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SD-WAN: A No Brainer for Unified Communications

Deliver high quality voice and application performance over SD-WAN for your employees, nationwide

Organizations utilize Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to bridge the gap between multiple locations and remote workers. A full suite of voice, video, instant message and screen-sharing capabilities enable dispersed teams to interact as if they were in the same office, increasing productivity and collaboration.

However, with a growing number of cloud-based business applications eating through bandwidth, it is difficult to protect the performance of Unified Communications. While delays in packet delivery can be unnoticeable in some applications, the poor quality of a call or video conference can be severely noticeable and disruptive to a user’s experience.

Organizations in the past have relied on expensive MPLS connections and private networks to support their UC systems. Due to their intrusive costs, complicated implementations and time-consuming management, many are trying to find alternatives to support their UCaaS needs. Implementing software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) to protect the performance of mission-critical applications becomes a clear goal. It lets organizations take control of their network and reap the benefits from cost-savings to reliable UC performance.

Here are a few things to expect with SD-WAN:

Guaranteed UCaaS Uptime

UCaaS systems are notoriously sensitive to network speed and reliability issues like latency, jittery or delays. To provide employees with a positive user experience and performance, UC needs a continuous stream of bandwidth.

SD-WAN lets you take advantage of multiple carriers and network diversity to improve performance and guarantee uptime. It aggregates the most cost-effective WAN connections to ensure you get more bandwidth efficiency for voice and application performance. SD-WAN automatically corrects a struggling connection and steers traffic to a better performing connection, so you never experience session drops or link degradation. While re-routing, SD-WAN uses its redundant dynamic failover to prevent interruptions in application sessions and ensures you’re not impacted by carrier outages.

The freedom to mix and match your network technologies and connections allows for more control over costs, eliminates dependency on one provider and guarantees uptime for your Unified Communications.

UCaaS Performance Becomes a Priority

In a typical office, there are many types of activities happening simultaneously that can cause degradation to your UCaaS system. One employee could be using YouTube, another could be streaming music – all of these activities could slow voice traffic and potentially prevent someone from making a quality sales call.

SD-WAN allows you to control how bandwidth is utilized by setting prioritization policies. You can identify which applications take priority on your network to ensure the performance of mission-critical applications, like UC, will never be compromised.

This makes SD-WAN a compelling choice for distributed organizations that work across a variety of broadband providers.

Better User Experience with Automatic Optimization

In addition to steering traffic according to the policies set, SD-WAN also automatically makes optimization decisions on the fly.

It does this by proactively processing low-priority packets in a different way to ensure the reliability of your UCaaS solution. When a link fails to respond, on-demand remediation occurs to protect you from blackout and brownout conditions. Cloud gateways are installed to automatically select the best path for traffic while eliminating performance issues between geographically separated UCaaS end-points.

Adopting a SD-WAN solution can help your organization build a scalable, flexible and affordable network infrastructure that makes it easier for you to engage in digital transformation initiatives like Unified Communications. A fully managed SD-WAN solution can offload pesky and time-consuming network tasks to a 24/7/365 team that is dedicated to your high-availability needs.

As UCaaS and business applications continue to demand an increasing amount of bandwidth, SD-WAN offers a simplified solution that aggregates bandwidth and prioritizes traffic based on network conditions. To learn more about SD-WAN with RingSquared, contact us today.