Unified Communications (UC) tools have become essential to the success of modern businesses. With the right platforms and solutions, business leaders can empower teams to share knowledge, collaborate, and stay productive, wherever they are.
As demand for hybrid and remote working strategies continues to increase, the need for effective UC ecosystems is rising. However, even the best communication solutions can’t empower and enhance your teams if they’re constantly affected by latency, service issues, and outages.
Just as seamless user experience is crucial to the adoption and impact of UC solutions, continuous service monitoring is essential to maintaining the consistent reliability of performance of tools. Service monitoring technologies empower companies to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users, increasing productivity and reducing downtime.
“Real-time, dynamic service monitoring is vital to a successful UC strategy. By deploying VOSS you will unlock highly agile UC monitoring and analytics that will optimize the performance of your collaboration suite, while fuel employee productivity and improving user experience. Talk to VOSS to learn how we can help you increase user adoption and manage your UC costs as you develop you UC strategy.”
- Jamie Litherland, Solution Owner, VOSS Solutions
The Evolution of UC Service Monitoring
Though the way we connect and collaborate in the business world has changed in recent years, effective communication has always been essential. Every form of communication tool, from business phone systems, to messaging and video conferencing apps, can be affected by issues.
As a result, companies have often relied on tools that allow them to monitor potential problems and respond to issues as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in the past, these tools were limited in their functionality and scope. Companies could access specific solutions for different communication mediums, capable of sending alerts and alarms to business leaders when issues occurred.
These “reactive” tools helped to resolve communication problems but failed to give companies a way of mitigating and reducing service problems. Fortunately, new evolutions in the UC performance management landscape have led to the development of more advanced, proactive tools.
These advanced solutions help companies not only monitor call quality and MOS (mean opinion score) scores in real-time, but also leverage predictive solutions, infused with AI and analytics to pre-empt issues. With the right resources, companies can now stay one step ahead of performance problems and reduce downtime.
The Core Elements of Successful Service Monitoring
In the modern age of flexible work and evolving business communications, service monitoring strategies need to be more advanced to overcome a variety of challenges. The right tools are crucial to accelerating a company’s “digital transformation” journey and increasing return on investment.
With innovative end-to-end solutions, companies can align data from a variety of different systems, improve visibility into their ecosystem, and more rapidly resolve issues. An effective service monitoring solution and strategy will give organizations the resources they need to:
1. Improve UC Availability
For employees to benefit from a comprehensive UC stack, they need to their tools to offer consistent reliability and performance. UC service and performance management tools give companies access to advanced monitoring techniques that ensure the uninterrupted operation of UC services.
With these resources, companies can carefully track the availability of key components in their UC ecosystem, proactively identifying potential problems and bottlenecks. This empowers IT teams to take pre-emptive action, reducing service interruptions, and enhancing user experience.
2. Enhance UC Observability
End-to-end visibility is crucial to maintaining UC platform and application performance. However, in today’s landscape, many businesses struggle to maintain a comprehensive view of multiple different platforms, systems, and solutions. The right service monitoring tools can enhance UC observability, giving businesses real-time insights into their technology infrastructure.
Intelligent tools can surface anomalies and deviations from expected performance standards, alerting business leaders to ensure problems are rapidly addressed. This helps to make sure UC services can remain highly availability and deliver a consistent quality of service.
3. Preserve Security and Compliance
Careful service monitoring isn’t just crucial to improving user experiences and business outcomes. It’s also an essential part of ensuring businesses can comply with industry and local regulations. The right monitoring tools ensure businesses can protect their ecosystem and identify potential risks and threats as quickly as possible.
Innovative platforms can also provide companies with tools that allow them to automate aspects of compliance, from running checks and tests, to creating audit trails, reporting, and more. This minimizes the risk of fines, reputational damage, and security issues.
4. Optimize Auditing
Speaking of compliance, today’s businesses need to maintain transparency and accountability when utilizing a variety of UC platforms, tools, and applications for interactions. A service monitoring solution can help with this, providing organizations with a robust auditing framework, where they can track every change and update to the UC environment.
A comprehensive tool can capture detailed logs of all configuration changes, as well as updates to access control, and user activities. These trails provide access to historical context for compliance and help with both troubleshooting and incident response.
5. Enable Scaling and Evolution
As the business and communication landscape continues to evolve, businesses must be able to keep their UC estates up-to-date and prepared for future growth. An effective service monitoring toolset should allow organizations to simplify the scaling process.
The right technology will empower companies to plan effectively for capacity increases, the use of new technology, and even the transition to new platforms. With an effective platform, companies can minimize disruption, adapt to changing business and consumer needs, and avoid unnecessary problems with their service quality.
The Power of Comprehensive Service Monitoring
The UC estate is often the heart of any company’s strategy for digital transformation, growth, and continuous productivity. However, a UC stack is only effective when it can deliver a consistent quality of service, providing users with intuitive tools, reliability, and excellent experiences.
“VOSS Insights gives you access to actionable intelligence and live data about your UC estate, enabling you to visualize and actively manage the performance and quality of your collaboration suite, across its lifecycle,” says Jamie.
Comprehensive service management tools such as VOSS allow companies to align the distributed components of their UC estate and maintain complete visibility into performance metrics and issues. With the right toolkit, companies can proactively and consistently monitor all of their endpoints, networks, collaboration environments and more, accelerating issue resolution and minimizing risks.
What’s more, it gives companies the freedom to rapidly scale to suit changing business needs, adapting their ecosystem without compromising on compliance, user experience, or overall performance.
Learn more about VOSS Insights here.
This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.