Businesses today are more dispersed and mobile than ever. Employees are on the go, working and collaborating with colleagues and customers from many different devices and locations, often via real-time voice and video apps.
They expect a quality connection anytime, anywhere—a responsibility that falls squarely on IT. As organizations expand to more offices and locations, enabling employees to collaborate with advanced communication tools is essential to maintaining high productivity and efficiency, as well as reducing costs. But distributed environments make consistency and availability an ongoing challenge—and frequently, an expensive one too.
Simplifying collaboration isn’t an easy task. Delivering a combination of real-time voice, video, and data is bandwidth intensive. It requires a complex network configuration to maintain consistent availability and high performance for these latency-sensitive applications.
Yet IT organizations often find themselves in situations where branch bandwidth is insufficient, or where aging infrastructures can’t support unified communications. Expensive WAN upgrades can delay the rollout, or undermine the business case for deploying unified communications. The stakes are high for business-critical applications. Even a brief outage can have a dramatic impact on the user experience. In a customer-facing environment like a call center, poor-quality voice or video can damage a company’s reputation, create delays, and lead to lost revenue. If a connection fails in the middle of a sales or service discussion, the prospect may lose interest or never return.
It’s up to IT to build an infrastructure that can deliver a superior user experience each and every time. But not at any cost; IT budgets are shrinking, even as the infrastructure grows—sometimes across thousands of locations, in a heterogeneous, constantly changing environment.
To succeed at this balancing act, IT organizations need visibility and control over their global network, along with the ability to eliminate complexity and simplify operations. Pros and cons of the public Internet
Many IT organizations rely on the public Internet to support their business-critical collaborations and communications. They have a wide array of broadband Internet options: Cable, DSL, and 4G Cellular are all strong alternatives that augment limited WAN bandwidth. But broadband Internet may at times experience congestion, which results in increased latency, packet loss, and jitter. These conditions can impact the performance of time-sensitive apps like voice and video and degrade the quality of experience (QoE) that end users expect. To overcome these challenges, companies need a cost-effective solution that lets them extend high-quality communication to an increasingly scattered workforce.
With an SD-WAN solution, IT organizations can deliver the superior experience users require to support advanced collaborations and unified communications at branch offices and other locations.
It provides the ability to use commodity broadband links and is suitable for even the most demanding applications—including voice and video.
Running unified communications over economical Internet links helps to dramatically lower costs, improve speed, and enhance flexibility. If a connection experiences performance difficulty or fails, IT teams can easily and automatically use other available links for assured performance.
The right SD-WAN solution provides a cost-effective, agile, and scalable fabric to support advanced communication and collaboration requirements—and improves overall total cost of ownership (TCO) for branch connectivity.
An optimal SD-WAN solution will provide advanced performance features such as dynamic multi-path steering and on-demand link remediation for performance protection. This lets organizations assure the best possible unified communications performance over any WAN link.
An ideal solution should provide:
- Application Recognition and Smart Business Policies. Built-in deep packet inspection identifies business voice and video media traffic and signalling, using application signatures. An optimal SD-WAN solution will support business policy with smart defaults for necessary bandwidth management, traffic steering, and link conditioning—without the complex configuration tasks required for traditional WAN environments.
- Dynamic Application Steering. By constantly monitoring all available link conditions and bandwidth, the solution can steer latency and loss-sensitive voice and video media traffic during sessions on a packet-by-packet basis around links that are experiencing high latency or packet loss.
- On-Demand Link Conditioning. When necessary, the SD-WAN solution applies link conditioning techniques such as forward error correction (FEC) to provide up to full packet replication. This capability helps mitigate loss and reduce jitter introduced by broadband and hybrid networks.
- To help ensure maximum reliability, the solution should also provide protection from link blackout and brownout conditions.
SD-WAN: An ideal platform for rich collaboration
In our dynamic global economy, collaboration is mission critical. Organizations simply can’t afford to risk downtime in essential applications like voice and video. VMware SD-WAN™ by VeloCloud® is a robust solution that enables companies to deliver high-performance, reliable unified communications and collaboration applications to branch offices and other distributed sites.
IT teams can deploy the solution into environments which contain multiple links—any combination of broadband, cellular, and private WAN. The solution consists of a VMware SD-WAN Edge device, which supports multiple WAN links, private or public, a global network of VMware SD-WAN Gateways, and a cloud-based VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator which manages the solution.
With VMware SD-WAN, geographically dispersed organizations can take advantage of enterprise-grade networks by using commodity Internet. The solution simplifies the rollout of unified communications by making network configuration easier and streamlines the process of monitoring key network characteristics that affect performance.
IIJ Global Solutions Indonesia as partner of Velocloud by VMware, will help you to implement the SDWAN technology, so your company can use Video and Teleconference as an efficient platform for collaborate.
Please contact our sales for more information