Running a Unified Communications solution

Running a Unified Communications solution
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Exécution d'un unifié
Solutions de communication

As part of the cloud-enablement technologies many companies are considering moving the telephony to the Cloud, but what do you need to know before taking any decision? In this episode you will find key information to help you guiding your company to the right choices and how to lead a VOIP strategy!

Les principaux acteurs des communications unifiées

Microsoft is leading the the way in the Unified Communications (UC) environment for many years thanks to the initial delivery of Skype For Business suite and now with Microsoft Teams, which represents the fastest growing collaboration service in the industry. Offering a full set of UC features, it’s suited for any corporate team or personal usage and, as well, meat the capabilities to support enterprise telephony and meetings.

While Microsoft Teams runs purely on the Office 365 Cloud in a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) model, Skype for Business remains a strong player for private Clouds deployments and hybrid infrastructures using on-premises servers. Both technologies can cohabit together and allow seamless migrations of your UC users between the platforms, allowing to offer different capabilities and manageability according to the features you want to enable or disable.

While Microsoft Unified Communications is mainly focused on a per-user perspective (UC features are delivered around a user object in Office 365 tenant), other Cloud solutions exist to fit in more classical and complex pure telephony demands. One of the top players in this row is Kandy Business Solutions from Ribbon Communications, a leader Cloud PBX UCaaS solution running in multiple Cloud datacenters located around the globe that connect traditional VOIP infrastructures with a top-up approach to enable extra services whenever they are needed on a per-line basis.

Choosing either one or another vendor, keeping the infrastructure well interoperable is a key factor to consider in order to smoothly transition from one VOIP model to another and between each piece of the collaboration infrastructure. To this end, other players have their niche in this area, offering all-in-one boxes supporting, among others, audio and video codec conversion (transcoding for interoperability between systems), analogue connectivity / compatibility with digital equipment (i.e. analogue faxing over IP network or to enable calls to transit with legacy facility management alarms), VOIP-specific security controls (also referred as telephony Firewalls) and, most important, guaranteeing the application compatibility between PBX systems, voice gateways and PSTN Trunks. Those boxes are commonly referred as Session Border Controllers (SBC) and they differ to each other according to the number of audio-video sessions supported, the type of deployment they admit (on-premises physical or virtual appliance, virtual on a private Cloud or pre-deployable in public Clouds like AWS or Azure) and, for Microsoft UC infrastructures, the level of certification they have reached with the vendor. Obviously, when physical voice connectivity is required, for example connecting an analogue device using an RJ11 cable, a physical device will still be required to deploy onsite, being a physical SBC supporting FXO ports or an ATA device which connects to any other SBC and make the the conversion between analogue and digital signals.

Avantages des communications unifiées

Among all the benefits you can obtain adopting a Unified Communications strategy for your company (with or without the telephony plugged-in as part of the system) you have to evaluate two factors: how much competitivity against your competitors are you loosing or winning and how are you planning to interface the communications within the enterprise and with your customers and partners.

Both factors lead to a main benefit that is common to any company deploying UC as a communication platform: the productivity. It has been proven for many years that UC systems enhance the collaboration inside and outside the company boundaries and, in consequence, reduce drastically the time and efforts it is required by employees to share ideas and bring them to live. That fact, proves that companies adopting UC as the main communication platform are definitively more agile and respond much better to an ever-changing business situation. Similarly and because you unify all company communications in a single technology, you are much prone to extend the perimeter of your communications outside the boundaries of your company, leveraging the collaboration with external entities such as customers, partners or other companies.

Another important benefit of UC is regarding the technical stuff. So far, most pure voice technologies that support telephony, were deployed in independent infrastructures disconnected from the IT world. UC systems, as they run on IP networks in a converged mode with other IT services, offer the benefit to extend and connect their functionality to other applications and services within the enterprise and in the Cloud. The concept of communicating anywhere, anytime and from any device (mobile, conference room, desktop or VDI computer, etc.) throughout the IP networks bring a unique opportunity to remove physical boundaries and improve the overall productivity, while creating resiliency of the business operations to overcome unforeseen events through remote work (pandemics, disruptions created by weather events, etc.).

