Customer & Partner Stories – Bigleaf Networks

Allstate Peterbilt & Bigleaf: Ensuring uninterrupted operations across the Midwest

Amy Chan — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:58:02 +0000

Allstate Peterbilt Group, the largest privately held heavy truck dealership group in the upper Midwest, with 26 locations across the region, exemplifies the critical significance of network reliability in today’s business environment. With a steadfast commitment to providing exceptional sales, parts, and service to their home and business customers, Allstate Peterbilt’s workforce relies on seamless connectivity to ensure uninterrupted operations.

Network Connectivity: The Backbone of Operational Excellence

For Allstate Peterbilt, reliable connectivity is the lifeblood of their business operations. Their entire business model, including point-of-sale, inventory management, and service ticketing systems, is hosted in the cloud, making a stable internet connection a critical necessity.

Furthermore, with a significant portion of their parts sales occurring over the phone, any disruption in connectivity can severely impact their ability to effectively serve customers.

Allstate Peterbilt relies on Bigleaf to support the core of their business operations:

Overcoming Connectivity Challenges in Rural Areas

Allstate Peterbilt’s widespread presence across the Midwest, including rural areas with limited internet service provider (ISP) options, presented significant connectivity challenges. Many of their locations, particularly in the Dakotas, could only access a single reliable internet circuit, leaving them vulnerable to frequent outages and downtime.

This not only impacted their ability to conduct business but also created frustrating situations where ISPs would often point the blame back at them, leaving Allstate Peterbilt’s IT team to navigate the complexity of resolving issues that may or may not have been within their actual power to solve.

Bigleaf: A Game Changing Solution for Network Reliability

Through their longtime partners at Fostar, Inc., Allstate Peterbilt discovered Bigleaf, and that’s when their connectivity challenges began getting addressed with remarkable efficacy. By leveraging Bigleaf’s intelligent SD-WAN solution, Allstate Peterbilt gained the ability to seamlessly combine multiple internet circuits, including fiber, cable, and cellular connections, providing redundancy and failover capabilities. The change was like night and day.

With Bigleaf, we can have multiple Internet circuits at every location. Some have more than two, but at least two, and I don’t have to worry about our internet going down anymore. It's been awesome.

Ryan Wuotila

Director of IT at Allstate Peterbilt

Simplicity and Proactive Monitoring: Key Advantages

One of the key advantages Allstate Peterbilt experienced with Bigleaf is its simplicity and proactive monitoring capabilities. Wuotila praised the ease of setup and management, “I didn’t even have to go to the sites. I could call and walk them [my team] through it. So that’s how easy it was when I have part-Sales guys that can do it.”

The Bigleaf Web Dashboard now plays a pivotal role in Allstate Peterbilt’s proactive approach to network management. Wuotila explained, “I usually have the Web Dashboard open and when I see a site highlighted yellow, I can click on it. It’ll show me one circuit’s down but our users don’t even know yet because your same-IP failover has already rerouted the traffic to another circuit. That lets me call it in and get that repaired without the end user even noticing there was a problem. I also get quick alert notifications any time a site is having any issue. That’s a huge plus.”

Wireless Connectivity: Enhancing Reliability in Underserved Areas

To further bolster their network reliability, especially in areas with limited connectivity options, Allstate Peterbilt has leveraged Verizon cellular circuits for backup. Bigleaf allows them to do this easily and allows for a cost-effective and flexible backup option, ensuring uninterrupted operations even in the most remote locations.

“It’s absolutely crucial for us to have different flavors of connectivity because we can’t always get a hardline connection,” Wuotila explained. “We have such eclectic locations, from metro areas with millions of people to places that barely have a post office. To have another tool for backup is really great.”

Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Bigleaf Wireless Connect offers the convenience of adding wireless connectivity to your Bigleaf service, providing a reliable, single-vendor solution for uninterrupted business operations.

Transforming Business Operations with Bigleaf

Bigleaf enabled Allstate Peterbilt to transform their business operations, achieving unparalleled network reliability and continuity. With outages reduced to a minimum, Allstate Peterbilt can now focus on delivering exceptional service to their customers, secure in the knowledge that their network infrastructure is resilient and adaptable.

Wuotila summed up the impact of Bigleaf, “As soon as you install a circuit, it’s displaying in the Web Dashboard within minutes. You can see each circuit up, your speed, how much bandwidth is being used at that moment.”

Unlock the Potential of Bigleaf

Elevate your business operations and achieve unparalleled network reliability with Bigleaf. Leverage intelligent SD-WAN solutions, proactive monitoring, and flexible connectivity options to ensure uninterrupted operations, even in the most challenging environments.

Contact Bigleaf today to learn how their innovative solutions can transform your network infrastructure.

Main Challenges

Limited internet availability
Constant outages
and downtime
Different ISPs at multiple locations
Unresponsive ISPs
and waiting games

Bigleaf Delivers

Aggregating multiple ISP connections
Easy and intuitive setup process
“Single pane of glass” view for all circuits

Final Results

Elimination of service outages
High performing internet, even in rural and limited-service areas
Issue resolution with no user impact

Empowering K-12 education: Optimizing internet connectivity with Bigleaf Networks

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 19:00:00 +0000

An increasing number of K-12 schools are adopting education technology (EdTech), digital communications, and online tools for administrative tasks. These efforts to embed cutting-edge technology into their classrooms, and every facet of their curriculum and operations, create an engaging and empowering learning environment that better prepares students for today’s tech-centric world.

K-12 schools we work with are implementing several technologies and programs, including:

One-to-one device policies to support individual learning paths.
Cloud-based learning management systems.
Administrative tools for student enrollment, grading, and reporting.
Integrated live-streaming tools that power student-led production and distribution of daily video announcements.
3D printing labs that help students bring ideas to life.
Comprehensive deployment of Google Suite across its educational spectrum.

Embracing this technology not only ensures a rich and interactive educational experience for the students but also streamlines staff processes, enabling them to remain focused on student learning.

Challenge: Ensuring reliable internet connectivity

The transition to a digital-first educational approach, underscored by cloud-based applications and a one-to-one device policy, can be hindered by an outdated network infrastructure and unreliable internet performance. Antiquated in-house servers, older wiring throughout buildings, decade-old switches and access points, high internet costs and bandwidth fluctuations easily threaten the seamless delivery of educational content, necessitating foundational and technology updates that can ensure consistent, high-quality internet performance across the institution.

Bigleaf Networks: Optimizing internet connectivity for K-12 schools

Curtis Roth, from The Rockland Group, works with many schools going through these kinds of digital transformations. He works to understand their objectives and then creates thoughtful solutions to meet them. For schools that rely heavily on internet-based tools, he recommends Bigleaf as a network optimization solution. Roth explains how Bigleaf allows the bonding of multiple internet circuits to alternate and share bandwidth which enables consistently smooth internet performance and helps to mitigate outages and downtime.

Once deployed, schools can use the Bigleaf Web Dashboard to understand their circuit and traffic performance across their WAN in real time to efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues. Many also learn with the Web Dashboard that they are overpaying for their internet.

For example, Roth was working with a school that was re-evaluating their fiber internet service because the COVID relief funding that helped them get it in the first place was running out. Without that subsidy, the fiber line would be cost-prohibitive.

With Bigleaf in place and Roth’s guidance, the school saw they weren’t even close to utilizing their full 1 GB of bandwidth, even with all their digital initiatives. This insight resulted in the school transitioning to two 500 MB lines instead, which not only allowed for network redundancy to minimize downtime, but also reduced their monthly internet bill by $1000 a month!

Additionally, the school was able to leverage an e-Rate program to facilitate the purchase of Bigleaf’s services, which broaden their accessibility to these internet solutions.

Benefits of Bigleaf for K-12 schools:

Operational continuity: uninterrupted internet service, a cornerstone for a school’s reliance on digital educational tools and cloud-based applications, is supported.
Optimized performance: With Bigleaf, schools experience real-time adjustments to internet traffic, optimized performance, and the minimization of bandwidth inconsistencies.
Cost savings: Facilitated by Bigleaf’s efficient use of multiple internet providers, which can maximize the value of their connectivity investments, schools can save valuable budget dollars by switching from fiber to a combination of less expensive connections.
Empowered education: Teachers and students benefit from an enhanced digital learning environment, less encumbered by disruptions of internet downtime.

Bigleaf Networks: Powering the future of K-12 education

For K-12 schools across the U.S., Bigleaf Networks can become more than a service provider, it can be a partner in their mission to provide a seamless educational experience. By delivering a reliable, optimized internet experience, Bigleaf helps schools transcend traditional connectivity challenges, embodying the promise of technology-enhanced learning. With Bigleaf, schools can confidently step into the future, knowing their internet connectivity is in expert hands.

Take control of your school’s digital transformation journey today!

Schedule a demo and discover how Bigleaf can be a trusted partner supporting your mission of providing exceptional, technology-driven education to every student.

Lifesaving connectivity: How Life Flight Network stays connected in remote areas with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:08:49 +0000

Life Flight Network's reliability at forefront of emergency care

Life Flight Network, the largest not-for-profit air medical transport provider in the United States, epitomizes the critical importance of reliability in emergency medical service. With a steadfast commitment encapsulated by their company promise, “There. When you need us,” they ensure exceptional care, transporting patients with their fleet of helicopters, airplanes, and ground ambulances from accident sites or remote communities, between medical facilities, or to specialists in other states. From the rugged mountains of Montana and the remote backcountry of Idaho to the sprawling plains of Washington and the picturesque Oregon coastline, Life Flight Network’s workforce of over 900 professionals is dedicated to delivering safe and expeditious care.

Seamless communication: Lifeline to critical care

Life Flight Network’s ability to communicate and coordinate seamlessly plays a pivotal role in their life-saving mission. From the moment a dispatch call is received, effective communication ensures crucial details are conveyed accurately and promptly to the pilot and medical crew. This communication is essential for both the highly trained professionals delivering ICU-level care en route and the medical team at the hospital preparing to receive the patient. This allows all teams to prepare and ensure swift adaptation to changing circumstances, including pilots and transport crews who are navigating transport efficiency amid varying weather conditions and flight logistics.

Inside Life Flight Network's network infrastructure

Life Flight Network operates a sophisticated infrastructure designed to ensure uninterrupted communication and access to critical resources across its numerous aircraft bases and operational sites. Facilitating communication between different base networks is pivotal, particularly for their systems like radio over IP used in their dispatch centers.

Additionally, their network supports critical applications such as Flight Vector and Rescue Net, instrumental in tracking flights, facilitating real-time decision-making, and managing billing processes. Life Flight Network operates a hub-and-spoke topology, with their hub in Beaverton, Oregon, which extends connections to all their sites through point-to-point VPN connections.

In a bid to accommodate their continued growth, the organization is embarking on a transition journey, migrating their on-premises footprint into Azure. This strategic move underscores their commitment to evolving with technological advancements while maintaining the high standards of reliability and performance crucial for their life-saving operations.

How Bigleaf supports Life Flight Network's critical missions

Bigleaf emerges as a transformative solution in Life Flight Network’s network infrastructure, addressing challenges with remarkable efficacy. Through features like same IP failover, Life Flight Network achieves unparalleled reliability, seamlessly transitioning between circuits without disrupting operations or compromising connectivity. Leveraging public IPs provided by Bigleaf further enhances network stability and simplifies configuration processes, ensuring consistent performance across operational sites.

In managing VPN traffic, Bigleaf ensures it rides the most stable circuit while providing redundancy and failover for the VPN when a circuit goes down or degrades (without dropping the session) and prioritizes traffic type within the VPN tunnels—delivering stability otherwise unachievable when dependent on the performance of the public internet.

Bigleaf’s simplicity and reliability are hallmarks of its effectiveness in Life Flight Network’s operations. With Bigleaf, there’s no need for intricate configurations or constant monitoring; it simply works. “I really appreciate the simplicity of Bigleaf,” says Jonathan Knowles, Life Flight Network’s network engineer. “The entire network team is comprised of my manager and me; not having another thing I need to worry about or babysit is awesome.”

Bigleaf Wireless Connect: Elevating Life Flight's Network’s reliability in underserved areas

Bigleaf Wireless Connect adds to Life Flight Network’s arsenal of network solutions, providing essential redundancy and reliability particularly in areas where traditional connections are limited, but core operations and services are primarily centered. “Most of our bases are positioned in rural locations where, if someone were to have a horrible accident, you know, the worst day of their life, we would be able to get to them and then to a hospital much faster than with ground transport,” Knowles describes.

Historically, Life Flight Network relied on point-to-point wireless solutions, but these often proved unreliable, with connections frequently dropping in and out unpredictably. More recently, the company has deployed Starlink in some of their locations as a primary circuit.

Bigleaf Wireless Connect offers a cost-effective and flexible solution for Life Flight Network’s diverse connectivity needs. “It’s absolutely crucial for us to have different flavors of connectivity because we can’t always get a hardline connection,” says Knowles. “We have such eclectic locations, from metro areas with millions of people to places that barely have a post office. To have another tool for backup is really great.”

