Using SD-WAN and UCaaS to Improve Global Enterprise Communications

You can battle proprietary on-premises video conferencing tools and deal with buffering errors, or enjoy a smoother experience via the cloud.

In this distributed, global business climate, we don’t always have the luxury or travel budget for face to face meetings. In those instances, many global enterprises have turned to Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for a game-changing advantage.

UCaaS is an enterprise messaging and presence technology for online meetings, voice, and video conferencing. The on-demand services work like SaaS and provide high levels of availability so customers don’t need to worry about endpoint software or where to connect from.

In the past, UCaaS was always delivered over a private circuit, which means customers would have to purchase a T1 or MPLS circuit for every branch office for deployment.

This can be prohibitively expensive.

However, there are many new cloud-hosted services which leverage the Internet for transport, making it possible to meet and collaborate globally. Unfortunately, businesses that leverage the Internet need to realize they are connecting through a public medium, which also competes with consumer traffic, causing major congestion which leads to underperformance of the application.

SD-WAN has been catching buzz as a means to solve these issues for many enterprises. SD-WAN utilizes software-defined networking to dynamically route traffic and optimize the connection, using the best one available. It’s far more flexible and scalable than a traditional MPLS, not to mention easier to deploy and maintain. In addition, customers can maintain control over their network from a central dashboard.

But even there, you still have to deal with the public Internet. Thus, you have global conference calls competing with consumer traffic to sites such as Netflix and YouTube.

Fortunately, there are some SD-WAN services providing global enterprises with a cloud-native private network, designed to free UCaaS end users from Internet clutter and optimize the application delivery to improve the communication experience. These services provide organizations with secure enterprise-grade connectivity that can be deployed within days anywhere in the world and offers a 99.99% uptime SLAs to back it up. It can be deployed in hours, replacing MPLS, WAN Optimization devices, and SD-WAN appliances.

Recently, Aryaka held an online webinar with analyst and Network World contributor, Zeus Kerravala, on how SD-WAN solutions improve performance for hosted voice and video applications worldwide.

In the webinar, you will also learn:

• The performance challenges using hosted voice/video over the Internet
• The pros and cons of edge-based SD-WANs for UCaaS solutions
• How a global SD-WAN improves performance and eliminates dropped calls

You can also learn about our partnership with 8×8 Cloud Communications and see how Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN has improved UCaaS performance for 8×8’s global customers.