In terms of cost reduction, adopting a new Unified Communications strategy can be pricy, however the benefits obtained with the increased productivity, the avoidance of the travel expenses and the unification of the telephony system with the IT, result, in the mid-term, in multiple savings. Moreover, if the UC also englobes the telephony connectivity to the PSTN, a well designed solution will help you eliminating all voice related equipment and reduce considerably the maintenance costs of your voice system. A usual technique to achieve that goal is centralizing the PSTN connectivity for a region or country in a single voice breakout and using a single appliance (SBC). This allows you to have a single running cost for the infrastructure and concentrate all your calling plans with a preferred supplier. Finally, the PSTN communication costs can be drastically reduced by a combination of two decisions:

Combining multiple voice carriers on your principal voice breakout appliance and then, deciding which one you use to call specific voice destinations (least cost routing).
Usage of data plans instead of regular phone calls from your mobile devices. In this case, all your external devices connect to the UC system using data and from there, all PSTN calls are routed according to the pricing you agreed with your usual carriers, avoiding to manage contracts with every mobile operator you might use.
More in the savings chapter, with UC you can potentially remove all client hardware, including IP Phones, Fax machines and conferencing devices (and free-up some ports on your network switches occupied by those devices)… you just replace them by hardware you already own: computers and mobile phones which can run soft-clients.

To support IT operations, it is critical to benefit of automation tools and APIs that can help on the provisioning of your users and objects and their configurations. With UC settling on the core of your IT infrastructure, you can leverage commercial off-the shelf software (that certainly you already have) to set up UC configurations as an integral part of your management system.

Most customers consider to adopt UC when their technology arrives at the end of life, specially for legacy PBX or when the PSTN carrier forces a move removing ISDN and analogue gateways. Clearly, if competitivity and costs are not forcing and early transition to UC, this is right moment to switch. It has to be seen as an opportunity and not as a drawback as the investment made on UC will improve employee’s synergies and finally, provide cost savings.

Les défis et comment les surmonter

1. Expérience utilisateur et efforts de support

The most critical part on any telephony transformation is the human factor. Keeping telephony running with a good level of user adoption while providing a mission critical service is a true challenge. In terms of User Experience (UX), switching from a legacy system to a new fully-capable UC platform always require a proper training plan that must be coordinated and defined in advance with company leaders. Another reality after many years deploying VOIP on the field, are the headaches that cause such implementations on regards with regular support demands coming from new voice adopters, for which, in-house service desks are not familiar to deal with. Hence, proper training for UC adopters and, as well, for the IT supporting staff is almost mandatory in all cases.

Moreover, switching from a standard isolated VOIP infrastructures to a new VOIP solution running across IT networks and datacenters, often cause issues to the supporting IT personnel in charge of the deliveries and service operations. Typically, the IT staff is skilled in their pure IT duties and the same remains valid for dedicated voice supporting personnel, however when both IT and telephony domains combine together, a skills gap easily appears and operations and responsibilities are quickly impacted. More precisely, IT personnel typically lack of VOIP knowledge and experience but they have to support those workloads running on their infrastructure and similarly, voice resources lost much visibility running the telephony service in a shared network managed by IT staff.

Guidance and Recommendations

A strong integrated approach using a well planned Enterprise Architecture work together with a well supported training plan is the fundamental key to retain:

User productivity and effectiveness Reduce support costs and limit the pressure on service desk agents
Anticipate any forgotten feature or improperly covered voice replacement scenario Identify scenarios where there is a margin of improvement Avoid any damage on the company reputation

Multiple supporting options are now available for modern VOIP infrastructures with the main objective to solve the skills gap. From traditional certified Partners to fully managed services offered directly by the vendors, you have a vast range of possibilities to support, maintain and / or operate any UC platform. If you feal that your supporting staff is assuming too much risk, consider to acquire a partial or fully managed solution, specially on the SBC appliances which, typically, are provoking most of the troubles due to their technical complexity.

2. Technical Complexity

Unified Communications requires a constant real-time flow of data to transport the voice and video signals for the peers involved in a call (or session); failing to do so, immediately affects the quality and perception that something is going wrong on the user experience and sooner or later, it triggers a support reaction. Those requirements are somehow easy to solve in managed networks inside company’s boundaries with network protocols such as the Quality of Service (QoS) or VLAN prioritization, however as soon as the audio-video traffic exits the company’s network to reach Cloud servers on the Internet, none of such protocols are then usable and no quality assurance can be offered directly.

One way to circumvent this situation, is adopting media codecs that support adaptive compression (limiting the required bandwidth consumption according to the real circumstances and expecting to fit the available network resources). Another way implemented by major Cloud vendors like Microsoft or Kandy Business Solutions, is to try to totally avoid the media traffic to reach the Internet servers whenever clients are located in same IP networks. To achieve that, they rely on the connected infrastructure SBCs to direct and sustain the client media traffic directly between the involved peers; sometimes and depending on the vendor, such techniques are known as “Media Bypass”, “Local Media Optimization” or “Direct Media”.

Obviously having those techniques implemented can dramatically improve the quality assurance and network optimization but the technical complexity required for deploying, maintaining and troubleshooting those protocols is considerably high.

