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Gartner predicts the UC market will grow to $42.4 billion by 2019, showing the plethora of options when it comes to platforms and the networks that support them. The cloud has made the decision to deploy a UC platform an often-easier choice, but also one that comes with greater complexity when it comes to networking and security, among other factors. Here are three considerations when moving toward UCaaS.

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  1. Infrastructure and Quality of Service (QoS): A fully distributed, decentralized UC environment to all locations will now connect to services over a wide-area network (WAN). To ensure the networking infrastructure can handle this shift, and do so securely, internal stakeholders should conduct a thorough network health and readiness assessment focused on evaluating current network infrastructure (e.g. T1, SIP, MPLS, SDWAN), bandwidth capacity and future bandwidth requirements, and assess QoS enablement, design and readiness across the entire network.
  2. Disaster Recovery/Site Recovery: Business leaders should have a UC business continuity plan in the event the business loses connectivity for any reason—like a natural disaster, cable splice, or a loss of power. They should have SLA with partners and communication plans with internal stakeholders and partners establishing a clear escalation and site recovery plan should their communication and collaboration services become unavailable. Storage of important documents and files in the cloud is becoming the new normal so maintaining near perfect uptime requires thorough planning and is critical to keeping the business moving forward.
  3. Financial: Cloud suppliers are investing billions each year and their customer’s CFOs can reap the benefits. How? Cash flow. Moving to a consumption model means cash extensions, in turn helping the CFO with better cash flow management spend allowing them to accelerate cloud migration and leveraging a cloud annuity model. For most businesses, simply building a data center is considered “bad spend”. By moving to a UCaaS model, businesses can free up critical resources, lower expenses and transition from on premises to public/private hosted or hybrid designs to manage their cloud transition.

Moving to a UCaaS model is a good time to reflect on critical business needs and the requirements to consider when making the switch; inflection points can help bring better understanding and clarity to your desired business outcomes.