Knowles further elaborates, “We’ve used other solutions but that adds another pane of glass to manage; whereas Wireless Connect is not only more affordable, but it’s managed by Bigleaf, which is more performant, in my opinion.”

With Bigleaf Wireless Connect, Life Flight Network gains peace of mind knowing that they have a robust backup solution in place, enhancing their overall network reliability and ensuring continuity of life-saving operations.

Experience transformation with Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Unlock the transformative potential of Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect to improve network reliability and performance. Enable uninterrupted operations, even in the most challenging environments.

Do you have limited connectivity options? Contact us for a demo and learn how Bigleaf Wireless Connect can help.

TeleCost Savings leverages Bigleaf Networks for enhanced internet reliability

Tabby Worthington — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 16:42:33 +0000

Partner profile

TeleCost Savings is a leading telecommunications consulting firm specializing in helping businesses across various industries simplify the process of obtaining the highest quality internet, voice, and data services with a focus on delivering value and ensuring clients receive the most for their investments, TeleCost Savings has garnered a reputation for its commitment to excellence.

Challenge

Enhancing internet connectivity for business clients

Dean Stewart, CTO of TeleCost Savings, recognized the need to improve internet connectivity solutions for clients seeking reliable and uninterrupted service. In a world where businesses rely heavily on internet-dependent applications, maintaining network reliability is essential. He explains, “Businesses need a solution that goes beyond conventional backup internet. They require a reliable and robust system that ensures consistent connectivity.”

Solution

Bigleaf Networks revolutionizes internet reliability

TeleCost Savings became a partner with Bigleaf Networks to address the connectivity challenges faced by its clients. Bigleaf’s innovative SD-WAN technology offered a solution that went beyond redundancy and transformed the way businesses experienced internet connectivity.

“Bigleaf Internet is more than just a backup; it’s a game-changer,” says Stewart. “It ensures businesses get what they pay for and eliminates the chaos that typically accompanies network outages.”

The partnership with Bigleaf Networks allows businesses to seamlessly integrate their existing second circuit with Bigleaf’s technology, guaranteeing optimal performance. In scenarios where the primary circuit experiences downtime, Bigleaf’s technology effortlessly transitions to the secondary circuit, preventing disruptions to VPNs and critical applications.

Stewart adds, “With Bigleaf, clients can achieve better voice and video quality without the need for dedicated fiber. It’s a cost-effective and elegant solution.”

"Bigleaf Internet is more than just a backup; it's a game-changer. It ensures businesses get what they pay for and eliminates the chaos that typically accompanies network outages."

Dean Stewart

Demonstrating the power of Bigleaf

TeleCost Savings not only advocates for Bigleaf Networks as an agent but also educates clients on the technology’s capabilities. They provide clients with insights into how Bigleaf’s dual IPsec tunnels and real-time routing work to ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

Stewart further emphasizes, “Bigleaf’s setup is incredibly simple, and its support is exceptional. The setup takes less than a minute, and if clients ever need assistance, Bigleaf’s support team is readily available.”

Navigating the Complex Telecom Landscape

TeleCost Savings navigates the complexity of the telecommunications industry on behalf of its clients. By working closely with businesses to understand their unique needs and challenges, TeleCost Savings positions Bigleaf Networks as a pivotal component of their tailored solutions. Stewart comments, “Bigleaf Networks becomes the cornerstone of our solutions, ensuring that everything works seamlessly together. It doesn’t disrupt existing systems; it enhances them.”

Conclusion

Dean Stewart’s TeleCost Savings is committed to providing businesses with the best internet connectivity solutions. By partnering with Bigleaf Networks, they have transformed how businesses experience internet reliability. Stewart’s dedication to delivering value and his deep knowledge of Bigleaf’s capabilities have made him a trusted advocate for businesses seeking to enhance their network performance.

In a world where network interruptions can have significant repercussions, TeleCost Savings and Bigleaf Networks are working together to provide businesses with the peace of mind that comes from reliable and resilient internet connectivity. With a focus on education and advocacy, they ensure that clients not only have the right solution but also understand how it works and why it’s essential.

Do you need to ensure your business has consistent connectivity?

Connect with us and learn more.

Passero Associates mitigates internet disruptions and downtime, amid limited ISP options

Tabby Worthington — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:01:29 +0000

Overview

Engineering and architecture firms must continually adapt to evolving conditions in large-scale projects, necessitating seamless communication, collaboration, and uninterrupted connectivity. As an esteemed player in the fields of building and airport design as well as survey work, Passero Associates needed to guarantee uninterrupted and dependable connectivity for its second-largest site’s team and senior executives. They found that using Bigleaf allowed them to minimize outages and downtime that disrupted their business operations and productivity.

Customer profile

Passero Associates, based in Rochester, NY, is a well-established engineering and architecture firm with a sterling reputation for delivering innovative and aesthetic projects. With a team of around 170 employees spread across eight different sites, the company manages a harmonious work-sharing model where tasks are distributed and collaborated upon irrespective of geographic boundaries. Their main office in Rochester houses around 90 of their talented workforce, with the second-largest office situated in St Augustine, FL, where they recently integrated the Bigleaf solution. Their daily operations are heavily reliant on software suites such as AutoCAD for designs and Microsoft Teams for communication and collaboration.

Business challenge

Unreliable internet connectivity with limited ISP options

Passero’s St. Augustine office, uniquely situated on an airport property, faced a perplexing connectivity issue. While they believed they had a direct “Fiber” connection, their connection setup was more intricate. The data link involved an initial journey to a point-to-point antenna before making its way to the fiber network. Due to this indirect route, the connection didn’t regularly perform as needed. On top of that, it was exceptionally sensitive to weather conditions, which was particularly troublesome with Florida’s various weather patterns.

This created productivity disruptions and business-stopping outages caused by jitter-laden public internet connections and adverse weather. More than the hours-long downtimes, the unpredictability of these disruptions was a menace. Imagine the uncertainty and stress of not knowing when or for how long your business-critical tools, like AutoCAD and Microsoft 365, including Teams, might be unavailable. It’s akin to driving on a road with random roadblocks. Such uncertainties can be as disruptive as consistent outages, if not more. The erratic nature of these connectivity issues made it challenging for key team members, including the CEO and CFO, to effectively operate their business. This recurrent and unpredictable problem nudged them to seek a failproof solution that would bring back reliability to their network.

Goals

Eliminate downtime caused by unstable connectivity, which directly affected important members like the CEO and CFO.
Adopt a quick-to-implement solution that didn’t require a prolonged setup process.
Find a flexible option since there were ongoing discussions about relocating their site. The company wanted to avoid committing to ISPs that mandated multiple-year contracts.

Solution

Bigleaf's network optimization SD-WAN

Understanding their needs, Chad Krout, Passero’s Director of IT, received a recommendation from Paul Miller of Integritas Group, LLC to try out Bigleaf’s network optimization solution. Being familiar with many solutions and their impact on business needs, Paul understood Bigleaf’s ability to quickly drop into a site and immediately resolve connectivity issues that caused outages and downtime. Given the pressing need and Chad’s trust in Paul, Krout decided to try Bigleaf for himself.

Along with the Bigleaf service, Chad added a Verizon 5G device as his second circuit that allowed him to take advantage of Bigleaf’s same-IP address failover, collective circuit monitoring, dynamic QoS, and intelligent load balancing.

In turn, Chad saw a difference almost right away. Within the first week, the airport fiber unexpectedly suffered an outage, but the office operations didn’t skip a beat. Thanks to Bigleaf, the staff in St. Augustine carried on with their work, blissfully unaware of any connectivity hiccup. Krout pointed out, “They were still able to make Teams calls and continue working without disruption. In the past, they would have been completely dead in the water.”

Furthermore, Bigleaf ensures Microsoft Teams and other cloud-based applications run smoothly even during brown-outs, times when the internet connection doesn’t completely drop (so traditional failover doesn’t kick in), but rather performs so poorly that internet-based apps are practically unusable. With Bigleaf, Passero has revamped their connectivity landscape, ensuring a smoother workflow even when facing internet challenges.

See how Microsoft Teams performs with and without Bigleaf

Passero's future plans with Bigleaf

Bigleaf’s ease of setup and use was also a notable advantage for Passero Associates. It allowed them to immediately deploy a solution and paid off quickly when the outage hit the week following the installation. Krout emphasizes the straightforward implementation process, noting, “The ease and reliability that Bigleaf offers stand out. After setting it up, the only change we made was to our VPN configuration. It works efficiently right from the start.”

Moreover, the flexibility of Bigleaf’s solution provides Passero with the agility it needs. As the firm considers possible relocations or expansions, they’ll know they’ll be able to bring along and set up their Bigleaf router and Verizon 5G to connect their site to the internet immediately, even if they’ll have to wait for a primary line to be pulled in. Then after a second line is installed, they’ll be able to return to their redundant 2-circuit setup that provides the optimized network connectivity they enjoy today. With Bigleaf, wherever Passero decides to operate, they’ll be assured of a robust and reliable internet connection and optimally performing cloud apps.

Are you struggling with internet outages and downtime but limited by your ISP options? Connect with us and learn more.

Ensuring Superior VoIP and UCaaS Session Quality for Kinect Communications with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:49:02 +0000

As the world grappled with the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses faced a new reality where digital connectivity became the lifeline of operations. Internet bandwidth, once abundant, turned into a critical resource, especially for services that require real-time communication like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). In our comprehensive video feature, we highlight Charlie Slaughter, the CEO of Kinect Communications, and his strategic partnership with Bigleaf Networks—a collaboration that proved to be a turning point amidst these challenges. He turned lemons into lemonade by improving VoIP and UCaaS session quality with Bigleaf.

Charlie Slaughter encountered a pivotal moment during the height of remote work demands. He recalls the intense struggle for bandwidth, “I couldn’t even make a phone call,” a sentiment that captures the frustration many faced. But with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solutions, not only did he conquer these obstacles at home, but he also saw Kinect’s services transform, marking a remarkable 42% growth in revenue. This growth was fueled by the enhancement of VoIP and UCaaS session quality, showcasing how resilient networking solutions can drive business success.

Watch our in-depth video to witness Charlie’s firsthand account of how Bigleaf’s innovative technology elevated Kinect Communications’ service quality, ensuring their clients experienced uninterrupted and clear communications.

By integrating Bigleaf Networks into their infrastructure, Kinect Communications could offer their clientele high-quality VoIP and UCaaS sessions, pivotal for maintaining connectivity in a time when physical distancing measures were at their peak. “Whether they know it or not, they need it,” Charlie stated, emphasizing the often-understated necessity of robust network solutions.

Further into the video, we delve into how Bigleaf not only met but exceeded expectations during an era where every byte of bandwidth counted. The implementation of Bigleaf’s services at Kinect Communications became a game-changer, turning potential operational chaos into an opportunity for growth and stability, especially by improving VoIP and UCaaS session quality.

Learn more about the Bigleaf difference and read Charlie’s success story. Discover the innovation that drove Kinect Communications to not just survive but thrive during the bandwidth battles that came with mass remote work scenarios.

Charlie’s experience is a testament to the critical nature of dependable internet solutions. Bigleaf’s commitment to quality and customer service makes it a trusted partner for businesses navigating the complexities of cloud-based communication technologies. It’s a story of triumph over adversity, of leveraging the right technology at the right time to ensure business continuity and growth.

In the realm of VoIP and UCaaS, session quality and integrity is paramount. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and intelligent load balancing are just two of the many features that have enabled Kinect Communications to deliver outstanding service to their customers. Charlie’s words resonate with the countless others who have come to rely on Bigleaf for maintaining superior service quality: “Quality of service is a direct reflection on me, whether it’s my problem or not. So it’s extremely important to me.”

For those looking to strengthen their organization’s networking foundation and ensure the highest quality of service in VoIP and UCaaS sessions, Bigleaf’s solutions provide peace of mind and tangible results. The video and accompanying success story are not just promotions but serve as essential case studies for the benefits of robust SD-WAN solutions in a demanding digital landscape.

To understand how Bigleaf can support your business in overcoming connectivity challenges and enhancing your service offerings, we invite you to schedule a free demo today. Join the community of businesses like Kinect Communications that have taken their operations to new heights with Bigleaf Networks.

VoIP provider credits Bigleaf for 42% revenue increase

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 May 2023 21:55:04 +0000

After more than 15 years of integrating and installing advanced VoIP and UCaaS systems, Charlie Slaughter discovered Bigleaf Networks during the pandemic.

“I had all my kids back home and we were all quarantining in the same household,” he explained. “Everybody was on Zoom for school and meetings, and I couldn’t even make a phone call.”

Charlie set up Bigleaf in his home, “and the rest is history,” he said. Ever since then, Charlie, the founder and CEO of San Antonio, TX-based Kinect Communications, has added Bigleaf to every customer quote.

“I’m a huge believer,” he continued. “I add it for all my customers because they need it. Whether they know it or not, they need it.”

