Complicating Cloud Communications: What Comes Next?

Every technology trend winds up being more complicated than it seemed when starting out. Increasingly, I think that’s where things are heading for cloud communications.

Don’t get me wrong; communications platforms are experiencing a massive shift from on-premises models to unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact center as a service (CCaaS), and cloud-based systems for video, collaboration, and more. But enterprises are showing some signs that they may need to refine their cloud perspective.

The first case in point is this item from Dave Michels on No Jitter this week: Zoom is introducing a software application, called Zoom Phone Local Survivability (ZPLS), that’s meant to be deployed to individual local sites, and can be used for failover connectivity if the cloud service goes down or becomes inaccessible. Thereby, ZPLS ensures that Zoom Phone users can still dial out.

If there’s one company whose name has been synonymous with cloud-delivered communications services over the last couple of years, it’d have to be Zoom, so the fact that they’re offering a premises-based module is noteworthy. In his No Jitter post, Michels places the new Zoom offering in the context of growing attention on resiliency and availability. He also points out that the ZPLS module can provide bandwidth optimization, another concern that was less salient during the pandemic for enterprises whose offices were largely sitting vacant or severely underutilized.

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This issue of resiliency and reliability has been getting more traction, which is why we’ve already got a session on the topic planned for Enterprise Connect (EC) 2023 next March, led by consultant Steve Leaden of Leaden Associates. We may not know exactly what the office will look like in 2023 and beyond, but one thing the enterprise does know — and can start planning for — is that any office you do have will need enterprise-grade connectivity in terms of resiliency and bandwidth to support application performance.

Read the rest of this article on No Jitter.