SD-WAN for Unified Communications: VoIP, Video, and Collaboration
Unified Communication (UC) connects branch and remote offices at all times, thereby reducing the stress of expense and travel. High-definition videos, superior-quality voice calls, higher bandwidth, and instant messaging are a breeze, increasing employee productivity. Unified Communication can give a rich user experience across devices irrespective of location. The downside is the challenging bandwidth as the organisation expands, making real-time communications over MPLS expensive and a far-reaching proposition for small companies to embrace Unified Communications. It is here that SD-WAN can pitch in. Let’s see how SD-WAN benefits UC applications.
SD-WAN provides robust solutions for creating, deploying, and managing distributed networks for enterprises depending heavily on cloud applications. Experience flexibility while connecting to the Internet VPN, MPLS, and public internet, giving you security and reliability at an affordable cost. SD-WAN offers centralised control to manage policies and security. With user productivity and application delivery constantly changing, SD-WAN helps to adapt to the changing application demands.
How can Unified Communications improve business policies and QoS?
Reliability is the key to any network connectivity; at this, SD-WAN does not compromise whether it is cloud or on-premises UC. SD-WAN helps to achieve your business policies and QoS effectively through automated enforcement of performance objectives giving access to privileges to users.
QoS can be automated to meet the prioritisation of UC apps and defines the WAN path without jitter, latency, and packet loss, transporting the apps across a different network of your choice, be it a public or private network, without security capabilities. For instance, business-critical applications and videos are given preference over games, and entertainment videos provide a better user experience at less cost as it is sent through less congested networks. QoS prioritises apps, data flow, and user access to meet SLA standards. Meanwhile, network QoS provides the best bandwidth and network access to essential apps, especially during network congestion. It also offers appropriate bandwidth for applications like live video, VoIP, and thin clients, without investing in extra bandwidth. Your IT department can easily manage policies by setting the path like public internet for groups or specific apps. It is affordable as IT can transfer bandwidth-eating apps to cheaper internet.
How does UC support your branch offices?
Branch offices are critical for your business performance, and collaborating with the help of UC tools is the key. The bandwidth for video calling or streaming videos is high, and the existing bandwidth could be insufficient. Earlier, headquarters used to move to broadband to satisfy the high bandwidth demands of the branch offices. With SD-WAN, the solution is simple and affordable. It provides rapid deployment of network connections to every branch office with centralised control to keep the deployment and management simple. The zero-touch deployment and provisioning are automated. Now changes across branch offices can be made quickly and with simple alterations to security, port policy, or single traffic, which means no downtime.
Higher performance with UC
SD-WAN provides a unified view from the cloud console. It offers integrated management of cloud networks, hybrid WANs, and branch wired and wireless LANs, all under one policy framework. The complex and elaborate CLI configuration part can be discounted with centralised management using menu-driven workflows. The cloud-centric SD-WAN provides faster network expansion with the help of zero-touch provisioning at remote locations, automated one-click connectivity, and transcription into a cloud environment.
Application-aware policies can help optimise bandwidth and detect applications on your network. SD-WAN helps monitor application performance and troubleshoot the issues arising from time to time. It delivers applications depending on the business intent policies without requiring new capabilities. The deep packet inspection identifies application flows and categorises over 1,300 applications on the cloud and on-premises.
Improving UC with SD-WAN
SD-WAN has the potential to offload considerable data in the form of VoIP, video, and recreational traffic from expensive MPLS to affordable edge internet to the cloud directly is not just a cost-saving proposition but also an efficient and improved UC experience. This way, the bandwidth is saved for critical apps while reducing wasteful bandwidth usage. This enables faster app access, enhancing user performance and helping SD-WAN realise its maximum potential.
SD-WAN integrates UC platforms with enterprise WAN. Administrators have control over traffic flow, and it helps them define policies and choose the best path for priority traffic. Combining SD-WAN with UC ensures that UC applications run securely and optimally.
SMOAD SD-WAN allows enterprises to capture control of IT activities by enhancing the user experience of UC infrastructure. With SMOAD, you have the key to multiple public and private links at affordable cost. Moreover, SMOAD offers mobile aggregated redundancy to keep UC up and running at all times.
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