Any enterprise aiming for the top in our ultra-competitive global economy needs to keep expenses down as much as possible. After all, ROI and TCO are much more than just buzzwords.
One place with a high potential for excessive expenditure is in the selection of business technology. It’s absolutely imperative to strike the right balance between overspending based on optimistic growth forecasts and failing to sustain the market demand by starting too small.
If you get it wrong, both of these approaches can lead to unhappy customers and stakeholders.
Here Comes the Cloud
Luckily, when it comes to making these decisions, the cloud is the proverbial knight in shining armor. The cloud has totally changed the game by delivering measured usage on demand, easy access, scalability, flexibility and resiliency, all with minimal cash up front. This means that you minimize risks when building your technology infrastructures, safe in the knowledge that the cloud’s agility allows changes to be made quickly and easily later on if necessary.
Choose Your SBC Well
One vital piece of the enterprise communications network puzzle is the session border controller (SBC). These days, you’ll usually find this important bit of kit deployed at the edge of an organization’s datacenter. SBCs provide a whole array of essential services, such as seamless connectivity to SIP trunks, support for work-from-home employees, strong unified communications security, quality assurance and regulatory compliance.
Quite clearly, given its importance, you need to select an SBC with enough capacity for all these functions, even though you might not have any idea how much traffic to expect. Here are just some of the factors that can radically impact demand:
- Business type
- Adoption rate
- Customer base
- Seasonal variations
- Geographical area
In the past, enterprises would usually deploy an SBC, either on-premises or in the cloud, with enough capacity to handle the expected peak traffic. Unfortunately, cloud deployment can be a massive financial drain in the long run due to its pay-per-use model and the cost of compute and networking resources.
Application Note
MEDIANT CLOUD EDITION (CE) SESSION BORDER CONTROLLER
TAKING THE GUESSWORK OUT OF SBC DEPLOYMENT
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Stretching the Limits
Cloud-based elastic SBCs are an innovative solution to this unpredictability, ensuring that you have exactly the right amount of resources available when you need them. They eliminate risk by being:
- Dynamically scalable to meet sudden or unexpected surges in demand, getting rid of the need to allocate extra resources for worst-case scenarios.
- Straightforward to deploy in a multi-cloud environment, simple to use and monitor, with only minimal technical knowledge required.
- Cost-effective enough to appeal to newly-launched businesses with limited budgets, while also being able to scale up to meet the needs of growing and large enterprises.
- Able to provide the same level of capabilities, quality of service and high availability as hardware-based SBCs.
Meet the Mediant Cloud Edition SBC
The AudioCodes Mediant Cloud Edition (CE) session border controller is an advanced SBC solution for cloud environments that very much ticks all these boxes. Its elastic micro‑services architecture is ideal for building highly scalable virtual SBCs quickly and easily, with the same full functionality as a traditional SBC.
Based on dedicated functional blocks, consisting of separate signaling components and media components, it ensures full elasticity in response to constantly changing traffic needs. This clustered architecture enables resources to be scaled up or down, as required, in real time.
The Mediant CE enables quick deployment and ease of use, offering a unique approach to scalable SBC design and delivering real cost savings to up-and-coming, existing or growing businesses – businesses just like yours. For just one example of the Mediant CE in action, check out this success story.
We support your favorite virtual environments, including Azure, AWS and private clouds. Azure users can even get the Mediant CE directly from the Azure Marketplace.
Want to take the guesswork out of SBC deployment?
