Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

The ability to communicate is critical to the success of any business. Voice, email, SMS, multimedia messaging, file sharing, streaming video, conferencing, collaboration, and more. Without them, operations cannot be conducted. But as traffic volumes and the number of communications services in use continue to increase, so do IT and operational challenges.

Communications services have traditionally been provided by broadband fixed-line and wireless operators, and are of course still widely available. These operators seek value-added revenue to offset the commodity nature of their "big-pipe" core business.

However, there are also many third-party solution providers, private implementations and Unified Communications (UC) product and service capabilities. In addition, there is a growing number of cloud-based services-many of which are often directed to consumer end users rather than businesses.

This robust alternative creates a large and complex enterprise communications services landscape in which challenges related to cost, reliability, interoperability, compliance, management visibility, and security must be addressed.

How to build a strategic framework for communication

How does the overall success of the company differ from other aspects? Typically, differentiating elements are strategic applications of multimodal, high-availability communication capabilities.

But with so many employees now working remotely or otherwise on the move, and BYOD becoming a very important factor in delivering communications devices and services, it's important to understand the requirements, options, and solution strategies that produce the best results in any given situation. There are two key factors at work here, as follows:

Patterns-Modern communications demands go far beyond simple voice (primarily phone), email and text messaging, data sharing, collaboration, and increasingly cloud-based services. It's important to ensure that all interaction models-one-to-one (call and message), one-to-many (presentation and streaming video, for example), and many-to-many (conference and collaboration)-are available and properly supported.

Time element-It is also important to support temporally decoupled communication, meaning that the receiver does not need to be present during a given transmission (voice mail, email and SMS). However, in this case, the key elements are where and how messages are stored and archived, as well as security requirements.

These points lead to a number of key considerations that each organization must consider, as follows:

Policies-A written enterprise-wide communications policy is critical and should include definitions of permitted traffic (e.g., entities that can legally receive corporate communications; acceptable usage policies can also be served here), facilities, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, support capabilities, required record-keeping (usually only transactions, but sometimes content), and retention mechanisms and durations, all of which are often influenced or even determined by specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Functional requirements and service sets-Includes definitions of required functionality and specific implementations, whether integrated or composed of separate services such as email and messaging. Businesses should take the lead in defining and operating here.

Security and integrity-Few people within IT worry about the security and integrity of data and IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, cloud services, and more. However, many users are not even vaguely aware that email and text messages are not secure unless additional measures are taken. Experience shows that uneducated users generally prefer expediency to security. While local security policies enumerate specific requirements, establishing a culture of security is a necessary prerequisite for establishing and maintaining successful communications capabilities.

Cost control-As end users, especially those traveling internationally, it is really important to run large bills on carrier networks if they stay on their own devices, address communication costs in one's BYOD policy, and reach agreements with service providers. Place and use in the enterprise, not (only)BYOD level.

Managing visibility-Unfortunately, this is where our model gets tricky. While it's easy to gain full visibility into services that businesses buy directly or otherwise operate, and equally easy to limit costs incurred through BYOD, the main challenge is detecting and reducing unauthorized communications, which is the biggest challenge for productive and secure communications. Unfortunately, anyone on the Web can use a wide variety of communication features, which means that policies and related hardening are currently the only options to mitigate this challenge.

Corporate Communications Options, Questions and Considerations

As mentioned above, building the right set of communications solutions can be complex. There are two key sets of strategic options, as follows:

Carrier and OTT services-Carrier voice and messaging (SMS / EMS / MMS) services are the default and essentially the primary means of communication for many, if not most, subscribers, particularly due to the widespread adoption of mobile handsets and BYOD, with carrier gateways enabling at least partial interworking of different networks. However, the message here is again beyond the control of the organization, so there are always a lot of reliability and security challenges. Of course, the same can be done for the growing number of web-based OTT solutions available for voice, data sharing, messaging and even collaboration, including popular services like Whatsapp, Signal, Facetime, Slack and more. Therefore, it is important for businesses to limit the number of products and/or services that allow internal communication. At the same time, the value of incorporating OTT communications services into internal management must be considered.

Organization vs. Consumer Solutions-On the other hand, given the large number of cost-effective (many even free) end-user/consumer-centric services, many organizations, especially those that are not subject to industry-specific regulation, may choose to essentially outsource communications (approved by IT, of course) to select service groups. As always, safety requirements should be carefully evaluated before choosing this route.

There are three additional considerations for this decision:

Supported Device Domain-As is the case with Enterprise Mobility Management, to limit operational and support costs, it may be necessary to limit the combination of mobile device/OS versions and revisions IT supports for internal communications. On the other hand, the use of third-party products and services can shift this challenge to the supplier sector.

End-user preferences-Because you must learn to use other new products or services, you expect to fall back from a portion of your user base regardless of which solution set you choose. The duckling syndrome will always be with us, and in-house education, training and marketing programs will also always be key to success. Regardless, ease of use (and ease of support) of any communications solution is always a critical issue.

Consolidation/Transition from Legacy Solutions-The extent to which existing solutions should still be supported is also an important consideration. For example, migrating to an internal VoIP solution still requires bridging to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), even if many PSTN services are replaced by more modern and beneficial technologies and end-user visible features inherent in VOIP-based communications.

Make enterprise communications manageable

As mentioned above, an organization-wide communications strategy coupled with enterprise goals and IT capabilities is the first step, just like BYOD and security. Solutions must be consistent with this policy and there are no exceptions.

Once the communication strategy is in place, the solution set can be assembled and aligned with the general framework we described above. In general, the process here will follow the processes normally applied to all IT services, including requirements analysis, service set definition, long and short lists of candidate products and services (and less and less new internal development) and experience analysis and evaluation through alpha and beta testing. The roll-out of solutions must be accompanied by awareness raising, education, support and oversight to achieve management visibility in terms of policies and solutions. IT must re-emphasize the importance of using only approved channels and facilities and avoiding hard-to-monitor out-of-band solutions, including social media.

Overall, we expect the role of operators in communications solutions to decline over time in favor of Web and cloud-based OTT solutions. This is a very long-wave transition, to be sure, and basically reconfigures communications services as facilities running on commodity transport pipelines rather than getting value-added directly from operators. It is likely that some operators will offer their own competitive OTT communications services, but we believe that disruptions in business plans due to this shift are rare. But disruptions will happen anyway-we can even foresee the day when new wireless phone buyers buy only broadband plans, with no voice or messaging services, which are bundled with devices today without exception.

Therefore, the future will be a three-stop shopping world: devices, broadband wireless connectivity (wireless WAN and Wi-Fi), and value-added communication solutions implementing various possible alternatives and integration levels. We should also note that the most important direction here is highly integrated Mobile Unified Communications (MUC) services, which have the potential to unify all required communication functions under a single product/service and management umbrella.

However, the framework we outline for now can help businesses prepare for the upcoming eventual merger of IT, networking and telecommunications, and help facilitate the transition to a more manageable, cost-effective and productive future of overall communication for organizations.

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