Growth in remote work demands solutions to unified communications infrastructure issues

Cloud-based unified communications (UC) tools are designed with remote workers in mind. Because they are built in the public cloud, employees can access the company's voice, video, and messaging resources from the office, home, or anywhere else with a broadband connection. On the other hand, traditional unified communications (UC) infrastructure is not as flexible. It is designed based on the assumption that most employees will access resources from the corporate LAN or WAN.

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Now, due to the coronavirus pandemic, many people are working remotely from home, and traditional unified communications (UC) platforms have some problems in use. The following will analyze some common obstacles to traditional unified communications (UC) for remote workers and put forward relevant suggestions for solving them.

Architecture Challenges of Traditional Unified Communications (UC)

When employees work from home, they need to remotely connect to the corporate network to access traditional unified communications (UC) services. They may use traditional remote access VPN applications or access the network through more modern virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but there are some potential problems. Many IT departments have not built their remote access infrastructure extensively enough to handle such a large number of remote employee access needs. As a result, when the VPN/VDI server or the corporate public Internet connection becomes overloaded, application bottlenecks will form.

In addition to UC server connectivity issues, IT departments are also experiencing software and licensing issues. Many businesses never expected to support so many remote users. As a result, softphones and softphone licenses were purchased only for those employees who spent most of their time working outside the office. Now that almost every employee needs to work from home, licenses are in short supply. As a result, IT departments either have to purchase additional licenses as soon as possible or provide access to UC tools to those workers who absolutely need them.

Solutions to address shortcomings of traditional unified communications (UC) infrastructure

IT departments can address the issue of legacy unified communications (UC) infrastructure access in two ways: software and licensing. The first is to strengthen the existing infrastructure, adding licenses and bandwidth as needed to meet these new demands. Of course, the downside is that the enterprise may spend more money to support this aging system.

A more forward-looking approach is to consider migrating from a fully on-premises UC platform to a hybrid or fully SaaS-based system. Since time is of the essence for many businesses, a hybrid approach may be preferable. SaaS phone systems require IT administrators to port existing phone numbers (known as direct inward dialing numbers) to a SaaS-based UC provider. This is a time-consuming process and difficult to implement on short notice.

On the other hand, a hybrid UC platform enables IT administrators to maintain their current public switched telephone network provider and architecture while also providing some public cloud UC services. You may also find that much of your legacy UC hardware and software can be reused in a hybrid model.

Finally, the hybrid cloud model frees remote users from reliance on VPN or VDI to access many UC resources. In this way, adopting a hybrid cloud UC approach reduces a lot of the additional load that would otherwise require costly upgrades to traditional UC infrastructure.