If you want to ensure your Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering can meet the growing demands of your enterprise customers while making your job easier, you need unified communications (UC) provisioning software. This blog covers the main benefits that UC provisioning software can offer.
Business communications are evolving rapidly. Traditional UC systems and solutions are quickly being phased out in favor of UCaaS solutions.
As the market for UCaaS becomes more competitive, UC providers and managed service providers need to find ways to improve their offerings while streamlining internal operations. That way, communications for the enterprise end-user can be as smooth and reliable as possible.
While there are many ways to improve your offering, one that often gets overlooked is UC provisioning software.
What is UC Provisioning Software & How Does It Work?
UC provisioning software is a type of platform that automates user provisioning tasks across an on-prem UC environment or UCaaS platform. With UC user provisioning software, UC engineers or IT administrators can create job templates for common provisioning tasks to be done as needed or in bulk.
Once those job templates are created, they can run automatically. Once a new user is detected in an enterprise directory or a ticket is created for IT, an automated UC provisioning platform can take that data and map it to the correct fields in needed UC applications for an end user, provisioning that user where they need to be without any manual work. It does this by connecting either natively or through an API to all the associated UC applications.
5 Benefits of Adding UC Provisioning Software to Your UCaaS Offering
The goal of UC provisioning software is to enable administrators to securely automate manual provisioning tasks and make onboarding, offboarding, ongoing administration and bulk changes much easier. Let’s look at how.
Benefit #1: Seamless Automation
The main benefit of UC provisioning software is that it enables your MSP to fully automate many of the provisioning tasks associated with UCaaS deployment and ongoing management.
Provisioning software automates the deployment of UCaaS services, reducing the need for manual configuration. This speeds up the onboarding process for new users and ensures consistency in service delivery.
Another benefit of automation is data centralization or a “single source-of-truth” for provisioning data. A UC user provisioning platform provides a centralized hub for managing various services in your UCaaS offering. This makes it easier and faster to monitor, troubleshoot, and update configurations across the entire enterprise UC ecosystem or your entire multi-tenant environment through a single pane of glass.
Benefit #2: Enhanced UCaaS Security
As companies adopt hybrid and remote work models, end-users are accessing company UC applications and information from anywhere. These new variables present new security vulnerabilities UC teams must account for. While there are many factors that influence the overall security of your UCaaS offering, UC provisioning software can play an important role in locking down UCaaS in three ways.
- Standard Job Templates: A UC provisioning platform offers standardized job templates for many routine UCaaS provisioning jobs. That means all provisioning tasks jobs are done the same way each time without any possibility of accidental or malicious data manipulation.
- Role-Based Access: Next, provisioning software will allow your team to delegate who has access to which jobs with role-based access. Ideally, you’ll want a UC provisioning software with granular privilege options, so you can tailor access to the exact jobs and individuals needed for your business.
- Detailed Audit Trails: Lastly, with detailed audit trails, your MSP will have a detailed log of events like access requests, all changes, and whether they were approved or denied. These logs are important for tracking down the origin of a security breach should one take place.
Benefit #3: Interoperability
Many UC provisioning platforms are interoperable with other common enterprise systems and related areas such as call monitoring, call analytics, E911, call recording, CRM, HRIS, IT service management (ITSM) and more.
UC provisioning software can be a hub that ties these disparate systems together. This ensures UCaaS doesn’t exist in a silo for your customers, facilitating a more cohesive and interconnected IT environment through a variety of integrations.
Benefit #4: Speed
Automated UC provisioning allows you to set up new UCaaS deployments with just a few clicks, saving your MSP time and resources while meeting new customer demands in the process.
Whether you’re adding new services to an existing customer’s instance or environment, or helping a client move their UC operations to the cloud, a UC provisioning platform can speed up the process through automation.
Furthermore, automated UC provisioning virtually eliminates the possibility of human error. This speeds up provisioning processes further by saving time and resources that would be used to troubleshoot and correct mistakes.
Benefit #5: Scalability
One of the biggest benefits of UCaaS over traditional on-prem UC is the ability to scale as needed without the hassle of physical phones and on-prem hardware getting in the way. Especially in today’s enterprise communications environments, the more flexible, the better.
Automated provisioning software fits perfectly with the goals of UCaaS. It is designed to scale with the growth of the UCaaS offering because it can easily accommodate an increasing number of users, devices, and services without compromising efficiency or performance for your team and your customers’ end users.
Conclusion
As you look to improve and expand your UCaaS offering, the ability to easily manage your multi-tenant environment will become even more important. Adding UC provisioning software to your UCaaS offering will allow your team to provide better service to your enterprise customers and end users. All while eliminating human error and simplifying bulk projects.
Interested in learning more about UC provisioning for UCaaS?
Akkadian works with leading MSPs to enable fast UCaaS deployment and streamlined provisioning across multi-tenant structures. Get in touch today to learn about partnering with Akkadian to add automated provisioning to your offering.
