7 Ways to Ensure Your Data Center is Ready for VoIP, UC, and IoT

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No doubt you have read many articles about getting your network ready for voice over IP

(VoIP) and unified communications (UC), but you’ve probably read few, if any, about getting

your data center ready. Regardless, whether you have a more recently built data center or one

built 10 years ago, it’s time to look at the fast-arriving Internet of Things (IoT) in addition to

your VoIP/UC service.

A common way to define IT markets is to break them into three segments and look at ways for

each segment to be ready for this next phase of data center readiness:

• Small and medium-sized businesses

• Large enterprises

• Cloud or hosted service providers

Gartner analysts predict 26 billion IoT devices will be online by 2020, and other experts project

as many as 80 billion. These predictions may sound crazy and high, but if you assume that at

least the vector projections are on that scale, you can prepare your business and data center

for this growth.

Because these devices are all IP enabled, they will be part of today’s digital transformation,

and all this new IP traffic will be transported on the Internet. Every vertical will be affect by

these new devices. Considering machine-to-machine communications, cognitive computing,

automation, virtual reality, and augmented virtual reality, you can envision how the oncoming

changes will affect your network.

Mapping these futuristic ideas into VoIP/UC networks may be a challenge, but give it a

try using the suggestions in this whitepaper so you can generate plans and ideas for your

business.

Small and Medium-Sized Business Data Centers Most small and medium-sized businesses do not own data centers, but they may have a data

closet that houses a private branch exchange and networking equipment, such as broadband

access, router, firewall, and switches. These are required to provide the quality of service and

bandwidth necessary to deliver VoIP and UC. Adding IoT will depend on the business use of

mobile and IP-enabled devices but, in the near future, will not require much more unless the

business builds and delivers IoT products to market, which will require additional support. Most

importantly, if the business rightsizes every resource for VoIP/UC, its data center will need to

be expanded.

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Today, however, small and medium-sized businesses are moving to the cloud in larger numbers,

where services drive the readiness for VoIP/UC and IoT.

Large Enterprise Data Centers Moving from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises changes the data center

model in significant ways. Enterprises are adopting cloud more now than in the past and have

projects experimenting with hybrid solutions based on the use of cloud solutions in conjunction

with on premises–based solutions. Many enterprise data centers today are already in the

process of changing their architecture using software-defined networking and scaling up to

handle the addition of huge amounts of data. VoIP and UC are traditional network applications

that have been conquered, but adding capability to handle the explosion of data from IoT and

other data-heavy applications are driving bandwidth to 40/100G from 1/10/40G across the

data center.

Changes in the enterprise data center include an increase in fiber optics for increased

bandwidth and simpler cabling, increased use of server virtualization, explosive growth in

storage demands, increased security demands (especially with so many new IP-enabled

devices), and data analytics to enable management and gain critical business insights from all

this new data.

Cloud and Hosted Data Centers Data centers for cloud and hosted service providers are where tremendous growth and

change are occurring. Start with VoIP/UC service providers. The maturity of these providers

means that the largest of them have multiple data centers with multiple incoming carriers and

geographically dispersed locations. This makes them mostly, if not fully, redundant and able to

provide business continuity services under extreme conditions.

This growth has been excellent for businesses that are purchasing hosted VoIP/UC services

because of price and feature availability. Consolidation in this market also continues, which

is a market dynamic your business may have already experienced. Will cloud and hosted

providers need to be ready for IoT? If their services will begin to integrate IoT devices into UC

applications, then they absolutely will need to do readiness planning. For collaboration and

information knowledge and sharing, new devices will be welcomed and may increase the value

of new and emerging UC applications.

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Changes in the cloud include even lower latency networks for better east-west traffic and

better operational VoIP/UC traffic, multiple data centers for redundancy and business

continuity, increased bandwidth, multiple carriers, and so forth.

How to Ensure Your Data Center is Ready Now that you’ve taken a high-level look at each business segment, what can your business do

to be ready to handle VoIP, UC, IoT, and all the new applications and data that will traverse your

network in this new digitally transforming world? Start with these seven suggestions:

• Increase bandwidth for all your networking devices.

• Increase server virtualization for cost and efficiency improvements.

• Use lower latency, redundant networks to enable high-quality voice and video in spite of

increased data traffic.

• Establish continuous improvement programs for ongoing security improvements,

especially the use of SRTP for VoIP connections.

• For larger networks and cloud networks, use intelligence starting with Layer 1 to handle

increased management of explosive data traffic.

• Consider adding analytics and governance to validate data.

• Add a disaster recovery plan to enable business continuity in case of major outages and

disasters. With more data and more traffic on networking platforms and cables, this is a

critical success factor for all businesses.

This will be the year of digital transformation, driving new network architectures and continued

growth for VoIP and UC market penetration. IoT is already here and growing exponentially.

Regardless of the size of your business, you need to be aware of changes that are happening

now and under consideration for the future. Need help? Talk to your trusted partner and

reseller. Learn and read everything you can. What are your data center plans?

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