Earlier this month, DSEI 2025 took place at London’s ExCeL, a world-leading event that brings together government, military, and technology innovators to explore the future of security and defence. With thousands of people filling the exhibition halls, the atmosphere was one of innovation, collaboration, and urgency – reflecting the pace of change across the sector.

This year’s show placed a strong emphasis on digital transformation, with AI and quantum computing taking center stage as enablers of faster, more informed decision-making. Demonstrations showed how these technologies are already being applied in live operational scenarios.

Collaboration and partnerships – spanning public, private, and international boundaries – were highlighted as essential to accelerate innovation and build more resilient ecosystems. There was also recognition that organisations are diversifying their approach to secure collaboration tools, exploring a broader range of options in messaging and conferencing to balance security, interoperability, and user experience. And with collaboration platforms now deeply embedded into daily operations, secure and effective management of environments (like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Webex) is becoming increasingly critical to information governance and mission success.

Cybersecurity dominated the conversation, underscoring the urgency of tackling ever-more sophisticated digital threats. Beyond strengthening cyber defences, access management models are also evolving, with attribute-based access control (ABAC) emerging as a more dynamic, context-aware alternative to traditional RBAC approaches.

In parallel, the importance of vendor-agnostic, self-hosted solutions that can flexibly operate across hypervisors or hyperscalers is growing, giving organisations greater sovereignty, resilience, and control over their technology landscape. Finally, immersive technologies such as AR and VR were firmly in the spotlight, showcased as powerful tools for both training and operations, and highlighting how quickly these innovations are shifting from pilot programmes to being applied in the real world.

Against this backdrop, the role of advanced technology management and optimisation becomes clear. Defence and government organisations are under pressure to integrate new digital capabilities at scale while ensuring reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness. Tools that provide automation, deep visibility, and actionable insights into incredibly complex communications environments are now mission critical. These capabilities not only reduce complexity and operational overhead but also enable organisations to embrace innovation with confidence, supporting secure, resilient, and future-ready digital transformation.

For us, attending DSEI was about more than observing these trends – it was an opportunity to connect with partners, customers, and innovators who are shaping the future of defence. The clear message from DSEI 2025 is that technology adoption isn’t enough on its own. Success will depend on how well new innovations are embedded, secured, and scaled to meet mission-critical demands.

Looking ahead, we expect future DSEI events to focus even more on how organisations can balance rapid innovation with operational resilience – a challenge that will define the next era of defence.

We have a long and proud history of working with many organisations in this sector, streamlining operations, strengthening platform resilience, and ensuring robust security with advanced features like ABAC, compliance with FedRAMP and DISA standards, proactive cybersecurity measures, and multi-layered secure access. So, if you are a defence or government organisation looking to achieve secure and scalable digital transformation by automating UC management, delivering real-time analytics, or enabling seamless migration from legacy systems, we would love to hear from you!

Managing the mix

Inevitably in these scenarios, there is a mix of vendors, technologies, and operator services under management. This project was no exception. It included the existing Cisco PBX (several clusters), Microsoft Teams Phone, Microsoft calling plans, Teams Phone Mobile, Operator Connect, and two operators providing PSTN access.

Managing the mix is taken care of by VOSS Automate in a single portal, providing a consistent view across the multitude of users, services, and numbers. Below you will see this at a site level, showing users with their devices and services, split across the existing PBX system and Microsoft Teams Phone.

The sheer scale

Next, we turned to the question of how to manage the scale of the solution, along with the number of administrators able to manage the service that were dispersed across various agencies and departments. The answer was to make use of the existing multi-node administration solution, hosted in different physical locations. This provided sufficient compute power along with a robustness should a particular location go offline.

Extending the solution to bring in Microsoft Teams Phone proved cost efficient, and the introduction was fast. The hierarchy concept described earlier provided a way to segment, filter, and navigate the vast number of users. Enhancements on existing workflows to cater for Microsoft Teams helped minimize training to the existing service agents who were managing the service.

Managing the two system syndrome

Managing an existing PBX system, which is multi-cluster and has a significant base of users and services, and then picking out departments to move on a schedule, is no mean feat. The crux point comes mid-migration, with users on both sides: Those waiting to migrate, and those migrated. Both systems need managing, operating, handling moves, adds, and changes.

The critical points on the solution were to:

• Run a discovery at the start of the migration project, to ensure there was good visibility into the existing PBX configuration, with the opportunity to clean up and trim back old configuration, thus streamlining the process and reducing license costs.
• Take advantage of the single portal view that straddles both sides, to provide a unified view of all users within the migration process. That was then coupled with migration ‘workflows’ that could move a user from Cisco to Microsoft Teams Phone.
• Regular synchronization with the underlying UC applications. In this case, Cisco and Microsoft Teams, to ensure that all information presented was accurate and up-to-date.
• Tracking telephone number inventory, what’s available and what’s used, who telephone numbers are allocated to, and what vendor system they reside on. Here is a sample screen shot from the VOSS Automate number inventory option, showing this:

More information

Carrying out a project of this scale is exactly what VOSS technology is built for. It’s exciting to solve a customer’s problems at such a grand scale, and we look forward to seeing the advancements that this dynamic UC platform takes in the coming years.

Find out more about VOSS for Microsoft or contact us.