Most large enterprises have Cisco products in one form or another. On their journey to transitioning from a traditional hardware outfit to a software, cloud and services provider, Cisco have developed an extensive product reach.
Cisco deployments scale from small to medium business environments, right up to enterprise, multi-site global ecosystems. Regardless of organization size of the number of users, optimizing the ecosystem to ensure a great user experience is an important goal for IT teams – but it is not without its challenges.
Through our experience in working with the largest Cisco deployments around the globe, we've learned that optimizing your Cisco deployment requires a few critical considerations.
As organizations scale and introduce new collaboration tools, such as whiteboarding and video calling, network requirements change. A good user experience is key to driving adoption which, in turn, increases the ROI of any investment. However, these tools can dramatically impact network performance. Setting network bandwidth alerts can advise teams when systems are reaching their limits, triggering increased resources to preemptively avoid any issues. In addition, tracking bandwidth growth over time, by location, can help plan for network expansions where they are needed most.
Unused software licenses are more common than you think. We have seen organizations with up to 30% of their licenses unused, because an office moved or closed, and they failed to reassign licenses. Managing end points that will never be used and paying for the licensing that could be deployed elsewhere wastes valuable resources.
As organizations seek to move their unified communications (UC) workload to the cloud, it is critical to have visibility across both the on-premises and cloud-based solutions. Knowing what on-premise equipment is being use – and who it is being used by – is important when managing cloud migration. Switching off a desk phone that looks unused may look great on paper, but if that handset is servicing the CEO's remote office, no doubt the UC team will hear about it. Visibility also allows organizations toe extract maximum return from existing on-premise assets as the migration takes place.
Looking at your organization's global gateways and their usage also allows teams to deliver the best route patterns to take advantage of call cost savings. While that may not sound like a big deal, these insights can save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run, depending on the size of the organization.
While Cisco provides a stable and robust environment, issues can still arise. Problems often result when changes are made to the UC environment, like software updates or the introduction of new hardware. Change can break things, so the ability to see who made the change, and where and when, is critical to resolution.
Teams managing a Cisco deployment must be able to quickly identify where issues are occurring, with the capability to drill down to the root cause. Contextual data on any issues, provided by performance management tools, empowers teams to quickly troubleshoot and resolve. Knowing an issue exists is the first step, but the contextual data explaining why a certain router is down, or why that call dropped out, is what empowers lower level engineers to troubleshoot more complex issues. This then allows L2-L4 engineers to focus on more complex issues and business transformative initiatives.