Charlie credits Bigleaf, along with an LTE cellphone router solution, for a 42% increase in Kinect’s monthly recurring revenue.

“Bigleaf is phenomenal,” Charlie asserted. “It’s selling like hotcakes, because it works.”

Charlie’s enthusiastic advocacy led to recognition as a 2022 Top Performer in Bigleaf’s managed service provider (MSP) channel.

Worry-free failover

Bigleaf’s Same-IP Failover has saved time, money, and aggravation for Kinect and its customers. In one example, Kinect’s website displays praise from a happy customer, a police department technology manager in the Gulf Coast resort town of Aransas Pass. Thanks to Kinect and Bigleaf, his department’s internet-based services kept running during a major outage that took out network and cell connections.

“Yesterday, a major fiber line was cut. This took out our primary internet connection along with one of the cell carriers. If it was not for our backup fiber and the SD-WAN solution, we would have lost most of our services. Instead, employees had no idea we had lost our primary connection until they got home and found the internet to be out citywide.”
– David Offalter, Technology Manager, Aransas Pass Police Department

Easy to integrate and manage

As an integrator, Charlie appreciates Bigleaf’s ease of installation and autonomous operation. “There’s very little hands-on. That’s important to me because I don’t have a big staff,” Charlie explained. “So, it’s a huge blessing for me to be able to ship a product [to the customer], plug it in, and it just pulls down that configuration file.”

Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS is another key feature that prevents headaches for Charlie and his team at Kinect. It works in concert with Bigleaf’s circuit monitoring and intelligent load balancing to identify and prioritize network traffic automatically, routing each type of traffic to the optimal circuit based on its capability and availability. There’s no need for manual policies, so Kinect can rely on Bigleaf to deliver reliable internet and cloud application performance.

According to Charlie, his company is held responsible for the customers’ network performance: “Quality of service is a direct reflection on me, whether it’s my problem or not,” he said. “So it’s extremely important to me.”

Charlie also benefits from Bigleaf’s monthly performance reports, where he can review any outstanding issues across all customer locations.

“I don’t go through every one of those reports. But the ones that I need are there at my fingertips,” he said. “The report shows up in my inbox, and I don’t have to think about it. It’s nice and convenient.”

“Phenomenal” product and service

“The customer service team at Bigleaf really has been phenomenal,” Charlie enthused.

“When I call, someone answers the phone any time of the day or night. And that means everything to me,” he explained. “Because there are days I wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and I need to talk to somebody about something that I couldn’t necessarily get to the previous day, an upcoming installation or something.

Charlie recommends Bigleaf to MSPs, systems integrators, solution providers, and other value-added resellers, to support their customers’ VoIP, UCaaS, and other cloud-based applications and services.

“Honestly, if you’re looking for a phenomenal product that requires very little effort other than to go out and install it and sell it, this is the SD-WAN solution that I would recommend to anybody,” he said. “And I have, actually, to be quite frank.”
– Charlie Slaughter, CEO, Kinect Communications, San Antonio, TX

To learn more about delivering reliable, resilient network performance, schedule a free demo today.

Bigleaf preserves continuity of service for Innovation Refunds

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 May 2023 21:22:34 +0000

Innovation Refunds is a fintech-based tax specialist that helps its clients to obtain tax refunds under a federal program that is due to expire in April 2024. To prepare for the upcoming deadline-driven surge in activity, the company is adding additional locations and moving its headquarters in 2023, while tripling its staff of accountants, tax attorneys, and other professionals. During this growth phase and beyond, Innovation Refunds relies on Bigleaf to support business continuity with stable, consistent network performance across all locations.

Customer profile: Innovation Refunds

Innovation Refunds employs a staff of 1,063, including over 700 who were hired in the past year. About a third of employees currently work in their West Des Moines, Iowa office.

For the past two years, Innovation Refunds has focused on obtaining tax refunds for company clients who qualify for an employee retention credit (ERC) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The ERC expires in April 2024, and Innovation Refunds expects activity to increase dramatically as the deadline approaches.

Challenge: Maintain service levels amid rapid expansion

To prepare for the additional activity, the company is continuing to execute its staffing plan with additional locations and capacity in Arizona, Iowa, and Florida, including new headquarters in downtown Miami. The move will improve the company’s proximity to key financial partners and markets.

Innovation Refunds manages its business entirely online, including exchanging private, confidential information with clients, tax attorneys, tax preparers, and the Federal Government. “Downtime and poor connectivity pose huge risks to the business,” said Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds. “We’ve effectively mitigated those risks with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN technology,” he added.

Solution: Bigleaf delivers reliable, consistent network performance

Nathan introduced Innovation Refunds to Bigleaf Networks when he served the company as a managed service provider. Prior to that, the company had set up internet connectivity with redundant fiber lines from two separate carriers. Both carriers used the same provider for the last mile, however. While each line was reliable, the combination was not fault-tolerant, according to Nathan. He brought in multiple carriers and partnered with Bigleaf to deliver last-mile diversity that optimized network performance and resilience.

Bigleaf has been instrumental in the company’s expansion plans, as well. Each of the new Innovation Refunds offices is serviced by a different set of ISPs who don’t offer a uniform choice of circuit types or service packages. Bigleaf works with any ISP and connection type, so Nathan can ensure a consistent, stable internet connection for all of the company’s disparate locations.

Since adding Bigleaf, Innovation Refunds has weathered several outages – including planned maintenance – without any downtime or disruption. When potential issues arise, Nathan’s IT team receives email or Slack alerts from Bigleaf. The team can address those problems proactively, without any degradation in the user experience for employees or clients. If one of the circuits experiences problems or even fails entirely, Bigleaf Same-IP Failover moves network traffic to a working circuit, automatically and seamlessly.

“Even when there’s an outage, our users don’t know there’s anything wrong,” Nathan asserted.

Because Bigleaf operates outside the firewall, Innovation Refunds was able to maintain its established networking and security policies. Those specific, mission-critical technologies enable the company to remain in compliance with regulations that govern financial institutions and accounting firms. Recently, the company earned AICPA SOC2 attestation, allowing Innovation Refunds to work directly with banks and other financial service providers.

“Our success depends on reliable and resilient internet connectivity.And there’s no way I’d want to do this without Bigleaf."

Nathan Phinney

CIO, Innovation Refunds

Relocating with cellular service — and Bigleaf

As Innovation Refunds began transitioning its headquarters from Iowa to Florida, employees were eager to begin work in the Miami office. Unfortunately, the fiber circuits had not been set up yet. In the interim, Nathan’s team provided internet access by connecting multiple cellular providers to the Bigleaf service, via a pair of Cradlepoint wireless routers, so employees could begin work immediately at the new headquarters.

Bigleaf supported internet-based applications, including business-critical voice and video calls, over the relatively low-bandwidth cellular connections. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and intelligent load balancing work together to automatically identify and prioritize VoIP and video session traffic, which is particularly sensitive to internet performance issues. Bigleaf routes those sessions to the best available path, so employees can communicate without disruptions or distractions.

“Bigleaf’s automated QoS does a remarkable job,” Nathan said. “The default settings have worked 100% of the time, so we don’t need to worry about programming any of it.”

Once the new fiber circuits were installed, Innovation Refunds retained the cellular services for redundancy. Nathan expects the company to be increasingly busy as the ERC claims deadline approaches, and the expanding workload will make further disruptions intolerable. It’s a significant amount of work to collect the required documentation for a single refund, and time is growing short for the potential claimants who have yet to begin the process.

“The cost of downtime will also rise as the deadline approaches,” Nathan explained. “The last two months are more valuable than the previous ten months,” he said. “Especially during this busy period, our success depends on reliable and resilient internet connectivity.”

“And there’s no way I’d want to do this without Bigleaf,” he concluded.

About the Employee Retention Credit

Businesses may qualify for a refundable tax credit if they retained salaried employees – and paid employment taxes – despite sustaining losses during the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020 and 2021.

Qualifying businesses may receive Employee Retention Credit (ERC) tax refunds of up to $26,000 per employee. Innovation Refunds offers free payroll tax refund estimates at getrefunds.com.

Watch our webinar with Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds

Don’t miss our upcoming webinar: “Does your network…not-work? Eliminating internet unpredictability in 2023.” Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds and Lori Stout, CMO of Bigleaf Networks will discuss proven technologies and strategies for preserving business-critical network operations with Michael Krieger of Network Computing.

CNI harnesses Bigleaf to improve internet continuity for utility companies

Amy Chan — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 23:14:09 +0000

Computer Network, Inc. (CNI) turned to Bigleaf Networks to reduce the impact of network outages and improve internet continuity, reliability and performance for the utility companies it serves. CNI’s utility management system (UMS) helps to streamline and control operations for more than 200 utility boards and municipalities across the U.S. that together provide water, natural gas, electricity, wastewater, and sanitation services to their business and residential customers.

Like many organizations that conduct business online, utility boards rely on internet-based communications and applications to manage their operations. If the internet connection is unavailable, even briefly, utilities and their customers risk losing access to critical services, in addition to incurring the costs associated with the disruption of ordinary business functions.

Bigleaf mitigates impact of network outages

With Bigleaf, CNI keeps internet connections up and running at its own Cullman, AL-based headquarters and at a growing number of utility company locations. CNI chose Bigleaf for its Same-IP Failover feature, which works in concert with a static IP address while switching traffic in the background from a faulty circuit to a working connection, in a seamless failover.

Some of CNI’s utility clients already maintained backup connections so they could execute a failover manually when one line went down. While this type of redundancy is helpful, many network configurations and policies don’t allow failover unless there is a complete outage. Further, this failover process itself causes an interruption in service.

Bigleaf, by comparison, initiates the failover automatically and instantaneously, so there is no interruption to data transmission or to the user experience. This seamless failover is especially important during session-based applications and technologies, such as VoIP, videoconferencing, or VPNs, when the slightest degradation or disruption of circuit performance can effectively end the session.

Bigleaf also identifies, prioritizes, and routes internet traffic automatically to the path that offers the best performance for each data type at a given time. The transition to a better connection is so smooth that the user will not notice any change, even in the middle of a video conference, internet-based phone call, online payment, or other traffic-sensitive interaction.

“Bigleaf Same-IP Failover solves many of the issues that our clients face. Bigleaf also provides quality of service and load balancing of the clients’ internet traffic.”

Mike McConatha, President, CNI

Works with any ISP, connection type, or configuration

CNI appreciated Bigleaf’s plug-and-play simplicity and broad compatibility. Bigleaf can be integrated easily into existing network configurations, and it works with any ISP or circuit type. This flexibility was especially important to CNI for rural utility clients with limited choices of ISPs and connection types.

CNI can add Bigleaf to the utility companies’ systems quickly and easily, with no change to established network configurations or policies. Many utilities require complex network and security protocols, with established firewalls, virtual private networks, and dedicated connections to payment service providers and preferred ISPs. Bigleaf does not interfere with any of those operations or vendors.

“We wanted a networking solution that was carrier-agnostic, so it can be integrated into any of our clients’ CNI system configurations, with any ISP. Bigleaf gave us that flexibility.”

Jake Morrow, Technical Operations Manager, CNI

With the Bigleaf solution in place, CNI’s clients don’t need to worry about network outages or the frustrating service issues that can result. CNI also uses Bigleaf at its own headquarters office to maintain 99.99% uptime across four circuits: two fiber optic cables, one coax cable, and a cellular router.

The Bigleaf Web Dashboard gives CNI actionable insights on the circuit performance delivered by each ISP and circuit, so any potential problems can be addressed proactively. And Bigleaf support teams are available 24/7 to identify and resolve any urgent issues.

“Bigleaf support has been incredible. When there is an issue, I can call in and typically get it resolved within an hour.”

Randy Bell, Sales Engineer CNI

Are you ready to improve the performance and reliability of your critical, internet-dependent applications? Schedule a free demo and learn how Bigleaf delivers flawless, worry-free connectivity.

Bigleaf prevents network downtime for Hanna Andersson

Amy Chan — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:13:20 +0000

Reliable uptime supports productivity and online sales

With an online-only retail operation backed by an internet-enabled data center and warehouse, Hanna Andersson was acutely aware of the risks associated with network downtime. Bigleaf optimized network connectivity at all three locations, to keep the company’s entire e-commerce operation up and running without disruption.

Hanna Andersson depends on e-commerce and ERP

Hanna Andersson is a children’s lifestyle brand with a longstanding reputation for top-quality apparel. The children’s lifestyle brand began selling from a catalog in 1983, and later established 55 retail stores and 11 outlets.

Beginning in 2019, the company pivoted to an online-only sales model and closed all its brick-and-mortar stores. Hanna Andersson’s 400 employees now manage the entire operation from three U.S. sites: headquarters offices in Portland, OR, a data center near Seattle, WA, and a Louisville, KY, distribution center.

Hanna Andersson’s e-commerce system is both an online catalog and a retail sales venue. The website is supported by the company’s ERP, which manages inventory and fulfills orders. Hanna Andersson also relies on critical business applications, including Office 365, other SaaS applications accessed via the cloud and hosted by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. 

