As we enter the festive season and bid farewell to 2020, we’d like to thank our partners, vendors, and clients for their ongoing support this year. We’re looking forward to an exciting start to 2021 with accelerated business transformation and planning around 5G and SD-WAN intensifying as long-planned changes and transitions to remote working becoming a reality.
Remote working driving UCaaS adoption
While the business case for a UCaaS strategy is nothing new, the forced experiment into remote working this year made the reasons for adopting UCaaS all the more urgent. Whereas the traditional benefits of consolidating communications infrastructure spend, boosting productivity, and minimising employee travel time and costs all hold true, UCaaS has become a core enabler of business resilience.
As businesses start to recover from COVID-19, there is a new appreciation for the tools that support a more agile and flexible way of working. Enabling remote operations needs to address everything from security and compliance, to employee productivity and satisfaction.
With many office workers continuing to work at home or divide their time between remote working and office working, it’s important to support employees with fluid communications systems and top-notch video capabilities. Executing a UCaaS strategy will help get everything right and equip teams with the tools they need to succeed.
5G becomes a business reality in 2021
In a mobile-first world with more employees accessing cloud-based applications and rich content from mobile devices, keeping everything and everyone connected is critical. 5G’s faster data speeds, lower latency, and increased capacity support higher quality voice, and video calls provides the flexibility for employees to work anywhere, anytime.
With more organisations supporting remote working, 5G allows a business to be more agile, empowering staff to collaborate and share work-related files faster. Unified Communications systems also work better with smooth interaction between business software and communication systems supporting the streaming of high-resolution video, audio and images with practically no latency.
In terms of moving to a 5G world, the Morrison Government has declared 2021 ‘The Year of 5G’ as it makes the low and high bands available to telcos.
Two auctions will be held next year to allocate the 5G spectrum. In April 2021, the Government plans to allocate high band 5G spectrum (in the 26 GHz band), which will enable extremely fast, high-capacity services. In the second half of 2021, the Government intends to allocate low band 5G spectrum (in the 850/900 MHz band), which will be crucial for broader geographic coverage of 5G services.
SD-WAN
With many organisations gaining competitive advantage from having a more permanent work-from-home setup for their employees, the move to making their networks more agile and more configurable with software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) services has gathered pace.
For any business struggling to meet ever-increasing bandwidth demands, SD-WAN enables fast provisioning of more network capacity to gain the performance needed without waiting 30 days or more for their MPLS services to be reconfigured. SD-WANs are also giving businesses a more efficient way to access cloud-based services and help companies secure communications to their business-critical applications that reside both on- and off-premises.
Whole-of-business managed services
For businesses needing help executing a UCaaS strategy, optimising network performance with SD-WAN or adopting 5G, talk to imei about our range of cost-effective managed services.
Unlike other managed network providers, imei offers whole-of-business managed services capability, providing managed services across your communications infrastructure. We manage network technology deployment, provision mobile technology, set up unified communications solutions, and run managed services over the top using advanced monitoring tools to optimise network performance.
Festive greetings
As our last post for 2020, may we take this opportunity to wish you all a safe and merry festive season. We look forward to returning in the New Year and helping businesses take full advantage of enterprise mobility and adaptive networks in the year of 5G.
