SD-WAN & UCC: Key points of digitization

Why digitalization needs more than cloud and software

In today’s ever-changing business world, it is dangerous to lag behind your competitors when it comes to digitalization. Due to the increasing dependence on cloud services, permanent availability of connectivity and networking must be ensured. Telecommunications providers have adapted their network products to the increased use of cloud services so that corporate networks support all their users’ most important applications in a way that ensures effective and efficient working.

SD-WAN vs. conventional WANs

In many companies, existing requirements for connectivity and availability to cloud services can no longer be optimally met by tried-and-tested technologies such as MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) or other conventional WANs with hub and spoke designs and central Internet breakouts. With cloud access, the company first routes all data traffic from the branch office via the central Internet breakout to the company headquarters. There, the central firewall checks the traffic before it is forwarded to the next peering point of the cloud provider such as Microsoft, Amazon AWS or Google, and the same route back again. This results in unnecessary network traffic, long round-trip times and high bandwidth requirements in the VPN. Network costs increase and user experience decreases. Another reason why conventional WANs such as MPLS are losing importance is the lack of security solutions for cloud access by mobile and remote employees.

In contrast, SD-WAN is ideal in terms of security (SASE)

Network reliability, efficient bandwidth utilization and a wide range of connectivity options: all of these features are critical for businesses, especially at a time when no one can afford significant network downtime and reliable bandwidth availability is essential to ensure the optimal performance of important applications. SD-WAN combined with SASE brings exactly these requirements together in one architecture.

UCC vs conventional telephony systems

Companies also have requirements for voice communication that are often not fully met by conventional telephony systems.

Flexibility: while conventional telephony systems (telephone systems) are rigid and inflexible, virtual UCC solutions offer absolute flexibility because they can grow dynamically with the company and perfectly serve trends such as nomadic use or working from home. This means that employees can be seamlessly integrated into corporate communications, regardless of their location.

Integration: the increasingly desired integration of systems such as CRM or ticket systems can be easily achieved with new UCC solutions, or are even available as standard. Many customers now map all their telephone functions in Microsoft Teams. This means that there is only one communication platform for employees across the company that covers all needs. Thanks to natively integrated third-party solutions for MS Teams, this is very easy and cost-effective to implement. We at SAVECALL have been using such a solution in our own company for over 3 years, have excellent experience with it and are happy to support you in your planning in this regard.

Individual calls: with a unified communications solution, a company also benefits from the fact that it can make individual video calls directly via a single app compared to a conventional telephone system. It is also possible to share screen content at any time. In times of decentralized workplaces, these features help to ensure efficient team collaboration. A normal telephone system or telephony solution no longer meets user requirements. When it comes to employee communication, collaboration is becoming much more important than telephony. The latter plays a subordinate role and should therefore simply be incorporated into the collaboration tool as an additional feature. Jumping back and forth between different apps and maintaining and paying for multiple systems is no longer necessary.