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AT YOUR SERVICE: XaaS transformations. This is particularly true for organizations that are reliant on their communications capabilities, such as call centers with work-from- home agents. Support for today’s “dynamic work-from-home-environment” was key to Aryaka’s and 8x8’s recently announced partnership that extended the 8x8 Open Communications Plat- form performance across Aryaka’s managed SD-WAN service. “We are living through unprec- edented times that require enterprises to accelerate the move to an online digital business and support massive growth of remote workers,” said Ghassan Abdo, research vice president at IDC, upon announcement of the joint offering. “SD- WAN together with cloud communica- tions and collaboration is a great choice to support this new digital economy and address the need for a massively distrib- uted and remote work environment.” “SD-WAN offers a path forward that can surpass the legacy WAN for predict- able and reliable performance and miti- gate the challenges of using the internet unaided,” said Nemertes analysts. Certainly, as Nemertes research- ers suggest, many enterprise networks are not optimized to deliver the perfor- mance and reliability required to sup- port cloud-based applications, includ- ing UCaaS and CCaaS. Similarly, cloud traffic for branches tends to be at a disadvantage in tra- ditional WAN architecture as it has to pass through a data center twice: once as traffic goes from a branch via a data center to the cloud, and again as response traffic comes back from the cloud via a data center to the branch. “This alone makes the traditional ar- chitecture ill-suited to an agile, cloud- powered enterprise, as it introduces unnecessary latency and increases the likelihood of packet loss and jitter by creating opportunities for congestion,” said Nemertes. Simply flipping from a legacy WAN to direct internet connectivity at home and remote offices would mitigate the problem of extra hops but introduces problems with the reliability of these “best effort” networks on which packet loss is higher than on a private WAN, and latencies are far more variable. With SD-WAN’s ability to virtual- ize underlying network services and to build enterprise-grade WANs using both public connectivity and private WAN connectivity, IT leaders can le- verage it to support cloud-based apps while reducing network costs. Nemertes researchers found that organizations with at least 90 percent of the WAN converted to an SD-WAN see a 56 percent reduction in staff time spent troubleshooting WAN problems. They also see a 20 percent reduction in staff time required to run the WAN, and a 26 percent reduction in branch WAN staff, decreasing further as the rollout concludes. SD-WAN supports UCaaS and CCaaS specifically in four key ways, said the research firm. The first two include performance and uptime as- surance. One of SD-WAN’s primary benefits is the ability to mitigate packet loss, latency and jitter of real-time traf- fic ensuring that voice and video are delivered with acceptable performance. Likewise, SD-WAN’s smart and invisible failover and dynamic traffic redirection protects from network outages between offices and UCaaS and CCaaS ser- vice providers. Among organizations with SD-WAN 90 percent deployed or further, Nemertes research found man- aged/in-net solutions deliver 70 percent lower annual downtime and 82 percent shorter outages when outages occur. Next there’s security assurance, and SD-WAN often comes integrated with embedded security features in- cluding basic firewalling, next-genera- tion firewalling, encryption, DDoS miti- gation and the ability to chain-in servic- es not offered directly by the provider. Lastly, economic efficiency comes by way of allowing UCaaS and CCaaS customers the ability to take advantage of lower-cost internet access services while still maintaining acceptable per- formance, security and reliability. A recent Nemertes study found that while just 28.7 percent of those us- ing UCaaS and CCaaS are also using SD-WAN, there is a direct correlation between success of cloud communica- tions initiatives and SD-WAN adoption. More than six in 10 (63.4 percent) of those that are satisfied with their UCaaS/CCaaS deployments are us- ing SD-WAN versus just 21.9 percent of those that were unsatisfied with the performance of their cloud communica- tions services. Going one step further, as managed in-net SD-WAN services have matured and spread, integrated SD-WAN and UCaaS/CCaaS offerings have emerged with specific advantages compared to a basic add-on or an over-the-top ap- proach. These can include true end-to- end visibility, integrated optimization, and the ease of layering on additional man- aged network and security services. “Using combined solutions should vastly reduce the amount of effort an enterprise has to put into deploying Source: Unify Square Data Security and Network Performance Critical to UCaas/CCaaS Deployments Source: IDG SMB Security Vendor Complexity Source: Cisco, 2020 Data security Network performance/reliability External management and support Global service consistency Technology integration Hybrid deployment/SIP trunking Critical Very Important Somewhat important Not very important Service Resilience Improvements in SD-WAN (in hours) Source: Nemertes Number of security vendors used within security environment and systems downtime due to the most severe security breach managed in the past year Average outage length Annual downtime Number of security vendors Downtime in hours 59% 36% 5% 39% 8% 1% 1% 1% 1% 47% 11% 50% 11% 53% 8% 52% 15% 52% 42% 39% 38% 32% 90%+ In-Net 90%+ DIY ALL 0.71 6.75 4 22.4 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 13 > 50 21-50 11-20 6-10 2-5 <1 1-4 5-8 9-16 17-24 > 24 1 36 CHANNEL VISION | July - August, 2020