Shift Gears on UCaaS with Aryaka SD-WAN as-a-Service
What makes Unified Communications as a service, or UCaaS as it is more popularly known, such a no-brainer for industries worldwide? To answer that question; imagine a day with all your communication channels down. No voice/ video calls, no emails, no file sharing and absolutely zero collaboration. I call it…Vacation! But on a more serious note…
Considering that we are seemingly plugged into everything and everyone the world-over and just how much of an extension of the business active communication has become, communications technology continues to evolve, whatever the label be. This includes UCaaS, CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), with a subset of the vendors outlined in the diagram below.
The days of relying on simple voice and fax to conduct business are clearly long gone. Thanks to globalization, expansion, offshore development centers, international clientele, remote employees and road warriors, effective collaboration is the cornerstone of the modern global workforce, pushing it all forward from one level to another.
it wasn’t so long ago when global mega-corps were shelling out an insane amount of money to pay bills for dispersed communication platforms and applications. Until that is, UCaaS picked up steam as an essential collaboration tool, integrating it all into a single platform and interface. From email, directory services, video conferencing, calls & multimedia to file sharing, instant messaging, collaboration tools and more, UCaaS brought it all under one roof. The result? Enhanced transparency and productivity, fewer mistakes and less lost information.
Fast forward to 2020, and as industries continue to sprint towards moving all or part of their communication tools to the cloud, there is an obvious question to be asked. Is UCaaS alone an elixir for all your communication and collaboration woes? Sadly…NO.
Miscommunicated=Misunderstood
UCaaS’s rising fortunes indicates that the industry solemnly sides with the cloud when it comes to performance, scalability and cost savings. But cloud services come with a condition: they are only as good as the network upon which they are delivered.
While UCaaS relieves in-house IT teams from the cumbersome task of managing on-premise solutions and system upkeep, it raises the stakes for WAN administrators. Because when it comes to real-time communication, the overall user experience, productivity and adoption rate is directly proportional to the robustness of network.
The public internet serves as the default network choice for many, and understandably so. The problem with this approach? Not only is it far from being business-grade, it also does not provide any QoS capabilities for real-time traffic. It might work well across small distances in some cases, but as the distance grows and the traffic traverses through multiple peering internet services providers, the user experience takes a hit. The impact? Blackouts, pixelated videos, call drops, white noise, garbled audio and everything else in between.
Even over short distances, UCaaS traffic competes for bandwidth with other TCP applications and is subject to the risks of high latency, packet loss and congestion. While UDP traffic can take such variations with relatively minimal productivity disruption, UCaaS handles more bandwidth-intensive flows and any bottlenecks can undermine the quality and availability of services.
Aryaka and UCaaS: Better Together
The limitations of traditional networks can be addressed using Aryaka’s fully managed SD-WAN solution that is designed from the ground-up as a cloud-first architecture, thus reducing the complexity of rolling out a UCaaS solution.
Aryaka sets industry standards for availability, deterministic network behavior and security. Typically, internet quality is considered a design consideration outside the control of the SD-WAN domain, but the Aryaka solution avoids this potential pitfall. Aryaka recognizes and marks UCaaS traffic, steering it optimally and dynamically across hardened internet access links and through the global L2 Aryaka private network infrastructure. The immediate benefits include:
Superior Experience– Quality collaboration sessions using a private network with built-in WAN optimization to minimize jitter, latency, and packet loss.
Guaranteed Bandwidth– QoS for real-time communications, including service prioritization, traffic shaping, and bandwidth reservation algorithms.
Non-stop uptime– Enterprise-grade connectivity to UCaaS platforms through a private network eliminating service interruptions and dropped calls.
Reliable Performance– Intelligent last-mile optimization ensuring reliable voice and video performance to all locations, including those with poor-quality Internet links.
Let Us Help You
Still sitting on the fence about whether to choose Aryaka as your network partner for UCaaS? Read the case study to find out how Aryaka helped a US-based transportation and logistics company improve the performance of their UCaaS solution and initiate a company-wide digital transformation initiative.
The logistics veteran was trying hard to scale these initiatives across branch offices in the USA, Canada and Europe, only to find out that their legacy network was failing to keep up with the requirements of these modern cloud-based applications.
As the company went back to their planning board, they realized it was the network that needed to be modernized first — to get the most out of this initiative. Read how Aryaka helped.
Want to know more? Register for a free demo.
