As cloud based communications become more of the natural fabric of business communications infrastructure, data networking is bound to evolve. Public clouds such as AWS and Azure are being used now to run many different types of enterprise applications, which means like it or not, interaction with these public clouds is occuring within the enterprise. These large public clouds are becoming part of your “enterprise network” by default. A coherent plan to route traffic is rquired. And that’s where SD-WAN comes in. With SD-WAN, one can intelligently route traffic and improve network performance of these cloud applications. And with more and more of this happening, SD-WAN will continue to evolve.
#1: Business communication systems
Beyond enterprise data networking, one of the things I think a lot about is the future of communications in the enterprise. One of the key enterprise applications is your business communication system. And this has certainly evolved over the years to being more and more of cloud based application, and the ability to use additional endpoints beyond phones such as mobile and desktop clients.
And the business voice communications system can now be accessed from a variety of networks, no matter where you are. It is not just the PSTN anymore. Whether the user is on a Wi-Fi, LTE or 5G mobile network, or from an enterprise ethernet network, access to your business voice communications is possible. In fact, the networks are so advanced that access to all of your business systems, not just voice systems, is possible. This enables work to occur from anywhere, at any time. This enabled many of us so called knowledge workers to work from home the past year and a half.
While more ubiquitous Wi-Fi is coming in the form of more and more hotspots, essentially extending your office to wherever a Wi-Fi hotspot can be found, 5G is the next frontier for enterprise communications. And not just because someone will be calling you at work or into your contact center from a 5G network.
5G also means faster speeds than any other wireless network, and it means your entire business could ultimately be connected to the outside world via a mobile connection. Think about the concept of mobile SIP Trunking if you will. Your entire business could be connected this way and you can even have a 5G business network slice, or dedicated bandwidth for you.
All of this means that all different varieties of business communication systems, whether unified or not, do not have to be physically on premise. All of these systems can be driven by cloud architectures. In other words, the borderless network also means everything could be in the cloud, if one so chooses.
#2: Convergence of UC and IoT
Data networking within the enterprise will also start to include IoT connectivity. IoT connectivity, as it relates to enterprise communications, is really about the convergence of Unified Communications and IoT. You might think that UC and IoT do not have anything to do with each other with other, but there is natural overlap. With a UC admin dashboard, there are alerts and monitors. And with IoT, there is data to trigger alerts and monitors. It’s a marriage made in heaven, like peanut butter and chocolate.
With a UC system, there are mobile end points such as phones, tablets and smart watches. But there could be other end points connected to a UC system, such as access control endpoints. Giving rights to an employee to enter a building, or a specific part of a building, is not that much different from permissions given to phone system users. And think about other voice/video enabled devices in an enterprise such as a camera. Or a doorbell with video that can also talk - like a Ring doorbell. So think about all these kinds of sensors/communication devices / things connected to a UC system. Some of these obviously can be connected with either 5G or Wi-Fi. But some can be connected with LPWA as well. The enterprise business communication hub of the future will be able to handle all required signaling types.
Any of these things that are particularly important to be tied to a UC/PBX system when there is RTC (real time communications) required as determined by the sensor/edge computing calculations can be set up to enable alerts in the form of a real time voice and/or video call to appropriate person.
In summary, the future of the data network in the enterprise will include many different types of protocols as the Unified Communication system starts to incorporate all different types of communications. In other words, unifying more communications means incorporating more types of networks and their protocols. And it will also include seamless integration of public clouds, because they will host the applications we will all use.
