Hybrid Unified Communications and Collaboration Has Benefits and Drawbacks
Organizations today have many options when it comes to their UC services, and the devices they use to consume those UC services. No longer are businesses limited by the technologies located within their premise – they can now have their services hosted in the cloud.
Businesses taking advantage of this flexibility are blending on-premise UC deployments with public and private cloud offerings to orchestrate a best of breed hybrid communications architecture. This hybrid UC&C approach delivers high return on investment, and is fast becoming one of the best methodologies to efficiently and effectively leverage advanced communications and collaboration technologies.
But these hybrid UC architectures also add an additional level of complexity to support. Because hybrid environments typically traverse multiple platforms and technologies, such as Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, HP, Juniper, and so on – they present challenges to the IT and Operations teams who are responsible for their service levels.
Hybrid deployments mean more complexity in the architecture, more devices, and typically less control by the IT and UC operations teams, as critical services are often hosted beyond their reach. In addition to supporting the devices and endpoints, these hybrid environments add additional overhead on the network requiring constant capacity analysis and fine tuning to deliver the expected service levels to users. Those same users are oblivious to these operational and support challenges – they simply want exceptional service, anytime, from anywhere.
Managing Service Levels in the Hybrid UC Environment
To successfully manage hybrid UC environments and service levels, UC operations teams must have the ability to manage and gain visibility across the entire domain stack that comprises the premise-based UC assets and transport layers, as well as the cloud-consumed services. To successfully ensure service levels in the hybrid environment, teams must capture analytics across the entire architecture, and have the ability to pinpoint the demarcation point of service delivery issues before services are impacted.
Service assurance solutions for hybrid environments must provide the right information, and the ability to analyze that information in context to understand where true root cause of service anomalies are occurring. Only then can UC operations teams can get in front of service issues, and resolve them prior to impacting end users or the business.
Unfortunately, most UC management solutions were built for traditional premise based configurations, and cannot provide a blended view.
Tone’s ReliaTel is the answer for hybrid UC&C environments. ReliaTel is a strategic management solution with extensive capabilities to proactively monitor the hybrid UC&C environment, with comprehensive capabilities that span numerous platforms from Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, and many others.
ReliaTel Provides a Unique Approach to Hybrid UC Management
ReliaTel management is broad and deep, delivering the visibility and control needed for hybrid architectures to ensure service levels, improve quality and performance, reduce service issues, and drive higher UC adoption and ROI.
But broad and deep analytics and data alone aren’t enough for the hybrid environment. Because a network could have hundreds if not thousands of devices, routes and endpoints, the way the data is presented is crucial, and the way that data can be used determines success or failure.
The ReliaTel Visual360 management portal provides the necessary correlation of how assets relate to each other and the problem to speed root cause analysis in the hybrid environment. Through Visual360, correlated views are provided within the context of the issue at hand, equipping operations with the intelligence and analytics required to understand the true cause of the issue, and pinpoint it at the source.
Further, ReliaTel provides integrated analytics and metrics that enable operations teams to make the right corrections, once root cause is isolated and identified. Solving the issue correctly, the first time, in a very short time window results in much higher service levels, significantly reduced service interruptions, higher user experience, and lower overall support costs.
Through ReliaTel Visual360, UC operations teams can immediately see the relationships between devices, sessions, resources, and the transport layer – correlated in their view with interactive ability to drill down and isolate the true root cause of issues with end points and the transport layer, as well as quality and performance degradation. By combining correlated views with the ability to filter and focus in context on the specific assets related to the problem, root cause can be quickly determined and effort can be effectively applied to solving the RIGHT problem, every time.
Using ReliaTel, hybrid UC operations teams have the capabilities necessary to proactively optimize the environment, reduce the occurrence of service issues, improve the overall performance of their hybrid UC business communications, and deliver excellent user experience.
Learn more about how ReliaTel solves the hybrid UC service equation with the Telecom Reseller Educast with Gary Audin, here: http://telecomreseller.com/2016/06/03/solving-the-hybrid-ucc-service-equation/
Visit the ReliaTel page to learn more about ReliaTel for your UC environment.