Industry Insights

Ditch the Glitches, Embrace Exceptional Voice and Video Experience with Versa Secure SD-WAN

The consumption of real-time voice and video applications, along with collaborative tools, has surged dramatically as organizations prioritize productivity and business agility in an increasingly digital and hybrid work environment. These applications enable seamless communication, faster decision-making, and more flexible team collaboration across geographies, enhancing employee and customer engagement.

Despite their widespread adoption, delivering consistent quality and a seamless user experience for real-time voice, video, and collaborative applications remains a significant challenge.

Legacy Solutions can’t guarantee real-time application performance

Most SD-WAN solutions continue to rely heavily on traditional network SLAs — such as jitter, packet loss, and latency metrics — to detect and remediate performance degradation, as they tend to be bookended. As they fail to measure application SLAs using application traffic passively, they often bypass SLA-based traffic decisions for SaaS apps, such as those for collaboration and video conferencing. This approach often leads to reactive rather than proactive performance management.

Real-time applications require Actionable Analytics

Voice and video applications are typically transmitted as high-volume UDP streams that demand significant bandwidth to ensure smooth delivery. These applications rely on codecs to compress and encode media streams, which directly influences the quality of calls and overall user experience. Organizations require an SD-WAN solution that accurately identifies and measures critical parameters such as codec types and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) to make traffic-forwarding decisions.

Versa Secure SD-WAN is built for Real-time and Collaboration

Versa Secure SD-WAN solution supports “Application-Aware” traffic steering that delivers accurate identification of all applications, including enterprise, SaaS and real-time apps and intelligently steers traffic across WAN links by providing:

• Bandwidth and SLA-based traffic steering:

  The Versa Secure SD-WAN solution features accurate app detection with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), SLA-based monitoring, and smart path selection. It tracks key metrics, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss, in real-time. In addition, it also monitors and measures application-based SLAs—such as round-trip delay, delay variation, transmit utilization, forward/reverse loss, and packet loss percentage to enable optimal performance and dynamic path selection based on real-time conditions.

  

• SaaS application traffic steering:

  As more and more voice, video, and conferencing applications are offered as SaaS, Versa Secure SD-WAN optimizes SaaS application performance with intelligent traffic steering based on real-time path monitoring. It continuously tracks actual SaaS traffic and local WAN link performance, whether accessed directly or indirectly.

  

  

• MOS score-based traffic steering:

  The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is the standard for measuring voice and video quality. Versa OS™ monitors MOS in real time for over 120 codecs and apps like Teams, Zoom, and Webex. If the MOS falls below a set threshold, Versa Secure SD-WAN can automatically switch the call or stream to a better-performing path to maintain quality.

  

• Prioritization designed for real-time apps:

  In addition to traffic steering based on bandwidth and SLAs, voice and video applications are sometimes forced to congested and lossy links. This makes prioritization a real necessity to ensure performance optimization. QoS in Versa Secure SD-WAN prioritizes critical traffic, traffic shapes both internal/external and upload/download flows, manages bandwidth across users and applications, and ensures low latency for key applications like voice and video.

Delivering Exceptional User Experience Securely with Built-in Security and SASE

Versa offers built in security services such as Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), CASB, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) integrated directly into the SD-WAN fabric, protecting application access and traffic on local breakouts and DIA while delivering unparalleled performance for directly accessed applications. For customers with a SASE strategy, Versa Unified SASE secures applications in the cloud while ensuring SLAs are taken into consideration at the first mile of the application, providing end-to-end performance assurance.

Summary

With these advanced SD-WAN capabilities—fast failover, forward error correction, packet duplication, dynamic path selection, and SLA-based routing—Versa delivers industry-leading performance and reliability for voice and video applications, ensuring optimal quality even under challenging network conditions. Learn more about how Versa SD-WAN can help transform and modernize your branch while delivering exceptional user experience for critical apps here.

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