With the world in turmoil, changes in the way we work are happening at the speed of light. A solid communication strategy has always been important, but now it’s paramount in achieving and maintaining business continuity.
In the world of unified communications (UC), Cisco’s legacy will always be the stability and reliability of its UC offerings. Most large enterprises worldwide deploy Cisco hardware and/or software applications as part of their collaboration, security, and networking infrastructure.
Cisco and the big picture
Cisco’s powerful Webex suite of collaboration tools, for example, is one of the leading enterprise solutions for video and team communication. The Webex application is a secure cloud team collaboration platform that allows for continuous teamwork with video meetings, guest access, group messaging, file sharing, white boarding – even your own personal meeting room.
Cisco deployments can be found in multi-site global UC ecosystems, right down to smaller SMB environments. But regardless of the size of the organisation or the number of users, the focus is always on the big picture - user experience.
Business continuity challenges
In the new ‘elastic workplace’, normality is now defined by virtual meetings and conferences, the constant addition of new communication devices and applications, ongoing re-education and re-training. Cisco and other players have been rolling out new collaboration tools with one primary concern – connecting the world.
While this has kept many organisations afloat, the strain on IT teams has increased exponentially. They must deal with recurring technical problems like:
- Network bandwidth and performance issues
- Device sprawl
- VPN concerns
- Bad connections and dropped calls
- Lack of interoperability
These and other challenges compromise an already tentative working environment.
Vendor vs third-party monitoring tools
When your communication systems are underperforming, the negative impact is almost instantaneous. Teams managing a Cisco deployment, or any UC environment in the current climate need to be able to get to the root cause of issues fast. No matter what vendor you use, or how many endpoints you have, you still need to gain full visibility into your UC ecosystem, when it fails and why, how to fix it and prevent failures from happening in the future.
