  As quantum technologies move from the issues of principle to those of
practice, it is important to understand the limitations on attaining tangible
quantum advantages. In the realm of quantum communication, quantum discord
captures the damaging effects of a decoherent environment. This is a
consequence of quantum discord quantifying the advantage of quantum coherence
in quantum communication. This establishes quantum discord as a resource for
quantum communication processes. We discuss this progress, which derives a
quantitative relation between the yield of the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf
protocol in the presence of noise and the quantum discord of the state
involved. The significance of quantum discord in noisy versions of
teleportation, super-dense coding, entanglement distillation and quantum state
merging are discussed. These results lead to open questions regarding the
tradeoff between quantum entanglement and discord in choosing the optimal
quantum states for attaining palpable quantum advantages in noisy quantum
protocols.
