What does a local coffee shop, an outdoor high school athletic field, and an auto dealership waiting room all have in common?
Answer: Each is a working office with high user expectations for good connectivity and high productivity.
Regardless of how much time people spend in their corporate office versus the home office or other remote locations, users’ expectations for the quality of service they demand—no matter where they may be—are going to remain high, as if they are in their corporate office. We all know what’s possible now, and there’s no going back. Given the forecasted double-digit annual growth in unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) sales coupled with expectations of $200 billion or more in global UCaaS sales by 2028, it seems as if your company and the UCaaS vendors know this too. Investments in UCaaS will continue to rise.
Comprehensive Visibility Is Key
Although UCaaS is fulfilling the promises of lower costs, greater flexibility, and reduced burden on understaffed IT departments, there is an inverse relationship between how easy and convenient it is to use and the amount of complexity that must be navigated to make it “feel” easy, run well, and meet users’ high expectations. Applications continue to become more complex as microservices are spread across multiple diverse environments. Yet, the demands for seamless access and high-quality connections for voice and video remain very high. Supporting UCaaS services delivered across networks and virtual private network (VPN) infrastructures to ensure positive user experiences has become much more difficult for IT professionals who lack comprehensive visibility. They must ensure an outstanding user experience while at the same time managing through layers of complexity blindly.
IT professionals need a simple, scalable approach to get the visibility they need to overcome UCaaS challenges, quickly identify root cause of any issues, and provide proof and evidence to stakeholders and service providers. A single-pane-of-glass view must be an achievable reality that ties all application layers together (no matter how many, what type, and where they live), so problems that occur within the complexity can still be solved in minutes and not hours, days, or weeks. That means having visibility to monitor performance where traffic aggregates in the core and out to the edges, no matter what the edges are, to provide the full end-to-end path of the real user experience.
The user experience can be negatively affected by low-end or unstable internet connections, VPN tunnel issues, degraded virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) performance, security issues, and mysterious performance problems. A bad user experience can lead to an array of other bad things including lost productivity, lost revenue, and lost confidence. And, if your CXO has a “bad experience” from a remote location, there’s another kind of “bad” coming your way that we won’t even mention.
How NETSCOUT Smart Data Helps
NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management provides a scalable deep-packet inspection approach that enhances the user experience, protects against lost productivity, and masks the complexity of the technologies utilized for more successful UCaaS experiences. We create Smart Data from physical and virtual components and build intuitive root-cause analysis workflows from continuous monitoring of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C)/UCaaS applications. Our UC&C expertise gives customers a more complete assessment of media quality, including critical performance dependencies. Plus, we empower customers with easy-to-use troubleshooting workflows for VPN services that deliver critical UC&C/UCaaS business services to the remote worker community and can utilize synthetic testing across business-critical use cases from anywhere.
In “Solving Remote Worker UC&C/UCaaS Problems in the ‘Work from Anywhere’ World”—part of our Problem Solvers series—NETSCOUT Senior Sales Engineer Kevin Morton delivers an outstanding presentation on thriving in the new world order of remote workers needing the same level of access and service they had in the office and how to make that achievable. Morton shares how his customers solved complex problems affecting their remote users in a new paradigm of remote/hybrid working. He not only makes a great case for meeting the high expectation levels of UCaaS users, but he also shows how easily that can be achieved with the right kind of visibility.
Listen to/watch "Solving Remote Worker UC&C/UCaaS Problems in the 'Work from Anywhere' World.”