a technology that optimizes their connectivity options, no matter how limited they are?
Imagine companies moving their locations from MPLS to standard broadband, a move that could ostensibly save hundreds of dollars per month in each location, all without losing call quality or performance from other cloud-based apps and services.
3. Bigger Savings
In the above example, another business may choose to deploy an MPLS circuit to all locations with unified communication needs, a move that ensures quality but also comes with high complexity and cost. Even a handful of sites on a private circuit can generate a hefty bill, and it only grows as bandwidth needs increase.
Now imagine those same companies moving their locations from MPLS to standard broadband, a move that could ostensibly save hundreds of dollars per month in each location, all without losing call quality or performance from other cloud-based apps and services. Better yet, a company with a hybrid MPLS-broadband network could move its voice communications to an existing broadband or cellular line, meaning no new services cut into the savings they realize by going off a private circuit. For retail, real estate, and other industries where multiple brick-and-mortar locations are the norm, that could mean a gift that makes everyone from accounting to the C-suite flush with cheer, all while trimming hundreds or thousands per month off of operational costs. Happy holidays, indeed.
4. One Back to Pat
Holding a multiregional presence often means dealing with a multiregional collection of communications providers, a reality that can bring stress to even the most experienced IT and administrative professionals. When a rep from Hartford encounters an issue contacting the Helena office, the number of stops (and providers) along the way can lead to endless finger-pointing from a huge cast of third-party vendors.
SD-WAN for UCaaS addresses this via the concept of "one back to pat." Since your communication tools are all laid over the internet, they can all come from the same company, regardless of how many locations you have or how dispersed they are. Besides the potential for volume discounts, this means easier resolutions and faster upgrades, among other single-provider benefits. That's another shiny box under the tree for everyone, from the people who fix tech problems to the ones who cut the checks.
5. Less Disaster, More Recovery
The same strengths that make SD-WAN for UCaaS great for call quality can also have significant disaster recovery benefits. At times, it can remove the "disaster" from the equation altogether. While connectivity solutions of all types come with uptime guarantees, there's no doubt that hiccups still occur. When that road crew up the street accidentally severs a fiber line, the internet provider's response time may dictate just how fast you can get back on the phone again.
But that's not so with the right SD-WAN product. Because SD-WAN for UCaaS is built to utilize multiple connections, moving from a temporarily dead line — even mid-call — is less "major disaster" and more "no problem." In most cases, the call will move seamlessly to the next-best option, be it your backup broadband line or an emergency cellular connection. Considering the productivity drops that come when major communication tools are lost, that's yet another gift for every level of your organization.
Ready to give your employees the hottest enterprise tech gift around? Contact Vonage Business to inquire about SD-WAN for UCaaS.
