UCaaS - The Future of Communications

By Dennis Thankachan, co-founder, CEO at Lightyear

UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service, and is a quickly growing market within the wider contemporary tech marketplace. In recent years, the tech market has been trending towards everything being sold as a service. This looks set to continue into 2021 and onwards, where UCaaS providers and other services have proven themselves vital in the age of COVID-19. Read on to find out more about this service, and why more companies will adopt the concept going forward.

Unified Communications

The concept of unified communications has been around for a while, but delivering unified communications as a service is much newer. Products such as Microsoft Teams are only a few years old, but they suddenly gained massive relevancy in 2020. Being able to provide remote access to your company's entire suite of communication software has become very attractive in 2020, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. Here are the top 3 reasons why UCaaS will be important in 2021 and beyond.

1.     Remote working

2020 brought about a dramatic shift to the way we work. Many more of us are now working remotely and, despite hopes of a vaccine, some companies have already announced they're planning to continue working remotely into 2021. This makes UCaaS all the more attractive because the cloud-based nature of it enables employees to connect from anywhere, including at home. This importantly includes all aspects of company communications, including telephony, video conferencing, emails and more.

For example, sales staff can now conduct client pitches and meetings through videoconferencing tools provided by a company's UCaaS platform. These video conferencing tools are reliable and scalable - whether a meeting has 5, 50 or 500 in attendance.  In a world where in-person sales meetings and conferences are not always possible, UCaaS is helping businesses to keep businesses going.

Companies have had to adapt to remote working, and UCaaS software has likewise been rapidly evolving in order to meet demand. Remote working is likely to become much more common in 2021 than any previous year, and even after the pandemic, many employers and employees may choose to continue to work remotely.

2.     Device agnosticism is the way forward

UCaaS delivers everything, from file sharing to video conferencing, all under one roof. These capabilities are becoming increasingly device-agnostic. What this means is that staff members can use most (or all) facets of the UCaaS toolset from any device. Most functionality, from editing company documents to voice calls and online conferences, can all be accessed from virtually any device. Whether staff members have a phone, tablet, or desktop PC, all communication tools are available to them.

This hardware flexibility enables companies to offer their staff the full suite of communication tools, using either their existing devices or with a much smaller hardware budget than before.  The cloud-based nature of the software also means that staff members are not tied down to a specific location in order to be able to complete a specific task. UCaaS allows for individuals to open up company documents, edit them in real-time while collaborating with others, and keep up with client correspondence, all while working from home or while travelling.

Simplifying a company's necessary hardware and granting employees access to the entire communication toolkit from a single device is hugely attractive to companies. Expect dedicated devices to continue to lose relevancy in 2021 as device-agnostic UCaaS software becomes more popular.

3.     Regulatory compliance

Another issue for companies to consider is the regulatory landscape, both as it stands at the moment, and as it looks to continue into 2021 and beyond. In recent years, there has been a trend towards giving consumers more control over their data. Legislation, such as GDPR in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US, has given consumers more rights over how their data is processed and stored by companies.

Both GDPR and the CCPA give consumers the right to demand that a company offer up all of the data it holds on them. This could represent a significant undertaking for companies running their own UC set up, as data may be held across many disparate locations and storage mediums. Not only does using UCaaS help silo company communication data, but the responsibility of developing tools to keep in compliance with legislation is offloaded to the service provider. This helps keep companies compliant with relevant data regulations at no additional overheard.

There is little doubt that in 2021 and beyond, more countries will enact legislation that seeks to control how companies store and process private data. UCaaS allows for at least some of this responsibility to be offloaded from the company and on to the service provider.

Going Forward

COVID-19 forced the hand of many companies that were only considering UCaaS before the pandemic. Now, it's crucial for many companies just to keep going. Now that companies are using UCaaS, the benefits over traditional approaches to communication are on full display.

The unified nature of UCaaS makes its adoption much easier. Traditional UC typically required a company to set up its own infrastructure. On-premises UC allowed companies to control exactly how their communication infrastructure was developed, but it came with several drawbacks. There were high upfront costs associated with installing all the necessary hardware and software, and IT personnel would have to maintain it, fix problems and keep everything upgraded. All of these tasks have become much more difficult now that many staff are working remotely.

The swing towards UCaaS is an answer to these challenging problems in challenging times. By offloading all the necessary installation and maintenance to a service provider, companies no longer have to worry about managing their own infrastructure. This allows for more predictable budgeting for companies, as well as increased reliability of service. All necessary hardware and maintenance tasks are dealt with by the service provider, which offloads responsibility from the individual company. UCaaS allows companies to focus their energy on their business, and not worry about their communication infrastructure.

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About the Author

Dennis Thankachan, co-founder, CEO at Lightyear, a web platform that helps businesses primarily on choosing the right IT infrastructure services for their operations (internet access, VoIP, managed services, etc.). Dedicated in building software to drive enterprise IT efficiency, he writes on various IT infrastructure and telecom topics.