The next generation of Web Dashboard has arrived, Bigleaf Cloud Connect delivers a new level of visibility and control into and over not just your wired and wireless circuits but also your entire cloud-connected infrastructure.

Designed from the ground up to be incredibly powerful and intuitive to use, Cloud Connect upholds our commitment to effective simplicity — keeping you informed of when things change, when things need attention, and what to do to ensure uninterrupted and reliable performance for all your cloud connected applications and devices — making it indispensable for any modern, cloud network-dependent business.

Created by us, for you… with your help!

We did extensive testing and research with partners and customers to identify and solve specific pain points. We’ve simplified navigation and site management across multiple locations, expanded visibility into network health and site conditions, and introduced advanced analytical tools to more effectively pinpoint problems and facilitate expedited resolutions. 

We’ve also vastly improved performance, access security, and overall user experience. Additionally, with our new architecture we are better prepared to deliver new functionality more efficiently. Cloud Connect is built to meet your growing business needs while reflecting our commitment to delivering powerful and easy-to-use solutions to optimize network connectivity and performance. Features include:

• Global and multi-site view: A Network Operations Center (NOC)-inspired interface that provides a bird’s-eye view of your entire network infrastructure, regardless of location. 
• More at-a-glance real-time metrics and data: Enables quick insights, real-time monitoring, and performance indicators for rapid decision-making and immediate action. 
• Advanced filtering, search, and sorting tools: Quickly pinpoint specific data and uncover valuable insights to optimize your network performance. 
• Enhanced Security: Protect your sensitive network data with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and other robust security features. 
• User-Friendly Interface: A streamlined design that prioritizes ease of use, with intuitive navigation and self-help resources for a seamless user experience. 
• Intuitive self-help resources: Helpful user support is at your fingertips, increasing your operational efficiency.  
• Markedly Improved Performance: Experience faster page load times and a more responsive dashboard for a truly efficient workflow. 

Are you ready for Cloud Connect?

You can log in and see for yourself right now! Cloud Connect is now live for all Bigleaf customers. What are you waiting for? Log in and have a look around!

For a more in-depth look at everything Cloud Connect has to offer, register now to join our special Cloud Connect edition of Bigleaf Bootcamp!

As a final quick note, through the end of this year all existing users will have the option of toggling between Cloud Connect and Web Dashboard just in case you’d prefer to delay your transition. We do encourage you to jump right in with Cloud Connect though, as we’re confident you’re going to love it.

Welcome to the new era of network optimization, wireless connectivity, and circuit management! Your business relies on the internet. Your internet relies on Bigleaf.

By enabling this on your account, you’re letting us know that you would like to provide feedback and be part of the feature development process at Bigleaf. Your feedback and input will help us decide how and what we design for our features.

How you can participate

There are a few stages when we may reach out or contact you:

General product call – A product call gives you a chance to speak to a person on the Product team and walk them through the challenges you encounter daily, and discuss features or new ideas you would like to see us work on.

Early feature design call – This may include us showing off a prototype design or mockup(s). Then you’ll have the floor to tell us what you think about what you’ve seen.

Beta testing – During beta testing, you would be given access to use and test out new features that are in a more complete state.

We look forward to interacting with you and getting your feedback and ideas!

Getting Started with Bigleaf

Bigleaf customers can get full documentation of our features by contacting Bigleaf support at  support@bigleaf.net or by reading the release notes. To get more details on these new bandwidth packages, please reach out to your channel sales manager, or contact us at 1-888-244-3133. If you’re not a Bigleaf customer yet and would like to learn more about how we can help ensure performant uptime across your organization, request a demo today.

In recognition of this need in the market, Bigleaf has launched two new high-bandwidth packages, for 2 Gbps and 3 Gbps.

With our new services, you can add additional bandwidth as your business requires, all while continuing to enjoy the same superior traffic and uptime performance benefits that the Bigleaf platform already delivers. 

New router hardware is available to service these multi-gigabit packages for new and existing customers looking to scale above 1 Gbps. The new multi-gig capable router (CPE) has an expansion slot that provides four additional 10 G SFP+ ports for WAN or LAN use. These ports on the expansion card can leverage fiber transceivers or direct-attach cables. 

Bigleaf is very serious about business internet connectivity and performance, and we’re committed to helping your business scale. If you’re interested in getting started with a Bigleaf 2 Gbps or 3 Gbps package, contact your Bigleaf sales partner or send us a message.

Are you new to the types of problems that cause issues with Internet connectivity and performance? Check out the “Crappy internet” blog post to learn more about these challenges and Bigleaf’s solutions.

Getting Started

Bigleaf customers can get full documentation of our features by sending a request to support@bigleaf.net. To get more details on these new high-bandwidth packages, contact your Channel Sales Manager or call 1-888-244-3133.

If you’re not a Bigleaf customer yet, request a demo today to learn how we can help ensure performant uptime across your organization. 

Starting today, Bigleaf channel partners can deploy and manage our service and equipment at any time. While our fulfillment process to-date has been very efficient, and many of our partners will keep using it, those partners who prefer to do their own provisioning can now install Bigleaf without the wait.

We’ve upgraded our dashboard and permissions systems so reseller channel partners can add users and control the service at any time without contacting Bigleaf. We’ll also soon be announcing other uses of this new permissions system to give real-time control to all Bigleaf users.