Challenge: Risks and costs of internet downtime

Network downtime is a direct cause of lost productivity, according to Tony Velasco, Director of Infrastructure and Operations for Hanna Andersson. The data center and warehouse are especially sensitive.

“If connectivity goes down at our data center, every single employee is affected,” Tony explained. “Our IT team is inundated with support calls, because no one is able to work,” he continued.

Internet connectivity issues in the warehouse can cause even more disruption. Even when a circuit doesn’t fail completely, intermittent outages or performance degradation can disrupt an entire shift.

When Hanna Andersson relied on a single circuit or a manual failover process – which was the norm before Bigleaf – an intermittent outage could cause a temporary shutdown. On at least one occasion, the entire warehouse staff was sent home for the remainder of their shift due to internet performance issues.

Losses would be especially acute during the holiday season, when the company’s distribution facility runs 24 hours per day, including 3 hours of unmanned order acceptance and processing.

Solution: Bigleaf reduces risk of downtime, ends “fire drills”

Tony evaluated several network optimization and SD-WAN solutions before choosing Bigleaf. Ease of use was a key benefit. Tony was also relieved to find that Bigleaf works outside the firewall, so there was no need to change the company’s established security policies, technologies, or vendors.

Since introducing Bigleaf, Tony doesn’t need to worry about internet downtime or performance optimization. Bigleaf keeps Hanna Andersson’s internet connections up and running, and all business-critical applications perform as expected.

Bigleaf fixed serious issues automatically, before they affected Hanna Andersson’s network operations. In a recent review of his Bigleaf Web Dashboard, Tony learned that there had been an outage on a main circuit that serves the company’s Seattle-area data center. That outage could have caused a downtime event, but Bigleaf corrected the problem seamlessly. For a company with 400 employees and an untold number of customers, even a few minutes of lost productivity and lost sales could have entailed significant costs.

Earlier in the year, one ISP’s line had recurring performance issues and a series of outages. That ISP serves the Hanna Andersson distribution center in Louisville, but thanks to Bigleaf, there was no impact on business operations. Bigleaf monitors circuit performance constantly and directs network traffic automatically to the circuits that are best suited for each application. That dynamic adjustment improves the quality of service so applications and services work as expected.

Result: Bigleaf saves Hanna’s time, money, and brand reputation

“Bigleaf saves my IT team so much time,” Tony said. “Instead of spending hours troubleshooting and resolving problems, we can look at the Bigleaf Web Dashboard to identify and address the source of a faulty connection,” he explained.

When the problem originated with an ISP, Tony presented that ISP with evidence from the Web Dashboard to show where and how the issue could be addressed.

With Bigleaf’s help, Hanna Andersson can now deliver an outstanding customer experience, enhancing the brand’s reputation for quality and reliability. The company was recognized by Newsweek in 2023 with a second-place award for customer service among online retailers of children’s clothing and products.

“We wouldn’t have achieved that recognition without Bigleaf,” Tony said.

Get valuable tips directly from Tony Velasco of Hanna Andersson in a fireside chat hosted by Bigleaf CMO, Lori Stout.

NW Towers provides reliable connectivity under the harshest conditions with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:07:26 +0000

Many of our managed service provider partners support clients who rely on the Internet to run their businesses, yet operate in remote locations with limited internet connectivity options. Northwest Towers definitely fits this bill. Read their story to learn how they use Bigleaf to provide highly reliable, remote connectivity to their clients, even under the harshest conditions.

Partner profile

Northwest Towers designs, constructs, and supports custom wireless networks for extreme deployments around the world. Their clients span a range of industries, including mining, construction, industrial, commercial, and transportation.

Business challenge

Extremely remote locations with limited connectivity options required reliable internet connections to run business-critical tools and systems without disruptions or downtime.

Solution

Bigleaf provides stable and highly performant internet connectivity that enables remote locations to transmit real-time operations data and telemetry to perform their daily operations efficiently.

NW Towers connects remote locations with Bigleaf

NW Towers specializes in building custom wireless networks with internet connections for remote sites. Many of their clients operate open pit mining sites. Other clients include ports, oil and gas, defense, agriculture, and emergency services. All of them are extremely remote.

In particular, mining operations take place far from population centers. In these remote areas, you typically won’t find any internet connectivity: no ISPs, no mobile phone coverage, and not even ancient copper for your old-school, 2400-baud US Robotics relic.

Yet modern mining operations are exceedingly high-tech. Vehicles, payloads, and other machines and systems are constantly producing data and telemetry needed to optimize operations and promote safety. They rely on real-time data reporting from the vehicles and data processing to keep the entire site moving. When these systems stall, idling large vehicles and highly-paid personnel, the cost of downtime is mind-boggling.

Minimizing these disruptions is why businesses turn to NW Towers. They are a service provider that specializes in bringing reliable connections to remote sites.

Every site has a different profile and calls for a different solution, from Starlink to Viasat to ruggedized LTE modems. NW Towers finds a way to provide even for off-grid sites without electricity on premise. They have developed an entirely self-contained solution delivered on a rugged high-tech trailer that’s equipped with a deployable tower, solar panels, and a diesel backup.

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls.

Bigleaf Networks ensures reliable connectivity, even in remote locations. Our advanced solutions provide seamless internet access wherever you are.

The NW Towers solution originally relied on multiple redundant connections, supported by a manual or automated failover process. However, when failures occurred, there was often a significant delay before the backup came online. Those delays caused idle time for valuable personnel and equipment. Such an outage could potentially derail schedules and operations. Additionally, switching to the backup system’s IP address would cause applications to fail, resulting in additional delays.

It’s an impressive and valuable solution that brings high-tech capabilities to the most remote and challenging environments. However, the internet connections in such locations are not the most reliable. NW Towers and its clients will do whatever they can to optimize their internet access and prevent costly downtime.

The solution: Last-mile internet redundancy

For these remote sites, NW Towers needed reliable, last-mile internet redundancy with failover that was not just automated, but transparent to both the local network and the remote connection.

Bigleaf proved to be a perfect solution. Because the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network encapsulates all network traffic in a cloud-based overlay tunnel, clients maintain the same static public IP address regardless of which connection is in use. The remote locations stay connected even during and after a failover.

In addition, Bigleaf Zero-Touch Setup meant that NW Towers was able to ship Bigleaf SD-WAN routers to each remote site. Installation is quick and painless—even with the variations in connectivity solutions used by each client.

The cost of downtime is mind-boggling

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls. Sites can transmit telemetry and reporting data in real time, even when their network connections aren’t performing optimally, or even when one fails.

This real-time delivery of telemetry data contributes to business-critical operational insights and helps improve worker safety.

Additionally, intelligent load balancing and Bigleaf Dynamic QoS provide stable, optimal bandwidth while minimizing latency across all available internet connections for each remote site. It’s a whole new level of performance and reliability for NW Towers’ clients.

The future of emergency services

Along with their mining clients, NW Towers plans to introduce Bigleaf into other exciting applications. They envision a future where their pre-packaged solution can be rapidly deployed for emergency services. When natural disasters and humanitarian crises strike, reliable power and internet connections can be some of the most fragile infrastructure elements. Without reliable connectivity, emergency services can falter.

With power and internet in one rugged trailer, service and emergency crews will be more effective and faster than ever. They’ll be able to transmit live video and receive data, like maps and architectural drawings of a site, that will help them respond more quickly to crises, reduce damage to property and infrastructure, prevent further harm, and save lives.

Need highly reliable connectivity at remote locations? Contact us to get started.

Bigleaf adds consistency and management to network performance

Bigleaf Networks — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 21:20:00 +0000

For managed service providers, streamlining and scaling network performance management has become an essential part of their business. However, many have found it’s difficult to ensure reliable internet connectivity and even more difficult to get visibility into issues. This leads to support tickets and Senior Engineers trying to fix things that should just work.

MSPs shouldn’t have to use their top talent to do things that frankly amount to basic day-to-day housekeeping items. They need a solution that allows for visibility into their clients’ networks and reliable internet connectivity. Not only that, but the solution also needs to be scalable. Simply, network performance shouldn’t need to rely on complex solutions and configurations – the approach to connectivity needs to adapt.

We sat down with Craig Anderson, vCIO of PC Miracles, to discuss how his team has used Bigleaf’s SD-WAN to take control of clients’ network performance.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about your background and what you do and what your business does?

A: I’ve been in the MSP space now for 13-14 years. Until recently, I was with a decent size MSP in Massachusetts, and that’s where I learned about Bigleaf and had most of my experience with it. Recently, I made a change to work remotely with PC Miracles out of Detroit and brought Bigleaf into PC Miracles. My experience ranges from running all the operations, service desk, processes for projects, managing the actual managed service, and even to some extent, a little bit of selling. Bigleaf was a major part of my success in this range of experience. We had probably about 100 clients, and I’d say a good chunk ended up using Bigleaf.

Q: What experience first sold you on Bigleaf?

A: When I first saw Bigleaf, a very good partner of mine who got on board early brought it in. We were doing an open house for clients and prospective clients, and they were one of our partners that were there presenting. The partner brought in a Bigleaf router with him, plugged in one of the internet connections into the wall, using our network. He also brought a Cradlepoint with a 4G LTE as a cellular internet backup and plugged that into the other port. He then took a SIP VoIP phone, and hooked it up to one of the cloud services, I don’t remember which one.

And he makes a call, and we can all hear it… he puts it on speaker to a cell phone, and he’s talking and then he just rips the cable out. Just pulls the cable right out of one of the ports, and the phone call, just doesn’t even miss a beat. The SIP conversation flipped right over, over the alternate connection. So, there wasn’t a dropped call and redial, or any sort of loss along those lines.

So right there, that to me was one of the biggest use cases. We were starting to see more clients go to cloud-based VoIP or really anything else that required the network to stay up.

Q: As the technology landscape has evolved this year, how has Bigleaf been a part of that strategy?

A: So, my most recent customers have a lot of site-to-site VPNs. They have very sensitive, based on an old technology, retail database systems, and if a site loses its internet connection and flips over to an alternate VPN on a different tunnel, all the sessions were lost, everything has to reconnect. Because Bigleaf hides all that, it obfuscates the connections, they can’t tell what internet connection they’re on, they just keep going because the packets are magically going over whichever connection and it’s magic as far as I’m concerned. The other big thing about site-to-site VPNs using Bigleaf… You get the single IP. From both an MSP and a customer standpoint, that ease of use is essential.

Any of us can get redundant internet going. Any MSP worth their salt can say, “Hey let’s put your firewall on and let’s put two internet connections on it.” But now we’re going to be able to make that turnkey, we’re not going to need to completely engineer that. We can now get it up to four internet connections without it getting complicated. Your customer is going to get the benefit of combining internet connections. We’re not just saying, “Hey if you’re on this connection, you get a 100 meg, and if you’re on this connection, you get 50 meg. We’re going to aggregate them and you’re effectively getting 150 because it’s using them both together, and you’re not going to need a senior engineer to set up something that is, from the customer standpoint, something that should be basic and should just work.

Q: From an MSP standpoint, what is the most helpful aspect of Bigleaf’s solution?

A: From the MSP standpoint, I personally want it because if you can bring that consistency across your customer base, you’re bringing that ease of management of internet connections to the MSP level. And if I can get to a point where the majority of, or all clients are running this, they’re going to obviously see their own benefits. But then I’m also going to see the benefit of being able to support them more easily and better because they may have whatever carrier is available in their geographical area or at their address—fiber, coax, satellite, 4G, whatever. But I’ve pulled those under one roof and consolidated that into one pane of glass, where we, as the MSP, can see what’s going on and support that and more quickly react or troubleshoot issues and quite frankly have less issues.

We can now pull that all together under one dashboard. That’s really one of the biggest things I found—we have the right quality for VoIP, we have that reliability, and it’s turnkey. You’re not having to engineer it, and when you reduce that complexity, you’re not having to troubleshoot the multitude of things that could go wrong in a more complicated scenario.

Q: What would you say to other MSPs on your experience with implementing Bigleaf?

A: I am one of those partners that can get a little bit technical, maybe more than the average person. But I kind of start to glaze over a little bit when we get too deep in the weeds, and it starts to sound like a lot of work and complicated. One of the big things for me over the years, in that MSP focus, has been scalability and repeatability. You don’t want to have your senior engineers use their best talent to keep things running day-to-day. So, I am very biased towards solutions that are more turnkey, but at the same time capable, you don’t want to give up the power just because you made it simpler. To that end, I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic or I wouldn’t have wanted to pull in Bigleaf as I went to new companies, or even bring it to my customers if I didn’t think we could manage it easily. Bigleaf is very simple to manage. You pull your customers’ internet connections under a dashboard that you have as an MSP, and you have that multi-tenant aspect, and your customers can have their own access.

