SD-WAN FOR COLLABORATION CLOUD DEPLOYMENTS

ConvergeOne recently announced the availability of ConvergeOne Secure Connect, our new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) managed services offer. In a nutshell, Secure Connect is a subscription-based, fully-managed SD-WAN that connects our customers’ networks to ConvergeOne Cloud Experience (C1CX) collaboration solutions. I know what you may be thinking: What is SD-WAN? It’s one of those terms that we’ve all heard of before, but few know what it really is, and why it’s a hot topic. Let’s dive a little deeper into SD-WAN and explore why Secure Connect is such a cool offer.

One of the things customers love about migrating to cloud-based Unified Communications (UC)/Contact Center (CC) is that they believe they no longer have to worry about the technology behind the scenes. They assume they can just subscribe to the experience, and everything will magically work. For me, the worst part about cloud-based UC/CC is that customers believe they no longer have to worry about the technology behind the scenes. Admittedly, they do get to stop worrying about a lot of it—but their LAN/WAN is something that they typically don’t get to stop worrying about.

In most traditional cloud deployments, there’s generally a hard network demarcation between what the customer is responsible for and what the provider is responsible for. This can sometimes cause problems, as the traffic is still real-time media. It still requires an end-to-end network—all the way from the cloud to the desk phone or softphone—that has low latency, jitter, and packet loss. Network routing must account for this type of service. When customers have networks that aren’t ready for this Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) streaming traffic, we end up having to pump the brakes on the deployment and wait for the customer to resolve this issue.

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