Only 27 per cent of firms have 'visibility, understanding and control' of their collaboration environments

UC&C control slipping out of IT's hands?

Only 27 per cent of UK firms have real visibility, true understanding and effective control over their IT collaboration environments, Computing Research has found.

The research, carried out in association with NetScout, found that a further 47 per cent of UK firms believe they have just about enough visibility and control of their UC&C environment but "could do with more detail".

More worringly, 11 per cent of companies say they've "never considered" monitoring their UC&C infrastructure. A further 14 per cent responded with "generally no", while one per cent admitted no visibility, understanding or control of this environment.

The research will be presented in full in an upcoming Computing Research white paper.

"Any or all of those organisations may be experiencing problems that they have no idea how to solve, [despite having] made significant investments in upgrading their infrastructures," the paper says.

UC&C systems are increasingly being integrated with production applications and other IT systems that are administered by non-IT management. In such a scenario, service assurance solutions that ‘monitor' the network can give IT teams some level of control over UC&C.

"It's clear that just such a solution is needed in the majority of cases, as even those enterprises that have deployed UC&C strategically are struggling with day-to-day service assurance, reliability, and integration issues," concludes the report.

According to NetScout, common complaints with UC&C ecosystems include network errors with bad endpoints, call server communication errors with external peers due to firewall, general permissions or configuration errors, and interoperability issues between call servers and SIP trunks.

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