Unified Communications as a Service

Improving UCaaS Performance with SD-WAN

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Overview

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based suite of applications that typically includes email, messaging, chat, phone, video conferencing, calendar and file sharing. These applications work together to not only make communications easier, but also more effective and productive. The orchestration of these functions allows you to see your coworkers’ statuses and choose the best form of communication at any given moment, whether that is an instant message, a live phone call, or a less time sensitive email. It allows you to schedule video, phone, and in-person meetings with ease from almost any application. The promise of UCaaS is that you will never miss a phone call again with unified calling on all of your work (and even personal) devices.

Because it is sold and managed “as a service,” businesses can skip high initial set up costs and complexity and quickly deploy advanced collaborative communication features. This is significant, because studies have shown that poor communication leads to losses in the millions of dollars every year. The flexible and cloud-based nature of UCaaS makes it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes across a range of industries.

Secure, Never Down® Connectivity to the Public Cloud

The cloud-based nature of UCaaS also requires that organizations have a rock-solid internet connection, which is somewhat beyond their control. An internet service provider (ISP) may experience service disruptions or outages at any time, on any given day. This presents an inconvenience at the very least, and business disaster at the worst.

When organizations work with applications like cloud-hosted UCaaS, it is important to provide redundancy to ensure the service is highly available and to minimize disruptions. Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) has enjoyed worldwide adoption to do just that – improve network reliability through resilience and a range of software controls.

Same IP Failover Using Microsoft Azure

Ecessa SD-WAN 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 UCaaS 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 traffic may take multiple ISP paths to reach Azure, the IP relationship between the Azure Public Cloud and the cloud-hosted UCaaS provider does not change.

This can be useful for other applications, beyond UCaaS, that would benefit from consistent connectivity, such as hosted desktop environments. The Ecessa SD-WAN solution gives you the flexibility to selectively route traffic up to the Azure Public Cloud, while maintaining local ISP load balancing and failover for noncritical and less sensitive traffic, like general internet traffic. This flexibility can give you better control of the costs of the Azure Public Cloud piece.

Security

As UCaaS deployments grow, the need for robust security solutions is a vital issue for the organizations using it, as well as their service providers. Your solution, therefore, needs to include a layer 7 firewall and VPN gateway. The consolidation of these capabilities in Ecessa offerings simplifies network complexity, lowers costs associated with multiple devices, and lowers support and maintenance costs.