As seen with the previous call quality challenge, technical complexity extends particularly to network and security areas of any infrastructure, specially when running a platform on a hybrid or pure online model. This is mainly due to the amount of different traffics and services enabled on a full-feature UC system (peer-to-peer audio and / or video, multiparty conferencing, instant messaging, desktop and application sharing, etc.) and the different ways a traffic can be delivered across the network (internal to internal, internal to external, external to external, via the Cloud provider or directing the media through clients, etc.). Adding today’s best security practices on top of those services, means to respect the standard security triad about confidentiality, integrity and availability (C.I.A. triad) in all traffic exchanges. So, protecting the communications in a such dispersed system using encryption protocols and multiple datacenters to ensure resiliency is hard to manage without a properly defined plan.

Orientations et recommandations

Starting such ambitious transition will require to assess your network infrastructure and operations before conducting any VOIP deployment. Network design and appliances are the key technical elements affecting (positively or negatively) the overall performance of any UC application. Initially, consider the analysis of the actual network topology and plan for any change in advance, specially when you plan to use softphones connected to Wi-Fi networks or running mobile clients from the Internet, you will require a proper DMZ network to support them. Then, deploying internal network protocols like QoS or improving internal routing or applying dedicated voice VLANs can be a must to avoid any possible congestion.

Regarding security features to protect the communications against the C.I.A. triad, most of the systems rely on TLS certificates to offer encryption and integrity, so plan the usage of PKI infrastructures to support your UC project.

In terms of offering availability of the UC service in mission critical scenarios, even if running the core voice solution on the Cloud provider, you still will require to secure the local resiliency. Depending on the UC technology you choose, you will have to opt-out for specific dedicated vendor appliance (i.e. Survivable Branch Appliances for Microsoft UC) or go with a generic solution offering multiple registrations.

Coupling network and security pieces all together to support a full UC environment, will force you to work on Firewall configurations, DNS zones and network routing, even if running a full Cloud solution. In addition to those, if running servers on-premises, consider some extra work on the datacenter.

In more secure environments where it is required an extra layer of control all over the UC traffic, many vendors explicitly offer security solutions to inspect the UC applications and defend the network boundaries against common VOIP vulnerabilities and, finally, reduce the overall attack surface.

3. Calendrier et efforts

Typically, Unified Communications projects are lasting many time and efforts for all personnel involved during many months. Even in small and simple infrastructures, the UC transformation project incorporate a minimum phase for collecting data (features and scenarios to support, line inventory, infrastructure assessment, etc.), to deploy the new technology and infrastructure, to phase out the transition and prepare the configurations in advance, to port the public numbers (DIDs or DDIs) with your PSTN supplier and then organize support and training resources with your users and technical staff. Such phasing, even in most perfect simple cases, is conducted during many weeks of hard work.

Moreover, many phases are usually delayed due to the many actors you will need to contact to obtain a fully working UC solution, including the licensing of your UC application, purchasing of any SBC through a partner or vendor, deciding the hardware you have to procure to replace IP Phones, headsets or analogue devices, ITSP suppliers to obtain the PSTN connectivity and public numbers, etc.

Guaranteeing additional compatibility with legacy PBX or connecting the telephony to applications (i.e. CRM apps, Ticketing software, etc.) will demand of a considerable extra effort to setup and configure the new voice infrastructure.

Orientations et recommandations

We understand that the time and effort is costly and running a UC transformation work without properly planning each step can result in an extremely expensive project and might impact your productivity and co-existence with depending applications and technologies. It is always a best investment, specially managing complexity, to spent time defining the Enterprise Architecture and then setup the corresponding projects and subprojects.

Never consider a UC vendor as the only actor required to support and transition your project! You will always require many other actors to intervene in many phases and you will not be able to avoid that in any cases, distinctively when you have a strong list of feature you need to deliver or when you run older legacy PBX solutions.

Sommaire

Communications unifiées : GO ou NO-GO ?

Unified Communications have born to stay and to replace, sooner or later, all you collaborative infrastructures in a unified platform running on IT. Earlier you decide to embrace the idea, better prepared your company will be to face new challenges.

Initial transformation costs and necessary efforts setting up the plan can be specially hard to manage, but the overall satisfaction with a UC platform when it is well deployed, in terms of productivity, cost savings, user experience satisfaction, manageability for the IT personnel, extensibility and personalisation, worths it.

Some decisions not covered in this episode but to consider as part of the Unified Communications strategy are:

Where to host your UC solution: on the Cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid environment.

What to do about the PSTN telephony: fully integrate it on the UC platform, just connect it but not transition the voice at an early stage or keep it separately for a while.

PSTN breakouts (with or without UC adoption): do you modernize your PSTN connectivity to run it from the Cloud or do you switch to a centralized model?

In all cases, keeping an Enterprise Architecture project as your main priority is the key to success deciding the best candidates and solutions, keeping transitional costs at minimum, reduce the time constrains and empower your users to fully benefit of the delivery of a UC platform.

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