whitewater rouse: Ensuring Successful Unified Communications Deployment

by Nigel Pink, our VP & GM, UK & Ireland.

www.ipanematech.com

Unified Communications (UC) can be a powerful, positive thing. It can allow companies to communicate across vast distances as though meeting face-to-face. It allows for integrated features like instant messaging, desktop sharing and video conferencing. It uses the best of Web 2.0 applications. By bringing companies together across numerous branch offices, it can even make remote working feel a little less remote. The list of positives for UC goes on and on. Accordingly, companies have been noticing. Gartner?s 2011 research indicated that the uptake of UC is on the rise1. Offices are increasingly investing in UC to help streamline their communications and maximise their time.

Yet UC, for all its benefits, has an undeniable dark side: it stresses networks. This stress is particularly pronounced along Wide Area Networks (WANs). Consider desktop-to-desktop video communications. Video conferencing, even when scaled for a standard desktop, requires around 200kb/s of IP bandwidth (upload and download). If an office?s 30 employees use video conferencing, which is usually bundled as part of the UC service, the bandwidth requirement is 6mb/s. Most companies aren?t enabled to handle such
heavy movement along the network.

In the same way that the number of cars on a given road is rarely constant, so does the amount of traffic from UC vary along the network. UC flows are made up of video and voice, which is dynamic traffic. This means traffic levels grow or subside based on user demand. In turn, this can result in UC applications impacting the performance of other business-critical traffic during high demand.

The network ?roads? that UC travel across have, in recent years, become increasingly clogged. Employees are now using company networks for their own recreational activities.

During an average week, 56% of UK office-based employees watch online video while at work. Roughly 66% of UK employees indicated they watch more than one hour of online video per week from the office 2. Simultaneously, offices are becoming more mobile, with employees working from home and/or bringing their own devices.

These difficulties are particularly pronounced for companies with multiple branch offices. As branch offices communicate with one another using UC, they multiply the potential risks to business critical applications.

Stalls, jitters and failures of UC due to network stress can be expensive. Vendors in Gartner?s research indicate that on average, the cost for UC per user ranges between USD 250 ? USD 300 at the low end, and up to USD 350 ? USD 500 at the higher end. These numbers don?t include telephone equipment, wiring, and so forth. To have UC fail would waste such investments. Similarly, the failure of business critical applications can cost an organisation. For instance, a high-volume online store bringing in ?25,000 per hour could crash due to a single network failure. If the outage lasts several hours, the monetary impact can be quite significant. IDC recently estimated the cost of an 11-hour IT outage at around ?600,000.

Why bandwidth isn?t the complete answer

There are two solutions: companies can purchase more bandwidth; or companies can use what they have more effectively through WAN governance tools, which monitor and regulate the flow of applications across networks.

Adding more bandwidth isn?t the complete and only solution, as more bandwidth is rarely enough. Critical applications will take as much bandwidth as possible. This is due to the way that internet protocol is designed. TCP (Transport Control Protocol) operates as a layer for protocol on top of IP. Designed with the internet in the 1980s to be able to share limited, poor quality resources, TCP is structured to seize available bandwidth. When the network is struggling to deliver resources to the protocol, it means TCP will sense delays and start to go more slowly, creating congestion situations. It?s a protocol where every data transfer, every application, will try to take as much network resource as possible. This means more
bandwidth, applied indiscriminately, isn?t the solution.

Another issue lies in the inability of additional bandwidth to respond appropriately to the variable nature of UC traffic. Consider an example: at 3pm, a company has an international call supported by UC. The call, occurring across many branch offices and numerous locations, might require 90% of bandwidth. At 4pm, the call is finished. Only 20% of bandwidth is used. This means expensive bandwidth is sitting dormant. Nor does additional bandwidth differentiate between business-critical applications and non-critical applications.

Perhaps during the call, an employee decides to download a YouTube video. Another streams music from an online host. Suddenly 100% of the company?s bandwidth is used, with equal priority given to the call and the recreational activities. Should another person need to join the call, or a business-critical function need to occur, the bandwidth is already at capacity. Something will have to give somewhere. Bandwidth doesn?t know or highlight where.

Finally, additional bandwidth doesn?t allow for efficient troubleshooting. When issues occur as traffic moves across the network, having a larger ?road? won?t allow companies to see where, when, and why. More bandwidth doesn?t provide diagnosis tools. Companies need something more.

It?s not size, it?s sophistication

The solution lies in having tools that allow a company to control applications as they flow across the network. Such monitoring and controlling is known as WAN governance. Through WAN governance, companies can see how applications are moving, who is using them and for what purpose. Companies can then prioritise applications accordingly.

If we consider the example of networks as roads, and applications as cars, a WAN governance tool might be a police officer. It can direct cars into appropriate queues. It can slow cars or speed cars depending on priority. This then allows vehicles to get to their destination in a timely, secure fashion ? regardless of the amount of traffic on the ?road?.

Branch offices in particular can take advantage of such tools through recently developed low cost, ultra-compact devices. These devices, aimed at branch offices with fewer than 50 employees, allow enterprises to manage traffic according to their business needs.

Companies can then guarantee the performance of UC applications without the need for costly bandwidth upgrades, while simultaneously ensuring that even rapidly growing intra-branch IP traffic is visible, controlled, and intelligently routed.

Such tools provide guaranteed performance and visibility to a company?s IT department.

This means the impact of UC flows can be fully understood and communicated to business leaders in a simple, clear manner. Finally, through such tools, UC is intelligently routed across the most appropriate network type. For instance, UC could be sent along the Internet or MPLS depending on the availability and performance of each network as things occur on a second-by-second basis.

Bottom line

The uptake of UC is on the rise. Companies must be prepared to handle challenges to their infrastructure. While purchasing additional bandwidth can mitigate some of the difficulties, a more comprehensive solution involves using WAN governance tools.