Businesses are rapidly moving to the cloud for their communications and collaboration needs, especially when they want to deliver a consistent set of services to staff anywhere in the world without the hassles of maintaining a PBX of their own. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) strives to meet business needs for features and performance, but achieving a successful rollout means providing a network that delivers high availability, high performance, and the ability to proactively address conditions that can hurt cloud communications and collaboration.

Three options are key to re-architecting the WAN in the age of the cloud: Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN), Direct Cloud Connect (DCC), and WAN-Cloud Exchanges (WAN-CX). SDWAN pools branch connectivity and intelligently manages traffic across all available links, increasing resilience and improving performance while reducing management costs. DCC bypasses the Internet for communications with a specific cloud service provider by linking the enterprise WAN edge to the cloud provider’s edge directly. WAN-CX uses an exchange approach to direct connection: enterprises connect to an exchange, then spin up virtual links through that connection to any cloud service provider on the exchange.

Nemertes is a global research-based advisory and consulting firm that analyzes the business value of emerging technologies. Since 2002, Nemertes have provided strategic recommendations based on data-backed operational and business metrics to help enterprise organizations deliver successful technology transformation to employees and customers.