One of my biggest clients, they have their IT director who wants to see what’s going on with his internet connection. In fact, in addition to Bigleaf’s stability aspect, another big driving force was wanting to have visibility into how well their connections were performing. So again, from the ease of use to management, you can just log in and see that. You have your history, you have what’s being prioritized, how much traffic is going through, all right there. I don’t think I’ve really ever had a day of training on Bigleaf, and it’s not needed even for configuring the solution. I know my team here; I was the only one coming in with experience with Bigleaf. And I’m saying “Alright, guys, I’m going to have this customer deploy Bigleaf.” The engineering team did a little bit of training, but was a bit apprehensive, right? But after they did the install, the feedback was, “Okay, yeah, that was no problem, that was easier than a regular internet cutover would have been. Certainly, easier than a firewall deployment.”

Bigleaf takes care of a lot of it for you. But even the configurations we work with and have to manage ourselves are very straightforward. If your techs deploy a firewall, if they handle an internet cutover, or if a customer gets a new internet connection; Bigleaf is not going to be a problem. And then that visibility and managing it on an ongoing basis, that single pane of glass, you now have it for the internet connections.

Q: If you looked at your business and your client’s network performance before Bigleaf and then after Bigleaf, what are the biggest takeaways?

A: We kind of beat it into the ground, right, on the simplicity, but it just works. Bigleaf makes redundant internet more solid. All the million little corner cases where a failover or redundancy didn’t behave as expected – all of that went away with Bigleaf.

Why medical offices and care facilities rely on Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 19:06:03 +0000

Healthcare is moving to the cloud

More and more of the day-to-day operations of the typical medical office, assisted living facility, clinic, and care facility rely on the internet. They’re turning to cloud-based tools to more efficiently and effectively connect providers, patients, and data.

Patient medical records and communications are being managed digitally. Phone systems are using VoIP so medical professionals can be contacted whether they are in their office, on rotation, or even at home.

Through cloud-based technologies, medical offices are connecting their phone, messaging, and email systems to their appointment scheduling, billing, prescription refill, and referral tools. And more providers are offering telemedicine visits as an alternative to in-person appointments. All of these interactions are 100% dependent on the internet working on their end.

Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations struggle with internet that just isn’t reliable enough.

An SD-WAN can optimize your connection to the cloud — without touching PHI

An intelligent software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is a cost-effective way to optimize your internet connection so you can make sure all of your important cloud-based apps work when and how you need them. There are different types of SD-WANs that have different advantages, though, so it’s important to pick the one that is best suited for your needs.

Bigleaf’s SD-WAN was built for the cloud, with a unique Cloud Access Network that controls traffic from your location both to and from the application source in the cloud. Our intelligent software auto-detects your application needs and adapts in real time to internet performance and connectivity issues before they impact your business — without technical complexity or need for expert staff.

And because many companies and organizations have very intentional security measures in place to protect sensitive information, we designed the Bigleaf SD-WAN to sit outside of the firewall. So, you don’t have to disable any of its features or change any configurations. This makes Bigleaf a popular choice for anyone who handles protected health information (PHI) and has to think about HIPAA compliance.

Here’s how a few Bigleaf customers are using our SD-WAN solution to make things better for their staff and patients:

Senior living community wanting to improve their residents’ quality of life

When a new IT director started at a company that operates several senior living communities on the East Coast, they quickly learned the internet connection was unreliable at many of their communities — and that it was much more than a minor nuisance. Like many companies, they have a cloud-based phone system, and when their internet goes down, so do the phones. That means residents can’t call or receive calls from family members. Nurse call systems are also rendered inoperable.

The IT director’s small team was getting a constant stream of internet-related support tickets. Unfortunately, all they could do was to call the local ISP and hope for a resolution. But this often ended with very little support and led to frustration among employees and residents.

The IT director knew they needed a reliable internet connection at every community location. To accomplish that, they added a second circuit and installed Bigleaf’s SD-WAN at each location. With those two components in place, their communities were equipped with multiple paths to the internet, plus real-time quality of service (QoS), load balancing, and seamless failover to ensure that those paths were used to provide a flawless user experience.

A plastic surgery office starting to offer televisits

When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders started, this plastic surgery office in the Pacific Northwest started offering televisits, or virtual video appointments, so they could continue serving their patients. They used their existing internet connection, but since it was shared with others in their building, it would slow down when several people tried to use it at the same time.

As a result, televisits often suffered from lag and video quality issues that made it difficult for the doctors and patients to communicate and understand each other.

It became clear that they needed an optimized and reliable internet connection to effectively offer televisits to their patients while also running all of their critical business applications, including a cloud-based electronic medical records platform. The clinic’s administrator talked to their network consultant and telecom agent to get their ideas and advice. They decided to connect through two solid fiber lines and deploy Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solution.

Right out of the box, Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS prioritized the clinic’s mission-critical applications above the rest of the traffic. Bigleaf’s intelligent load balancing utilized the two internet connections to provide real-time traffic shaping and steering that improved stability. This minimized the jitter, packet loss, and latency issues that had affected video call quality — so now the televisits just work. Plus, the other applications they rely on are working better, too.

A primary care clinic tired of phone outages

This clinic in the Rocky Mountains relies heavily on their phones, for everything from scheduling appointments to reminder calls and communicating with patients about lab results or follow-up care. Their old PRI phone system relied on a T1 internet connection that would go down for long periods of time, which had a very real impact on their business and their patients.

In a little over a year, their phones went down three times for more than a day each time — with one outage lasting three days. The office manager at the clinic had talked with their telecom company multiple times about the outages. The telecom replaced several parts that were supposed to fix the problem, but the clinic continued to experience entire days of downtime.

After that three-day outage, the clinic’s office manager was fed up. Fortunately, the managed service provider (MSP) who manages their IT and internet connection knew just how to help.

Since the clinic already had a very reliable fiber line, the MSP recommended that they move to a cloud-based phone system supported by Bigleaf’s SD-WAN. Even with the single circuit, Bigleaf’s SD-WAN would manage their sensitive VoIP traffic and deliver the reliability they needed. The MSP’s recommendation was highly credible and trusted because his company used Bigleaf, too.

Give your staff and patients reliable internet

Today, a reliable and optimized internet connection is crucial to avoiding disruptions to your business operations and ensuring quality patient care. It’s the difference between things like your phones, telemedicine appointments, and scheduling system working well and keeping your business running smoothly and being frustrated daily while dealing with issues like garbled audio, freezing video, and applications that lag and can’t keep up.

If your office, clinic, or care facility is struggling with internet issues, you can solve the problem with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN — and it’s probably simpler than you think.

Have a question or want to learn more? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to help.

Non-profits and businesses transform communications with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 15:00:08 +0000

How to transform communications with Bigleaf

Work-from-home and social distancing trends accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as organizations found new ways to connect with their customers, partners, and vendors in the new environment.

Many of their plans revolved around new or increased reliance on VoIP and UCaaS, with solutions including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting. Common issues arose with the internet-reliant systems, including calls that sound choppy or robotic, or drop altogether, as well as outages or lag that affect the performance of VoIP phone calls, video conferences, and screen shares in collaboration apps.

Bigleaf worked with a number of business and non-profit organizations to address performance problems they faced with VoIP and UCaaS solutions.

Worry-free video conferencing for church services

During the pandemic, churches and places of worship were not always able to host in-person services. Some turned to video conferencing technology, like Zoom. Even after the pandemic, Zoom services have continued as a convenience for homebound congregants. During the Zoom call, it was critical to have a reliable internet connection so the service would not be interrupted, and there would be no time to deal with any technical issues during the service itself. Plus, most churches did not have on-site technical support staff to handle any problems in real time.

Bigleaf was able to provide a straightforward solution for churches and other organizations. They were able to install and maintain the Bigleaf solution without technical expertise. Bigleaf’s owned and operated Cloud Access Network is fully redundant and peers directly with apps like Zoom, so the churches can have faith in their internet connections and offer uninterrupted services for their congregants to enjoy remotely or in person.

Reliable voice and video calls for medical offices

Many medical offices and other healthcare providers redesigned their patient interactions due to the pandemic. Telehealth visits became a vital part of patient care, adding new requirements to strained phone and video call capabilities. The phone systems were also critical to management of patient appointments, prescriptions, and general consultation, and in some cases, phones were used on-site for curbside check-ins.

One healthcare provider contacted Bigleaf to help upgrade their system to accommodate new services and capabilities. They were running an old T-1 PRI line, which kept going down as often as 3x per day over a 15-month period. On one memorable occasion, the line was down for 3 entire days.

All of this downtime resulted in lost appointments and much frustration. It jeopardized the clinic’s potential to provide critical care. The old system couldn’t support a normal workload, and it was totally inadequate as a basis for the new patient communication model that was required to serve patients during the pandemic.

The medical office switched over to a fiber line and added Bigleaf to support the performance-sensitive, cloud-based VoIP and UCaaS cloud applications. Bigleaf provided the stability needed for the new voice- and video-dependent systems and processes.

The clinic did not have on-site tech staff so they needed assurance that their systems would work autonomously. They were also planning to switch from a server-based electronic medical record (EMR) system to a cloud-based application. Worry-free internet was a requirement for that transition, too.

Bigleaf provided the performance they needed during the early days of the pandemic, with room to grow their digital infrastructure to accommodate future needs.

Protecting quality of service for business-critical applications

Even after the pandemic, many organizations continue to rely on video conferencing technology and voice calls to interact with remote colleagues and customers.

One technology development company built out new office space with several “Zoom Rooms,” to help teams interact with remote coworkers or maintain physical distance in the office environment. Video calls and conferences are critical to the company’s operations.

Meanwhile, some of the company’s employees stream YouTube videos and other bandwidth-intensive apps while they work. These apps can hog network resources and disrupt VoIP and other sessions.

VoIP and UCaaS traffic is very sensitive to internet performance, and the company needed to ensure that they would continue uninterrupted. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and Cloud Access Network work together to prioritize the business-critical applications automatically.

Bigleaf detects and responds to change in the available circuit throughput, when sensitive traffic can be affected, and prioritizing both inbound and outbound VoIP and UCaaS traffic ahead of the bulk data transfers such as YouTube traffic. Bigleaf Dynamic QoS detects the bandwidth bottleneck in the paths to and from the customer’s site and adapts QoS to ensure traffic isn’t buffered in QoS-unaware ISP routers.

Better VoIP and UCaaS with Bigleaf

For those and other organizations, reliable VoIP and video calls continue to be critical to their success. To accomplish their goals, they depend on the internet. And their internet connectivity depends on Bigleaf.

To learn more about Bigleaf’s role in VoIP and UCaaS system performance, watch this on-demand webinar, Fix Bad Video and VoIP Calls for Good. Or contact us for a free, 30-minute demo.

ITC builds proactive solutions for a reactive marketplace

Amy Chan — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:02:06 +0000

ITC builds proactive solutions for a reactive marketplace

When a company’s VoIP call quality declines or its video conferencing system experiences a lag, the most common remedy is to install a bigger and more expensive internet connection. But bumping up bandwidth is rarely the fix. The problems persist, and the complaints continue.

MSPs like ITC rely on Bigleaf Networks to solve these and other connectivity problems. In fact, they’ve learned to solve network issues before their customers even realize there’s a problem. That’s a superpower that enables the MSPs to enhance customer value and reduce the cost of internet-related support calls.

SD-WAN changed ITC’s customer interactions

Founded in 1989, ITC provides a broad range of technology solutions including: managed IT, situational awareness, structured cabling, unified communications, video surveillance, wireless networking, voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, and other cloud applications and premises-based, always-on technologies.

“Many companies, even today, approach IT reactively,” said Keith Studt, president of ITC. “They find themselves relocating offices, going through a merger or downsizing. And as the deadlines for those events get closer, they realize they have a need and an opportunity to reassess their IT systems.”

Telephony is at the heart of many of the clients ITC works with. According to Studt, one of the drivers for reassessing their IT platforms is performance — dropped VoIP calls, inconsistent connectivity and, ultimately, lost clients. Clean, reliable connectivity with resiliency or redundancy is paramount for many of ITC’s customers.

So, ITC turned to Bigleaf to make their clients’ networks more reliable and, for some, more affordable.

“We try to educate our customers that internet connectivity is the weakest link that causes a problem with cloud services, whether that’s their voice, email, or CRM. So, if we can enhance that experience, and provide them the connectivity and business continuity, even in the worst of conditions, everybody wins,” Studt said.

No two companies’ problems are the same. So the MSP’s team needs to understand every client’s unique business requirements and design the most effective solutions.

Studt says he has noticed a surprisingly large number of competitors who believe the cloud means simply plugging in a device and expecting it to work.

“We go into client engagements with a primary goal of understanding what it is we’re trying to accomplish, where they make their money, what it is they do well, and how can we complement that or increase that or help them without changing how they do business,” said Studt. “We show our clients trends and things that they can leverage to help them become more profitable and create an all-around mutual relationship that allows both sides to win.”

Better network visibility enables ITC to provide proactive service and higher value

“We were losing clients who were using a particular Internet provider in our territory,” Studt said. “And given the rural area we service, there weren’t a lot of other connectivity options. We were stuck.”

To deliver the reliable connectivity, ITC needed to provide the cloud solutions their clients needed.

