LiveNX: Cloud-based Network Architecture with Skype for Business

The Pulse

More and more enterprises are implementing their voice and video infrastructure as a hybrid architecture that leverages both on-premise and cloud-based elements. As with other enterprise applications, the vision is to ultimately embrace an entirely cloud-based architecture in the form of UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service). Skype for Business has an established track record as a hybrid architecture that allows enterprises to embark on such an architectural evolution for their voice and video infrastructure.

Optimizing the Network for Skype for Business

There is a complication when it comes to adopting hybrid premise-cloud architectures for voice and video communications, though: How do we ensure consistent user experience across the board? It is hard enough to implement end-to-end network QoS for on-premise Unified Communications. And now we have to include cloud on-ramp network QoS into the equation, as well as supervise the cloud SLAs.

Value to the Business

Business Intent: Digital transformation is driving higher expectations for network performance that supports collaboration applications. LiveNX is built to know application behavior on the network and proactively adjust to enable transformation – especially for voice and video traffic.

Network Visibility: An insurance policy for IT Operations, LiveNX provides comprehensive coverage of the entire network landscape. This is particularly relevant for Skype of Business given its hybrid nature since it spans from the end user to the cloud via the enterprise network and cloud on-ramp points.

Improved Productivity: The quality-of-experience (QoE) of collaboration applications directly correlates with knowledge worker productivity as well as customer experience. LiveNX ensures consistent, end-to-end QoE by providing end-to-end network visibility across both legacy and emerging software-defined architectures such as SD-WAN.

Faster Trouble-Shooting: Trouble-shooting voice and video remains a complex, time-consuming task. LiveNX provides deep insight and situational awareness of the heterogeneous network environment, and puts complete control of Skype for Business network policies into the hands of the operator.

Ensure Enterprise Network QoS

Challenge: Ensuring that your enterprise network infrastructure is ready for voice and video deployment isn’t easy. What’s the average and peak network utilization of your voice and video applications? Which locations showcase the highest voice and video loads? Are voice and video flows
consistently marked as EF46

[Expedited Forwarding] priority throughout every router and switch? Is SIP signaling traffic marked as as CS3 (DSCP24)?

LiveNX Capabilities

End-to-end voice and video flow visualization. Easily visualize hop-by-hop, end-to-end handling of every voice and video as well as signaling flows across the entire network. Roll back to get insights into past behavior.

Site utilization baseline. Real-time capture and analysis of line-rate voice and video flow data simplifies the task of capacity planning for voice and video traffic – both for legacy networks and to plan for emerging voice and video deployment over SD-WAN overlay architectures.

Business-critical applications. Real-time visualization of voice and video traffic, combined with summary reports, help to continuously optimize traffic policies to ensure high MOS scores.

Supervise Cloud QoS

Challenge: As you adopt UCaaS solutions such as Skype for Business, you often have to rely on the performance of the cloud-onramp links as well as the UCaaS cloud to deliver on expected voice and video QoE. But how can you supervise that business-critical performance and ensure your service provider is delivering on the agreed-upon SLAs?

LiveNX Capabilities

Validate cloud uplink performance. Voice and video traffic may now break out directly into the UCaaS cloud, and not take a path through your enterprise network you have direct control over. LiveNX allows you to visualize service provider link performance out of every location.

Monitor individual voice and video flows. Realtime visualization of end-to-end flows quickly identifies performance metrics and highlights service provider uplink issues for quick diagnosis and correction.

Correlate on-premise and cloud performance events. Real-time visualization exposes QoS anomalies and service provider and cloud provider performance issues. Gain the ability to supervise SLA compliance.

Troubleshoot Transient Issues

Challenge: The toughest problem to tackle in UC in general and UCaaS in particular are transient issues. How can you tell why a particular SIP session was not established? How do you map a SIP response code to an on-premise or cloud network issue?

LiveNX Capabilities

Real-time flow monitoring. Use real-time end-to-end flow/path visualization to monitor bandwidth, manage performance, and gain immediate insights into multi-domain network issues that impact users.

Historical voice and video traffic analysis. Use historical playback of end-to-end flow/path visualization to investigate and remediate performance problems across apps, users, and devices.

Correlate SIP response codes and multi-domain network events. A tough issue to resolve in any UC environment is to establish why sessions were not established or why a particular session’s QoE degraded while established. LiveAction can provide complete end-to-end, multi-domain visibility to pinpoint the exact source of the issue.

SD-WAN Deployments and Skype for Business

Many enterprises are adopting SD-WAN as a key way to improve network agility and reduce bandwidth cost. But as they introduce such virtual overlay architectures, they often have to revise their day to day operations, especially when it comes to maintaining full visibility as well as troubleshooting application performance issues – particularly for Skype for Business.

LiveNX features industry-leading integration with Cisco SD-WAN, making it an indispensable weapon when it comes to planning, implementing and operating an SD-WAN infrastructure that optimally supports the needs of Skype for Business. LiveNX also provides the ability to quickly and accurately pinpoint the source of any emerging issue that impacts Skype for Business.

LiveNX Capabilities

Easily visualize Skype for Business Traffic. Keeping track of applications in SD-WAN can be challenging. Is the application being routed over MPLS or Internet links? Which VPN tunnel is being used? Which policy has been applied? What packet loss, jitter and latency is voice traffic experiencing? LiveNX provides a powerful topology view that immediately answers these questions.

Establish the root cause for path changes. SD-WAN policies control applications routing behavior. QoS issues can trigger re-routing to remediate transient issues. But it is important to arrive at the root cause of such transient issues. With the Site-to-Site Analysis view, LiveNX provides the toolset to establish the root cause with an intuitive and fast 3-click workflow. Moreover, LiveNX provides playback capabilities to uncover recurring issues.

LiveNX: Insight into Skype for Business Traffic with SD-WAN Topology View

LiveNX: Establish the Cause for Path Changes with Site-to-Site Analysis

Master the Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Challenge

Maximize success as you plan, deploy and operate your Skype for Business (or any UCaaS) solution over your multi-vendor, multi-domain network infrastructure. LiveNX enables you to measure and manage the quality of experience over any network – be it a legacy infrastructure or an emerging SDN solution like SD-WAN or SD-Access.

LiveNX delivers complete, end-to-end insight across all network domains in your enterprise infrastructure in a single consolidated view. It streamlines management of audio, video, web meetings and calls and operations of complex voice and video solutions in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environment, including Skype for Business.

LiveNX Benefits

Improve customer experience. Customer satisfaction is the key— specifically in the early stages of initial contact. With more network efficiency and quality of communication, new leads can become loyal customers.

Maximize overall productivity and profit. An excellent performing network supports strong decision-making, innovation, knowledge-sharing and crosscompany collaboration.

Save time and costs. Dramatically accelerate troubleshooting time for voice and video issues by up to 80%.

LiveNX: Multi-vendor, multi-domain consolidated dashboard view into overall network performance for
Skype for Business