Broadband Internet connectivity, and the technology innovations that have been developed around it, have driven fast, convenient adoption of new cloud-based applications for businesses worldwide, including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS). .
Implementing these technologies within a converged IP network offers many benefits, including increased user productivity, vendor independence with greater choice of applications and end-point devices (phones, computers, etc.), and the potential to reduce network and equipment costs, and the management of the communications infrastructure.
Secure, Never Down® Connectivity to the Public Cloud
When organizations work with applications like cloud-hosted VoIP, it is important to provide redundancy to ensure the service is highly available and to minimize disruptions.
Ecessa has always been a leader in providing local Internet failover. For many years, Ecessa has also helped customers with cloud-hosted VoIP environments tackle the challenge of providing reliable service and mitigating ISP failures. Traditionally, this has been done using two directly connected Internet circuits and a mechanism to detect issues and initiate a failover to provide Never Down® connectivity, but this approach is dependent on the cloud-hosted VoIP provider recognizing and supporting the failover.
Same IP Failover Using Microsoft Azure
Ecessa has introduced a new level of functionality that allows you to use local Internet connections to redundantly route traffic securely through the Azure Public Cloud, and then route that traffic to the cloud-hosted VoIP provider, eliminating the need for the provider to recognize if there is an issue with your local Internet connections. This is known as Same IP Failover, because although the voice traffic may take multiple ISP paths to reach Azure, the IP relationship between the Azure Public Cloud and the cloud-hosted VoIP provider does not change.
This can be useful for other applications, beyond VoIP, that would benefit from that consistent connection, such as Video Conferencing and Hosted Desktop environments. The Ecessa Azure Public Cloud solution gives you the flexibility to selectively route traffic up to the Azure Public Cloud, while maintaining local ISP load balancing and failover for non-critical and less sensitive traffic, like general Internet traffic. This flexibility can give you better control of the costs of the Azure Public Cloud piece.
As you can see, the solution requires a local Ecessa WANworX appliance and a virtual instance of Ecessa software running on a VM in the Azure Public Cloud. While the Ecessa WANworX appliance is a fixed cost, the virtual instance pricing can vary, based on the resources allocated to the VM and the bandwidth used.
Security
As UCaaS and VoIP deployments grow, the need for robust security solutions will become a vital issue for the service provider. Ecessa SD-WAN products include a built-in layer 7 firewall and VPN gateway. The consolidation of these capabilities simplifies network complexity, lowers costs associated with multiple devices, and lowers support and maintenance costs. You can learn more here.
Get Never Down® Cloud Applications for Less Than $100/Month
Additional Resources
More about PowerLink – https://www.ecessa.com/powerlink/
More about Ecessa Edge – https://www.ecessa.com/ecessa-edge/
More about WANworX – https://www.ecessa.com/products/wanworx/
More about WANworX Virtual Instance – https://www.ecessa.com/products/wanworx-virtual-instance