ITC turned to Bigleaf to eliminate customers’ routine performance issues. Studt quickly discovered that Bigleaf provided powerful, unanticipated benefits.

“Bigleaf gave us visibility to see when problems were occurring so we could inform the customer and also gave us the quantitative data to be able to point specifically to the carrier causing the issue,” said Studt. “That visibility has been incredibly beneficial to our business and to the service we are able to provide our customers.”

While ITC can’t stop provider outages from happening, Bigleaf keeps the outages from affecting internet performance. It also enables ITC to identify issues quickly and communicate them to customers proactively.

“With Bigleaf, we’re able to call customers before they call us,” said Studt. “It’s definitely put us in a place where we have a more intelligent solution than our competitors.”

Chaos becomes a competitive advantage

Before partnering with Bigleaf, Studt’s team used a chaotic deployment of laptops to track down connectivity issues. Bigleaf’s firewall-friendly, on-site router and dedicated backbone network can control traffic both to and from the cloud, providing ITC with end-to-end visibility and control.

The move to Bigleaf has given ITC an advantage over competitors and opened opportunities to increase revenue with existing clients.

“We had one client whose circuit was consistently causing 3 hours-long service outages outside of normal business hours,” Studt said. “Nobody knew because, obviously, they weren’t there. But then it started to happen during the day when people were working. Because we had visibility and could pinpoint the problem at the source, we were able to upsell that client to a much more powerful and profitable enterprise-grade fiber connection.”

That visibility means ITC doesn’t need to chase after network providers, track outages, or diagnose root causes. Bigleaf saves time and stress for ITC’s small staff and customers.

“It would be great if every site had rich connectivity and redundant connections, but that’s not the reality of today’s internet,” Studt said. “Being able to give customers proactive, quality service because of the visibility Bigleaf provides helps them see the value of what we offer.”

MSP Convergence boosts customer satisfaction with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 20:56:20 +0000

MSP Convergence boosts customer satisfaction with Bigleaf

The cloud has fundamentally changed how small and mid-sized businesses think about their internet connection. Internet continuity is now a critical component of daily operations, employee productivity and customer experience. Yet these businesses still suffer daily frustrations, including dropped VoIP calls, grainy video conferencing, and unresponsive applications — all caused by underperforming internet connectivity.

MSPs who manage IT for these businesses need to be able to address these frustrations with a response that’s better than “we’ll let you know what the ISP says.” MSPs who leverage redundancy and intelligent software can provide their customers with the internet continuity and application experience that they expect.

But how do you ensure that continuity and experience without the pitfalls that have made traditional networking solutions so unappealing?

The answer according to one MSP? “Start the conversation now.”

Eric Gray, founder of Portland, Oregon-area MSP Convergence Networks, explained how his team relies on Bigleaf Networks to start a better conversation around internet connectivity — making internet continuity a reality for his customers.

As an MSP, how did you know that your customers needed a new strategy for internet connectivity?

It really started when our customers began moving technologies like VoIP phones, Microsoft 365, and video conferencing into the cloud. When our business started, we were the cost side of IT. Keep the server running. Keep the network working. Make sure the internet is plugged in. Now our conversations are way more focused on the application layer and keeping those cloud applications running the way they should.

Vendors have done a great job convincing those customers that moving to the cloud is easy. But to actually migrate a critical business application to the cloud without disrupting productivity requires planning and infrastructure. Networking is the piece that often gets overlooked in that process.

I’ve inherited clients who failed to plan their network properly for cloud applications, and it shows in the support tickets they send us. As those support tickets increased in regularity, we knew we needed a solution.

It sounds like that kind of negative customer experience could be a big challenge for MSPs. Have you seen that?

Absolutely. For the most part, our customers operate under all-you-can-eat agreements, and we have over 9,000 users. Anything we can do to make the phone not ring or a ticket not come into our system is time worth saving. It also generally means that our customers are more satisfied, always a good thing in the competitive MSP market.

Outages are the most obvious problem to impact customers’ cloud technologies. But we’ve found that a lot of the complaints come from more subtle internet performance issues like packet loss or latency — problems that still read as a live internet connection, but that make phone calls sound awful or keep applications from working the way they’re supposed to.

Those “things not working the way that they’re supposed to” problems are a bigger strain on the business than most MSPs realize. Those are the complaints that your service desk techs spend hours, days, weeks or months of energy trying to troubleshoot. Best case, you lost a lot of time and money in solving the problem. The worst case is your help desk thinks they’ve solved the problem because it went away, then the customer has the same problem and gets in touch with a different help desk guy and then another. That can go on for months because no one ever gets to the root cause of the issue until one day, the client gets pissed off. Then, as the MSP, you look bad because you didn’t put two and two together.

Sounds painful. What networking conversations could MSPs have with their customers to avoid all that?

As MSPs, we think in terms of disaster recovery and continuity. When you’re on-prem, it means redundant servers and BDRs. When you shift to the cloud that goes away. You now need to think about internet links and what your disaster recovery and continuity plans are for those.

You can’t just rely on one internet connection anymore. You need two connections or more. And if you have two, you need to think about things like load-balancing and instant failover. That means you need something like an SD-WAN solution to manage it.

That’s a conversation that should happen ahead of time, but folks don’t tend to give it the attention or care about it until they have a failure or a bottleneck. Then they care.

Did you try other SD-WAN solutions before Bigleaf?

At first, we tried to integrate a second circuit using the SD-WAN technology built into our customers’ firewalls. That felt like it should be an easy fix, but there were some inherent problems in that approach.

In that scenario, you’re selling it as a failover concept, but it doesn’t automatically failover because of the change in IP addresses and routing. So we’d say, “Yeah, we can put in this second link on this second port on your firewall, BUT when the internet goes down you’re gonna have to call us and we’re gonna have to reconfigure DNS. If you’re going to be down a whole day, we’ll do it. But if you’re gonna be down an hour, you’re better off just living with the outage. It was not elegant, to say the least.”

Not only did the customers not like paying for an internet connection that they were not using. But they would forget about our conversation. Then they’d get hit with an outage and ask us, ‘Why am I paying for this second circuit if it’s not going to help when the primary goes down?’ So they’re basically paying for a link just to sit there. They’re paying for a connection that you hope they never use, and it’s just not a good situation for the customer.

What impact has Bigleaf had on your business as a Managed Service Provider?

The value that Bigleaf has to an MSP goes beyond revenue and sales. It’s about having the phone ring less and having fewer support tickets come into the queue. It’s about having customers that you just don’t have those outage conversations with.

Anything that saves my team time frees up resources to add another client without adding more resources. An MSP is always trying to improve that, and Bigleaf fits right in there.

Here’s a real-world example. Early on a weekend morning, one of our clients had a major internet outage. They’re a 24/7 operation, so they started pinging us on Sunday at 2:00 AM. They were paging us every hour for updates and waking up my on-call person and my guy was hitting a breaking point because there was nothing we could do. It was a telco issue. He emailed back and said, “Would somebody please get a Bigleaf in here?”

When I hear that from one of my techs, all I think is: “Why don’t we have a redundant internet and Bigleaf in there?” If they had Bigleaf and a redundant internet, my guy would have never been woken up in the middle of the night. By having that conversation with the customer earlier, we could have avoided frustration for both the customer *and* my tech.

Any final thoughts for other MSPs who might want to consider Bigleaf as a solution for their customers?

Rarely does technology just work. I’ve never had an employee complain about Bigleaf, and I’ve never had a customer complain about Bigleaf. I keep waiting for it to stop doing what you promise, but it just freakin’ works.

Matrix learns the secrets of a cloud-ready network

Amy Chan — Wed, 22 May 2019 15:41:14 +0000

How to build a cloud-ready network

Matrix Networks got its start in 1984 supporting and installing PBX phone systems. Over the years, the company’s embrace of internet technologies and cloud computing solutions has helped its customers navigate a constantly evolving network landscape.

Matrix Networks attributes this success to the company’s principled approach to cloud-ready network solutions based on three decades of experience.

In an interview with Bigleaf, Kyle Holmes, president of Matrix Networks, explained the company’s strategies for moving customers to the cloud.

As companies shift their businesses to the cloud, what are some of the things you’re seeing?

A lot of people don’t realize they are already in the cloud. In fact, many of them are farther along on their cloud journeys than they think they are. That’s because every business application is moving to the cloud. Every application on a desktop has a web version today. That has resulted in an increase in IT sprawl, as the cloud makes it easy for individual departments to make their own buying decisions.

Is there a secret formula you’ve found for building a cloud-ready network?

There’s a right way to build a cloud-ready network. We call it Matrix Connectivity as a Service (MCaaS). Through a combination of purposeful network design, disparate circuit sourcing, and SD-WAN optimization, we’re able to intelligently manage a customer’s internet bandwidth. From carrier-agnostic circuit sourcing to built-in, company-wide redundancy, 24/7 support and monitoring, and consolidated billing, MCaaS has simplified the way our clients experience connectivity, allowing them to focus on what matters: their business.

We’ve had a lot of success because we’re principled about our approach to what it takes to build a cloud-ready network. Customers want something easy that just works and they want one partner for their connectivity strategy. It’s why our MCaaS is so popular. It’s what our customers want because it’s everything they need in one package with one bill.

What role does SD-WAN play in the solutions you deliver to clients?

In many client engagements, we’re seeing SD-WAN displace existing MPLS networks because SD-WAN delivers better reliability, more speed, and cloud access. And beyond the technical benefits, SD-WAN makes it easy for company IT managers to migrate their applications on private networks to the cloud, giving their own customers — the users — better speed, reliability, and access flexibility. It’s always good to remember there’s usually a human at the other end of your solution and anything you can do to make their life easier is a good thing.

Are companies you work with aware of SD-WAN or is this something you introduce to them?

A couple of years ago, if you mentioned SD-WAN to someone it would be the first time they had ever heard of it. Today, everyone’s heard of it, but nobody understands it. That’s largely due to the fact that there’s a lot of market confusion around the term where people think they’ve got what they need and they really don’t.

SD-WAN is a broad term that means different things to different people. In our case, customers don’t come looking for SD-WAN, but we’re able to show them why they need it.

Your approach to SD-WAN is different than a lot of companies in the market.

For us, SD-WAN takes on two plays: One, we took a hard stand to require SD-WAN in every UCaaS solution we sell. That’s non-negotiable for us. Because deploying UCaaS without SD-WAN is like driving a car without a seatbelt.

The other is as an MPLS displacement where companies are migrating applications to the cloud from a private network and realize they suddenly have different security and reliability requirements.

What makes Bigleaf different?

There are three network connectivity types: site-to-site, cloud-based, and hybrid SD-WAN. Companies can live off a single dumb pipe and hope nothing goes wrong. But we all know that networks inevitably go down. Or they can create a better experience using SD-WAN.

Bigleaf falls right in that cloud SD-WAN sweet spot. There aren’t many that do, fewer that do it well, and none that were built specifically for the cloud like Bigleaf.

To put it bluntly, Bigleaf is an upgrade to the internet. Bigleaf allows companies to migrate to the cloud with minimal changes to their network or existing firewall infrastructure. It’s simple and it works. And that’s why we’ve made it a mandatory part of our offering and also why it sells so well.

What advice would you give to others?

It’s easy to fall prey to the marketing around the cloud and SD-WAN. You need to find a partner who has sifted through the sand for you. When you find that partner, pay attention to the dashboard experience they offer. Visibility is important.

And remember, carrier networks go down. Don’t be dependent on just one. When CenturyLink went down last year, 80% of our clients were on their network. None of them called us. And a big reason they didn’t was because they had Bigleaf as part of the solution we built for them.

Bigleaf connects auto dealerships to the cloud

Amy Chan — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 14:26:16 +0000

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, there are over 16,000 franchised car dealerships in the U.S. alone, selling around 17.5 million cars each year for a total of $995 billion in new car sales revenue. Combine that with another $110 billion in repair orders and you can see why the technology market for auto dealers is expected to exceed $10.7 billion by 2026, led largely by demand for cloud-based solutions (Source: Transparency Market Research).

Dealerships making this move to new cloud-based technologies are looking for help figuring out how to leverage the savings and flexibility of cloud without sacrificing the reliability of their legacy systems. Fortunately for them, IT pros like Bill McClain of Virginia-based consulting firm, Networking Solutions, are up for the task.

For over 20 years, Bill has worked with auto dealerships to help them build and manage the technology they need to grow their businesses. We sat down with Bill to talk about the unique technology challenges faced by auto dealerships, what’s driving their move to the cloud, what’s getting in the way, and how SD-WAN and Bigleaf can help.

Q: Why do auto dealerships require such a unique IT approach?

Bill: One word, “complexity”. The biggest IT challenge for a dealership chain is the range of technologies that they rely on. A lot of folks think of car dealerships and they envision a showroom and a lot with sales folks walking around. In fact, dealerships are run like three different businesses in one. Each of those business units have their own products and hours of operation, and all of them rely on various pieces of software to operate.

