Unified Communications solutions have become critical in the modern age of work. With the hardphone switch-off on the horizon, companies of all sizes need to embrace cloud-based unified communication technologies to empower teams and serve customers effectively.
At the same time, a cloud-based communication solution offers companies greater agility, access to more advanced services, and opportunities to reduce costs. It’s little wonder that the market for unified communications solutions is set to reach a value of $222.61 billion by 2030.
Unfortunately, migrating to, and managing a UC ecosystem isn’t easy. There are countless challenges to overcome, from choosing the right platform, to finding ways to boost adoption.
That’s where UC service providers step in, to deliver crucial support.
How Managed Service Providers Reduce UC Complexity
The transition to cloud UC solutions can be incredibly complicated. Businesses need to manage everything from securely migrating their data into a new ecosystem, to ensuring their cloud calling platforms and tools are integrated seamlessly with critical software.
Service providers, offering “managed services” for UC solutions, can mitigate some of the complexity through assessment, accelerating the migration process, increasing adoption, and offering valuable insights businesses can use to improve their decision making strategy.
Here’s how service providers can optimize your UC strategy.
1. Increasing Adoption and ROI
Although most employees and team leaders are aware a shift to the cloud is imminent, it can be difficult to encourage all team members to adopt new SaaS solutions at the same pace. Service providers can help to address this issue. They can analyze your current ecosystem, and ensure you’re implementing the right solutions to ensure teams can access the same resources and tools in the cloud.
They can offer access to ongoing consultation and support, helping train team members on how to use new tools, and enhance change management. Plus, through progress tracking and data-driven insights, service providers can help you keep an eye on adoption levels throughout your organization.
They may it easier to monitor every aspect of your UC environment, for insights into roadblocks, hurdles, and issues that could be harming user adoption rates. By accelerating adoption, service providers ensure you see a return on your UC investment faster.
2. Preserving Reliability and Uptime
Up to 93% of large enterprises say that downtime can cost them more than $300,000 per hour. While the costs of UC interruptions and issues can vary, any disruption in your ecosystem can cause serious issues with productivity and performance.
Service providers can help ensure your technology continues to run smoothly. They can help you track technical issues and problems that might lead to issues with your communication strategy. They can even give you access to comprehensive redundancy and failover systems that ensure you can continue to manage and make calls when technical issues arise.
What’s more, service providers manage your communication ecosystem for you, implementing session border controllers and SIP trunking solutions worldwide, to ensure your communication strategy is reliable and resilient, even as your business grows.
3. Automating Complex Management Tasks
As mentioned above, there are numerous steps involved in managing a UC ecosystem, and handling all of these tasks in-house can be time-consuming and expensive. Service providers in the UC landscape can automate a wide range of tasks. They can conduct automated assessments of your communication environment, helping you to make the right decisions for your cloud ecosystem.
They can streamline the migration process, transferring data into cloud environments, and connecting the dots between tools with custom integration solutions. They can even handle provisioning for UC licenses and numbers, or give you access sot a cloud-based environment where you can manage your whole environment from a single pane of glass.
Voice is a heavily regulated service. Every country has its own level of complexities and guidelines to monitor.This creates a disjointed experience. A single provider managing entire ecosystem for the enterprise ensures standard experience across the globe.
Plus, for companies with complex communication strategies, service providers offer a convenient way to simplify third party carrier management. They can work with carriers around the world on your behalf, manage SBC solutions and SIP trunks for you, and give you more time to focus on other tasks.
4. Boosting Cost Efficiency
As mentioned above, service providers in the UC landscape can leverage insights and data to help you plan and implement the right UC system. However, they can also provide insights that help you scale your hybrid workplace, while keeping costs low.
With end-to-end reporting tools, service providers offer companies an overview of everything from their SBCs, to endpoint usage, network components and voice quality. This can help organizations make better decisions about how to provision their hybrid workforce, while keeping costs low.
Service providers can also help to bridge the gaps between different carriers and vendors. They can offer an all-in-one solution for accessing endpoints, intuitive meeting solutions like Microsoft Teams, and cloud telephony in one place. This eliminates the need to handle multiple different bills and ecosystems separately, leading to better cost management.
5. Improving Security and Compliance
Transitioning to the cloud with your unified communication solution comes with various security threats to consider. That’s particularly true now that cyber criminals are growing more sophisticated, and accessing cutting edge tools to enable data breaches.
Service providers in the UC landscape don’t just ensure you’re accessing the right tools to empower your workforce. They also give you the resources you need to protect your data and your teams. They can ensure you’re leveraging end-to-end encryption throughout your communications stack, accessing data to track potential risks, and leveraging state-of-the-art monitoring tools.
They can help you provision users with specific access controls and multi-factor authentication policies. Some companies, like Tata Communications, even offer access to advanced fraud prevention as a service, leveraging machine learning and data analytics for enhanced protection.
Discover the Value of UC Service Providers
The rapidly evolving world of work introduces a host of new opportunities for companies to improve and enhance the way teams communicate. Shifting into a cloud-based UC environment can help make your team more agile, productive, and efficient.
However, you need the right service providers to ensure you can take full advantage of your new ecosystem. A comprehensive service provider like Tata Communications can simplify the complexity of building and managing your UC ecosystem, and accelerate your return on investment. “Tata Communications is your partner in your UC journey. We support you on every step of the process through our expertise in cloud voice infrastructure, security and compliance – all to enhance your employee experience”, says Vivek Kar, Global Product Management Head, Collaboration and Voice Services, Tata Communications.
If you want to speed up UC deployment, simplify management, keep your systems secure, and improve user experiences, it’s time to explore the benefits of working with a UC service provider.
