NETSCOUT Helps “UC” the Value of Visibility

Supporting the hybrid workforce remains a top priority for many organizations, consistently aiming to improve digital user experience and provide high-quality interactions to increase productivity. The modern enterprise places high importance on unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) application performance and must adapt its network infrastructure to support UCaaS utilization.

Unified communications (UC) is largely associated with video-conferencing platforms, with about 81 percent of companies polled reporting that they use video for most or all of their meetings. The use of video technology has also increased in other formats such as webinars, live event streaming, and recorded meeting sessions shared for playback and review.

Investment in Bandwidth Continues

To support this widespread use of UC technology, today’s modern enterprises are evaluating their network infrastructure. In the last year it was reported that, as employees began returning to their offices, almost 30 percent of companies boosted their internet bandwidth and upgraded their wide-area networks (WANs) to support communication needs. 

This expansion increases the need for end-through-end visibility and continuous network and application performance management. As hybrid work continues, the amount of bandwidth needed to support operations often fluctuates. It can be difficult to predict patterns for usage, making real-time insights into performance and bandwidth ever more valuable. Intelligent, evidence-based performance assessments help IT organizations and WAN management with capacity planning, allowing them to optimize spending and prevent bottlenecks from interfering with UCaaS services and mission-critical network and application performance.

How NETSCOUT Helps

NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management leverages Smart Data collected from packet monitoring for each location’s traffic utilization and from business transaction tests to evaluate performance and assess software-as-a-service (SaaS) and UCaaS digital user experience quality. With readily available, ongoing visibility at the WAN network edge, companies can quickly evaluate bandwidth demand throughout a business day and week, as well as troubleshoot to pinpoint the source of degradations and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).

In 2022, 69 percent of companies surveyed by NETSCOUT revealed that the time to resolve unified communications and collaboration (UC&C)-related issues was anywhere from a few hours to a few days—or more. Only 30 percent said resolution could be found within a few minutes. This downtime is critical for businesses because it disrupts hybrid workflow productivity—a problem 93 percent of IT leaders surveyed are concerned about.

As companies increase their UC adoption to support hybrid workers, they must assess their underlying network infrastructure and optimize bandwidth for WAN connectivity across their distributed locations. With NETSCOUT nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, network operations (NetOps) teams can have the visibility they need to deliver high-quality user experiences to their workforce. Whereas many companies may leverage dashboard tools from their existing UCaaS providers to monitor performance, this is a siloed approach that in many cases simply rules out the hosting vendor’s location and service, leaving IT to continue researching all the other potential causes of the problem across the communications ecosystem. nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions are vendor-agnostic and provide packet-level information that can solve both UC and UCaaS issues—even when a variety of different connectivity methods such as SASE or SD-WAN are involved.

See how NETSCOUT helped this leading manufacturer ensure WAN connectivity and seamless UCaaS application performance.