Any given dealership has multiple sales teams for different kinds of sales like showroom, auctions and fleet. Then you have the service department which must manage the shop as well as a parts warehouse. Finally, there’s the finance department who’s responsible for the dealership’s banking relationships.

What’s more, all those departments live on their phones. Adding another critical technology to an already complex technology infrastructure. Multiply this across multiple brands and locations, and you get a sense of how difficult it can be to keep a dealership chain up and running at full speed.

Q: What’s driving these dealerships to make the move to cloud-based systems?

Bill: Historically, these dealership groups have relied on in-house systems. Old AS/400 servers that ran local instances of critical applications like dealership management software (DMS) and Microsoft Exchange servers. These systems were expensive and complicated to maintain, so most groups couldn’t afford to have them at every location.

One of my clients had three campuses with multiple dealerships at each campus for different car brands. Because of the cost and complexity of their servers, they had all their locations connecting back to one DMS server at one of their larger locations. This arrangement required even more cost for MPLS connections between all those locations to keep all their other dealerships online. Even then, any disruption at the primary location, like a power outage or hardware problem, would take down every one of their dealerships.

By moving to cloud-based versions of those applications, these dealerships win in two big ways. First, they save time and money by eliminating the need for internal hardware management and infrastructure. Second, and arguably more importantly, their ability to run their business is no longer dependent on an aging server being managed by an understaffed IT department.

Q: What challenges are getting in the way of that cloud move?

Bill: Like most companies moving to the cloud, connectivity can be a big issue for dealerships. Once they move key systems like phones, email, and DMS to the cloud, the Internet connection at each location becomes a lot more important. This leads to two big challenges: availability and performance.

Many dealership chains are made up of lots of locations that are spread out between multiple campuses. Some of these campuses can be in more remote or rural areas with limited ISP options. This can make it difficult to find a single ISP that can provide the uptime and performance that dealerships would need to keep their cloud apps working reliably for all locations.

Some dealerships try to address the connectivity issue with a backup internet connection and a dual-WAN firewall. But those kinds of failover systems have some big problems. First, they only help during outages when the primary circuit is down hard. What’s more, the customer ends up paying for two lines every month when they’re only ever using one. This can be a hard sell to management.

Q: Is that why you typically get involved? Reliability issues?

Bill: That’s right. I’m usually contacted by a sales manager or general manager whose team is experiencing call quality issues or application outages. They usually aren’t interested in the technology side of things. They just want their teams to be more productive, and they need these systems to work more reliably.

One dealership I work with has 13 brands spread across four dealerships on one campus, with fiber running between each dealership, and a Bigleaf router connecting them to three different major ISPs. One of the ISPs went down and, because they had Bigleaf installed, it didn’t affect their phone or cloud systems. They were still in business. I remember calling the CEO to let them know and they had no idea an outage had ever occurred… but their competition did.

Q: How has Bigleaf’s unique take on SD-WAN helped these dealership chains make the move to the cloud more successful?

Bill: The internet has become a commodity. But it’s still the internet with all the quality and reliability challenges that come with it.

With Bigleaf, dealerships can buy the most appropriate connection for each of their sites. Instead of going to one ISP, they can go to the best ISP for that specific geographic location. This gives them more flexibility as they grow.

Bigleaf also works with the customers’ existing firewalls. That means they can drop in Bigleaf without having to add risk or cost to their security infrastructure. Because Bigleaf works right out of the box without the need for policies, I can fix a customer’s call quality or application outage issues in a matter of days instead of months. It just works.

At the end of the day, dealerships are in business to sell cars, not babysit their network connections. Bigleaf gives them the peace of mind that their applications now running in the cloud will work reliably and with the quality of service they need, freeing them up to sell more cars.

Logistics giant Allen Lund moves 30 sites to cloud-based communications with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 03:14:49 +0000

Facing a roadblock on his logistics company’s cloud journey, Craig Borzelliere, manager of IT Systems and Infrastructure Department for Allen Lund Company, turned to Bigleaf Networks.

Bigleaf sat down with Craig to learn more about the transition. Craig moved Allen Lund’s nationwide network of transportation logistics offices to cloud-based telephony. His IT organization faced networking challenges along the way, and Bigleaf helped to smooth the bumps in the road on that cloud journey.

Every day, IT leaders like Craig are moving critical business technologies to the cloud, to reduce cost and increase flexibility. This move can heighten the need for stable and reliable internet options, however, so cloud technologies run as intended. Bigleaf enables companies like Allen Lund to transition business-critical applications and capabilities to the cloud, with resilient, worry-free internet connectivity across multiple locations.

Read the full Allen Lund case study to get all the details. To learn more about Bigleaf’s role in improving cloud performance and user experience, schedule a free demo.

Portfolio Networks eliminates outages with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 21:06:39 +0000

It feels like just yesterday. On December 28, 2018, CenturyLink experienced a major network outage, disrupting residential, commercial and 911 services in many areas across the nation. The widespread outage affected many customers for more than 24 hours. We recently spoke with Scott Moeller, director of business solutions at Portfolio Communications about what it was like for businesses affected by the service disruption and what others can learn from their experience.

When did you first get a sense something big was happening to CenturyLink’s network?

I didn’t know it had even happened. My cell phone rang when the first customer called me. They didn’t have SD-WAN. He said, “Hey, Scott. Sorry to bother you, but is CenturyLink having a major problem, because we get our DNS from them and our DNS is down and now I’m starting to see our circuits drop.”

While I was on the phone with him, I saw an alert from CenturyLink pop up on my screen saying they had a major fiber cut somewhere. When a customer tells me their DNS is going down, that means something bigger than a breadbox is wrong. I knew this wasn’t a fiber cut. I did some digging and got the word out to every customer I knew that this was going on.

How did the outage affect your customers?

It was a disaster for the ones who didn’t have SD-WAN. That outage — and remember that was a global outage — killed their websites, it killed their toll-free services. Customers couldn’t even call them to report a repair ticket. Their email was down.

What were some of those initial calls like?

They were frantic calls for the people who didn’t have SD-WAN because the first thing they had to do was report it. When something goes wrong in an organization everyone points to IT and says “What did you do?” And then IT has to explain what’s going on.. When they could quickly point to CenturyLink and say it’s nothing we did, they were relieved but they were also like, okay, we’ve got to talk more about this because whatever we’re doing isn’t working.

What about the people who had SD-WAN already?

The people who had SD-WAN were totally relaxed. They weren’t affected in a negative way because, while they still had outages, their users didn’t know it. My contact at a large northwest based family drugstore said to me, “Scott, we can’t thank you enough. We see some CenturyLink services down but due to our Bigleaf SD-WAN, we don’t have a store down. Thank you for designing our network like this.” I got the same response from a large regional electrical parts retailer . I had those conversations all day long.

Second connections must have helped a lot of SD-WAN customers weather the storm.

Except for the ones who had put all of their network eggs into CenturyLink’s basket. I had heard through the grapevine that some customers had gone down as a whole regardless of their second connection because their SD-WAN was CenturyLink and CenturyLink’s platform went down. I purposely don’t pitch a behemoth as an SD-WAN for that very reason. I would prefer to have my customers know that they have two different connections from two different carriers and they have an independent party as their SD-WAN box and hopefully another independent party as their firewall.

It’s not just fiber cuts, though, right?

One of the reasons to have an SD-WAN is because of planned maintenance. Every carrier has them. They have to upgrade their software and their hardware. And customers have no control over when they occur. They are at the mercy of the carriers. If payroll’s going out, you can’t have a maintenance outage. But if you have a major carrier that says “Hey, we’re doing it anyway” well then you’re stuck from a business perspective. It’s a disaster.

I also remind companies that this latest CenturyLink outage happened three years ago, too. And Comcast had one last summer. And I went through who knows how many outages with Level3 before the merger with CenturyLink. There were probably six or seven a year that were nationwide.

Networks go down. If you’re a customer, it doesn’t matter if it’s because a squirrel chewed through the line or your carrier’s maintenance schedule conflicts with your business schedule. Down is down.

The business impact of an outage must be considerable.

CenturyLink had everybody down for 40 hours for the most part. I looked at one customer and I just said, you’ve got 17 sites that were down for 40 hours. How much business did you lose? Your SLA is going to get you $49 per store, but how much did you lose because you couldn’t sell, you couldn’t do any repair, you couldn’t do any marketing, you couldn’t do any business whatsoever. You had everybody sitting on their hands for 40 hours.

And the promise of an SLA does little in the heat of an outage.

Every single IT manager I work with does not want an SLA because they know that if their network goes down they get $5.70 because it’s prorated by the number of minutes you were down. And a $5.70 credit does not get your CEO off your back about an outage that shouldn’t have happened.

Any advice for IT managers on how to avoid the pain of these types of outages?

They have to find someone they trust, someone who has experienced these outages. Their carrier’s job is to sell them more services at the highest price possible. It’s not to help them fix whatever problem they are facing. Which means they need to find someone who can give them an independent analysis of what’s happening and present real business solutions based on the real world experience using those solutions.

TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:32:44 +0000

TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

John Pentlin, VP of IT at TruHome, removed a roadblock from his company’s cloud journey with help from Bigleaf Networks.

Every day, IT leaders like John are moving critical business technologies like voice communications to cloud-based systems because of their reduced cost and increased flexibility. However, this transition leaves many IT leaders looking for more stable and reliable internet options to keep cloud technologies up and running as intended.

John sat down for an interview with Bigleaf and shared his reasons for moving TruHomes 200+ call center reps to a cloud-based phone system. He described the networking challenges his IT organization faced along the way and how Bigleaf has helped him to meet those challenges.

Read the full TruHome case study to get all the details. If you’d like to see how Bigleaf can help your company improve cloud performance and user experience, drop us a note or request a quote to get started.

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 18:44:08 +0000

Onward Communications fixes UCaaS call quality with Bigleaf

Tricia Ward of Onward Communications had just moved one of her large, multisite customers to a hosted voice service when call quality issues threatened to derail the deployment. The customer had moved from MPLS to fiber internet with redundant circuits at all sites.

The carriers couldn’t explain the voice issues, and the UCaaS vendor was reporting great MOS scores. No one could figure out why the customer was experiencing call quality issues or how to solve the problem.

That’s when Tricia brought in Bigleaf Networks to track down the problem, solve it, and ensure that it didn’t happen again. Tricia sat down to tell us the whole story, and the cameras were rolling.

Video Transcript

Tricia: So, the customer I’d like to talk about is a transportation logistics firm that I’ve been working with for about the past seven years. They were on a legacy MPLS network. They were growing. They were acquiring new locations, and they really wanted me to come in and look at improving the network and helping them with their applications across all their locations.

We had just installed the network, all fiber, now we were installing hosted voice, and as part that endeavor, we decided that we should probably put in some redundancy. We also put in various cable circuits and fixed wireless circuits across the country.

So the customer has a great network. Now, it’s robust. It’s going to meet their needs.

They’re operating across the hosted voice platform and they start having issues. They start having a lot of dropped calls. They start having latency, jitter, all of the things you don’t want to have happen in your voice network.

We turned in trouble tickets with the carriers and the carrier said, “Oh no, there’s nothing wrong with our network.”

We turned in trouble tickets with the UCaaS provider and they said, “No, we have great MOS scores.”

The customers said, “Well, it’s not our local area network because we know that works.”

We were almost at our wit’s end. I thought about what I could do, and I had a relationship with a company in Portland by the name of Bigleaf. I knew their product fairly well and I knew that they had a portion of their product that dealt with analytics.

Jeff: Bigleaf is an SD-WAN service provider with a very specific focus on purpose-built connectivity to the cloud. Customers moving line of business applications to cloud and SaaS environments and helping them architect their network accordingly.

Tricia did reach out. She reached out to us, not asking, “Can your SD-WAN fix this?” but rather “I have a problem. Can you guys help?”

We get these calls from partners from time to time where there’s a problem and it’s obvious what the one thing is. There’s something wrong where the partner needs help and the customer needs help.

What can we do? Our attitude was there was gonna be one of two outcomes. The perfect outcome would we could just drop in Bigleaf’s service and the problems would go away. But we felt from what she was describing that probably wasn’t going to the case. There was going to more to it than that.

We felt it important to be very transparent and honest front in saying, “Here’s what we think we can do.” and, more importantly, “Here’s what we think we can see.”

Nobody really knew if this was a LAN issue, an internet issue, a voice provider issue. We felt that if we could get in the middle of it we could use SD-WAN, hopefully, to fix the problem, but more importantly to identify where these things are happening and who needs to take responsibility for what to get ultimately to resolution at the end the day.

Tricia: So we got a Bigleaf demo unit into their location. Talked through the process. Put it in place, and all of the sudden it was as though a light turned on. They had actual statistics that were helping prove out the various problems in the network, and it turns out it wasn’t just one problem.

Jeff: It wasn’t any one person’s fault. It wasn’t any one thing. We were able to identify some issues coming out of network. We could point to the customers and say, “Hey we see this. Can you work on that?”

We were able to identify some issues on the circuits which was hard data that could be taken back to the carrier and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing. Can you work on that?”

And we were also able to identify issues between the carrier and the voice provider and say, “Hey guys, it looks like there’s a problem over here. How do we fix this? How do we get this all together?”

And nobody was sitting there saying, “This isn’t my fault. It’s your fault.” It was, “how do we get this fixed? How do we make the customer happy at the of the day?”

Tricia: It just completely transformed the experience that the customer was having, so much so that they bought Bigleaf for every location without even thinking about it.

Jeff: To a certain degree, not fixing the problem immediately made for a better relationship. Working side-by-side with everyone involved, we were able to put everybody on even ground and ultimately show our value beyond just a single service you drop in at one location to fix one little thing.

Tricia: Everybody who wouldn’t take ownership before all of a sudden had evidence standing in front of them and said, “Oh we better take some ownership of this problem.” And so today they have all locations operating with primary internet connection with their secondary network connection for redundancy and a Bigleaf router in-between, managing and monitoring what’s happening in their network. And they look at those statistics daily. I know that for a fact.

Jeff: You need to think of support when you’re thinking of service. They go hand in hand. In my experience, the best relationships have come out of challenging situations. You need to be able to take the opportunity to help someone, to really drive the relationship home, and create more value long-term.

Tricia: With the support Bigleaf gave and with the tenacity that they attacked the problem, it has really transformed the customer’s business. And in fact, they did not replace anything in the solution. They were just able to make the necessary tweaks. To make the solution right.

DP Fox builds a cloud-first future with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 15:46:38 +0000

Meet Grant Zondervan. Grant, who is VP of IT at DP Fox Motors, accelerated his company’s cloud journey with internet optimization from Bigleaf Networks, to support future growth at the large chain of auto dealerships.

Every day, IT leaders like Grant are moving critical business applications to the cloud. That transition brings a whole new level of flexibility and speed to those companies, but many IT pros still need stable, reliable internet options to keep cloud technologies up and running as intended. Bigleaf delivers that solution in a cloud-first SD-WAN, supporting resilient internet connectivity and contributing to success stories like Grant’s.

Grant Zondervan, VP of IT at DP Fox/Fox Motors

Grant moved DP Fox’s most important software to the cloud, and his IT organization grappled with uptime challenges along the way. Bigleaf has helped him to meet those challenges as DP Fox continues to expand business operations and add new locations.

Read the full DP Fox case study for all the details. To learn how Bigleaf can help your company improve cloud performance and user experience across multiple locations, schedule a free demo or drop us a note.

Advantel moves contact centers to the cloud with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:45:58 +0000

Advantel moves contact centers to the cloud with Bigleaf

Advantel Networks is a Bigleaf partner who has been delivering leading integrated voice and data solutions to clients around the world since 1984. Along with traditional voice, VoIP, and security, several of Advantel’s customers look to them for contact center solutions.

As is the case with other communications technologies, many of those contact center customers are looking to make a move to a cloud-based solution. Advantel’s Director of Contact Center and Business applications, Loganathan “Loga” Sivasundaram and Rick Giesea, Senior Account Manager for Cloud and Network Services, explain how they help Advantel customers to adopt cloud-based contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions with Bigleaf.

Loga Siva
Director – Contact Center and Business applications, Advantel Networks

So, what’s driving the demand for CCaaS among your customers?

Loga: We have several large to medium-large enterprises for whom customer experience and customer journey mapping is a critical competency. For a good majority of them, contact center solutions aren’t just about customer service, but also customer acquisition on the front end. We see this a lot in the retail space with large online retailers and manufacturers. They are constantly challenged with the question of how much of my technology do I keep in-house versus more flexible cloud-based options.

I would imagine this is where CCaaS comes into your discussions with them.

Loga: Absolutely. For these companies, it’s about managing call load and unforecasted or seasonal traffic volumes. To do that, they are looking at people like us who can help them build the seasonal infrastructure they need.

But it’s more than building infrastructure. They don’t want to invest a lot of capital expense (capex) into technology that’s only needed for a brief period of time. Timing is of the essence. They need options available when it is least expected.

The elasticity of cloud-based services is essential for our customers to allow them to scale up and scale back down as needed. We’re able to jump in to put the technology services in front without them having to alter their existing business process or culture. Continuity is critical.

When you look at your customer landscape, are there specific events that trigger the decision to move to the cloud for things like CC?

Loga: Primarily it’s volume. Everybody operates at a threshold. For some it’s volume. For others it’s cost. When they hit their limit, that’s when they make that first call for the cloud.

Are there things you’re seeing that prevent people from making a move to Cloud?

Loga: Sometimes it’s just time and effort. A little bit of it is culture, too.

If I take this technology outside of my organization, will I lose control? Will I lose people?

The truth is they don’t lose control. It just requires their existing team to manage those new services in the cloud. There’s a shift in how that team’s expertise is put to use.

Rick Giesea
Senior Account Manager Cloud and Network Sales, Advantel Networks

How does connectivity manifest itself in this move to the cloud?

Rick: Traditionally, when you look at an organizational WAN topology, services used to be centralized either at the customer or in an outside data center. You operated on MPLS and everything was secure over that WAN, and it was somewhat easy to manage. Now with organizations moving services to the cloud and relying on the public internet, that’s where issues arise. How good is my internet connection? Do I need a backup connection? How do I ensure connection quality? That’s where SD-WAN and Bigleaf come into play.

70 percent of our customers have a distributed geographic footprint. In the Bay Area, it’s a fiber-rich market. Good internet is generally available. But when you look at other areas of the country where people are relying on a broadband connection for all of their business communications, that’s where the quality of the internet isn’t so great. It creates problems.

That distributed footprint must add operational as well as technical complexity.

Rick: We and others like Bigleaf specifically because Bigleaf’s SD-WAN is carrier-agnostic. Especially with the types of customers we have that are distributed across multiple locations in different regions with different providers. Bigleaf’s ability to connect to a diverse world of services is a huge differentiator.

As contact centers are no longer only phone calls, a lot of times doing chat or email, that must add to the complexity.

Loga: It does. It’s also the most significant focal point for organizations that tie revenue to call center performance. CCaaS is one of our primary areas of focus. SD-WAN is a must-have part of the conversation.

Rick: Bigleaf is an excellent fit for these customers because it can automatically identify the different kinds of traffic, even from a single CCaaS provider, and ensure that it’s prioritized correctly. As companies continue to move these kinds of technologies to the cloud, that prioritization is key to ensuring a successful rollout, enthusiastic adoption and, most importantly, successful customers.

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Our thanks go to Loga, Rick and the whole Advantel team for sharing their expertise and insight. If you have any questions for Loga or would like to learn if Advantel could help with your own contact center challenges, reach out to them today at 800-377-4911 or visit their website at www.advantel.com.

To share your own partner perspective in a future Bigleaf spotlight, contact stories@bigleaf.net. To learn more about Bigleaf’s network optimization solutions, schedule a free demo.

Simplifying HIPAA compliance for healthcare providers

Amy Chan — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 12:00:47 +0000

Simplifying HIPAA compliance for healthcare providers

The global market for cloud-based healthcare technologies is expected to grow at an average rate of 17.6% to cross the $201 billion mark by 2032 — with the U.S. accounting for 51% of that total — according to a 2023 report by Market.us.

The rapid growth is not surprising, as cloud-based communications and patient record systems can be deployed with significantly lower cost and complexity, compared to their legacy counterparts.

In the U.S., healthcare companies looking to benefit from these cloud technologies must ensure that they’re staying compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA.) New networking technologies like SD-WAN can help.

To help explain more about HIPAA compliance and how Bigleaf can help, we reached out to one of our partners, James Bowers II. As the owner of Input/Output, James consults with companies to help them achieve and maintain their HIPAA compliance. His clients have seen a lot of success using Bigleaf’s SD-WAN to address HIPAA requirements.

Q: So, what exactly is HIPAA and why is it such a big issue for healthcare companies who want to use cloud technologies?

James Bowers II
Security Architect, Input/Output

James: HIPAA was initially introduced to help consumers keep their insurance coverage, but it also includes another set of provisions called “administrative simplification” aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. The administrative simplification provisions cover:

Electronic transmission of common administrative and financial transactions (such as billing and payments)
Health data and identifiers for individuals, employers, health plans, and heath care providers
Privacy and security standards to protect individually identifiable health information

These kinds of protections ensure that patients are protected and that healthcare data is kept private and secure.

That being said, HIPAA compliance is extensive, complex and, for a lot of companies in the healthcare field, required by law. A lack of proper HIPAA compliance can lead to extensive civil and criminal penalties. So these companies are understandably slow to adopt new technologies that might put their compliance at risk.

But competition is pushing companies to adopt faster, cheaper, cloud-based technologies for critical applications like patient record management. To stay HIPAA-compliant through their cloud journey, companies need to be able to show that they have contingencies in place to maintain a connection to cloud-based patient records in the event of an internet outage.

At Input/Output, we’re focused on helping companies make this cloud move as painlessly as possible while maintaining their HIPAA compliance. So SD-WAN felt like the perfect technology to provide our clients with an outage-proof Internet connection that allows them to benefit from the speed and cost-effectiveness of cloud-based technologies without putting their HIPAA compliance at risk.

Q: What kinds of companies need HIPAA compliance?

James: Any company that stores, transmits, or that may come in contact with electronic protected health information (ePHI) falls under HIPAA in some way. Apart from traditional healthcare providers like urgent care centers and assisted living centers, there are quite a few entities that are covered under HIPAA that you may never think of like:

MSP providers
Data backup providers
IT providers
Office cleaners (not fully HIPAA themselves, but proper confidentiality agreements are required to be in place)
Copier companies (I have one from last week that may get a HIPAA audit because one of their clients is getting audited)
ISPs

Most of my clients fall into the traditional healthcare provider role, but these others are also required to perform HIPAA risk assessments, and there is quite a bit that they have to provide to stay compliant. It warrants a further conversation with them as it depends on what precisely they are doing but in some cases, they have more requirements than the provider themselves.

It’s eye-opening for a lot of providers.

Q: How does internet connectivity fit into the HIPAA requirements?

James: Covered entities — entities that are required to follow HIPAA guidelines — are required to have a written plan in place that specifies how they will maintain access to ePHI in the event of an emergency. Access, or the lack thereof, to ePHI in a critical patient situation could mean the difference between life and death.

Less drastic, but still required, is that ePHI must be available to patients if requested. A lack of access to ePHI can impede a covered entity’s ability to provide care to their patients, which can have a tremendous impact on the entity’s bottom line and reputation. For these reasons alone, a contingency plan is an essential consideration.

Q: How does Bigleaf’s SD-WAN help your clients with HIPAA compliance?

James: The best contingency plan to an emergency internet outage situation (that could restrict access to ePHI) is to avoid the outage altogether, and Bigleaf’s 99.99% uptime guarantee can help a practice do just that.

By leveraging multiple internet connections along with Bigleaf’s intelligent SD-WAN platform, a covered entity can reduce their internet downtime to less than 53 minutes per year. Compare that to the hours and sometimes days of downtime companies experience with other internet solutions.

Q: What makes Bigleaf’s SD-WAN a particularly good fit for HIPAA compliance?

James: The key to Bigleaf’s SD-WAN, relative to HIPAA is in its simplicity. Simple solutions like Bigleaf can drastically reduce the HIPAA ePHI contingency planning required. Instead of heavily-documented manual procedures, Bigleaf provides an automated solution with built-in backups and failover protection. Add in some considerations for large-scale disasters, perhaps keep local copies of ePHI for upcoming procedures, and a covered entity has a robust, cost-effective, and compliant solution.

A simple contingency plan leveraging Bigleaf SD-WAN is also considerably easier to implement. The Bigleaf router installs transparently without any changes needed to existing firewalls. So deployment can be done quickly and reliably. Once installed, their intelligent platform automatically detects, prioritizes and routes traffic over the right connection without the need for complicated policies and rules. This ensures that a covered entity not only maintains access to their ePHI, but also provides the best care to their patients and reduces mistakes, which keeps a covered entity protected.

Complex solutions, plans, and processes introduce mistakes or are ignored entirely. At Input/Output, we provide solutions that seamlessly integrate with a company and their business model. To support this seamless integration, we rely on simple, secure and reliable solutions like Bigleaf SD-WAN. Once installed, a covered entity can focus on their business and patients, not their technology or compliance requirements. That’s the way it should be.

Q: Any final thoughts for a company that may be struggling with HIPAA’s contingency requirements?

HIPAA can seem intimidating and impossible to manage, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is to understand all your options and choose technologies and solutions that eliminate complexity wherever possible.

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A big thanks to James for sharing his expertise and insight. If you have any questions for James or would like to learn if Input/Output could help with your own HIPAA compliance challenges, reach out to them today at (561) 408-0007 or visit their website at www.inputoutput.tech.

If you’d like to share your own partner perspective in a future Bigleaf spotlight, email us any time at stories@bigleaf.net. We’d love to share your story!