Partner provisioning is another step that demonstrates Bigleaf’s ongoing commitment to MSPs and our efforts to continue empowering the MSP channel.

You can see how easy Bigleaf partner provisioning can be in the video below. To get details on how to sign up for Bigleaf partner provisioning, please reach out to your Channel Sales Manager, or call us at 1-888-244-3133.

This new Gateway Cluster will further optimize latency in the Northern California region. What’s more, this expansion adds to our list of directly peered networks, giving Bigleaf customers improved access to our cloud, content, and network peers.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve expanded our presence across the US and in Europe.  In the coming months, we will be excited to make similar announcements in the APAC region. With our Cloud Access Network at the core of our offering, these expansions will continue to position Bigleaf as the leader in Cloud-first SD-WAN. 

If you want to learn more about how we can give you worry-free Internet performance over broadband internet connections, contact us today. 

International expansion driven by Cloud adoption

Our move overseas is driven by the same growing SD-WAN demand that we’ve seen in North America. MarketsandMarkets predicts the SD-WAN market will grow to $4.1 billion by 2023.  

With European businesses embarking on cloud adoption driven by applications like VoIP and Office365, their need for SD-WAN solutions is expanding. To meet this demand, we launched in three major telecom hubs in Europe – London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt – with plans to expand to other countries including France and Australia later this year. This will enable our partners to provide their global customers with a unified SD-WAN solution. 

This is just the beginning

Cloud technologies that initially found their foothold in the U.S. have been quickly gaining adoption in Europe and Asia as companies embark on the now familiar and necessary migration to the cloud. Mid-market European cloud adoption is at the same level as it was in the U.S. three years ago.   

We see this adoption being driven by applications like UCaaS and Microsoft Office 365. In fact, Gartner predicts that global spending on cloud infrastructure and services will hit $214B in 2019, representing more than 50% of global enterprise software spending. Business who rely on those cloud services will need a way to ensure consistent and reliable internet performance anywhere in the world and SD-WAN will be a critical part of delivering that performance.  

There’s no way around it, the world is moving to the cloud and companies need the right networking platform to make that move successful. Bigleaf has seen tremendous growth in the U.S. because we anticipated this shift and intentionally built our SD-WAN offering from the ground up for the cloud. The need for our Cloud-first SD-WAN is growing throughout Europe and Asia and these new POPs give us the global reach to bring Bigleaf to more customers through our channel partners.  

We’re looking forward to working with our partners who have international customers that need a unified SD-WAN solution. For many of our partners, Bigleaf’s push into global markets will allow them to continue selling the solution they’ve come to depend on in North America.  

If you’d like more information on our international launch, check out today’s press release. If you have any questions about Bigleaf’s unique Cloud-first SD-WAN, or if you’d like to expand Bigleaf into your own region, email us or send a note through our contact page. 

This is a big deal for customers using a second edge router or firewall. For example, those using an IAD for SIP termination, or those who segment their corporate network with a separate firewall from their guest network. With the second LAN port, customers who need to connect two devices can benefit from Bigleaf’s improved internet and application performance without any additional equipment.

Simplified internet and application performance across multiple edge devices

This new feature enables users to configure the AUX port on our edge routers to be bridged together with the LAN port, giving them the ability to plug two network devices in that can both use our service at the same time. They can use one public IP address block across both ports (assuming they have more than one usable LAN network IP), or two separate IP address blocks.

Once configured, this feature allows Bigleaf users to connect both a data firewall and a VoIP network termination device such as another firewall or router to our service without a switch in-between.

Getting started with Bigleaf’s second LAN port

Using the second LAN port can be done using your existing edge router. The second LAN port is enabled in your Bigleaf web dashboard by simply checking the “Enable as 2nd LAN Port” box on the config tab. When the feature is enabled, the web dashboard “overall” graph will be automatically updated to show the usage across both the LAN and AUX ports.

If you have our High-Availability upgrade option, you already have the ability to use multiple LAN ports. Please refer to the setup guide included with the equipment, or contact our support team for help.

For customers hoping to enable this feature, we currently limit the ability to edit config within the web dashboard to Bigleaf support teams only. This will be changing in the near future with an expanded role/permissions system, but for now, please contact support to have this enabled.

The WatchGuardONE Technology Partner Program was designed to help partners and customers integrate WatchGuard’s best-in-class network security solutions with complementary industry solutions like Bigleaf. Through this kind of certification and documented product integration, Bigleaf and WatchGuard channel Partners and customers gain stronger security, easier deployments, and better interoperability in their IT ecosystems.  

This partnership is a natural fit for Bigleaf as we’ve always promoted the use of best-of-breed security solutions paired with best-of-breed SD-WAN. Even before this partnership, Watchguard customers and partners have relied on Bigleaf’s Cloud-first SD-WAN to provide rock-solid connectivity. Now those customers and partners will get an even more integrated experience, and we can bring our combined solution to an even wider audience.  

We’d like to personally thank Ben Oster, John Berg, Danny Banks and Corey Nachreiner at Watchguard for their help in making this partnership a reality. We look forward to building this relationship and continuing to integrate our solutions into the future.    

Got questions about the partnership or how to purchase Bigleaf and Watchguard solutions? Submit them through our Contact page. 

The move in technology consumption from corporate-mandated to consumer-driven means networks need a new strategy. Where manually-built fine-grained policies once dominated, now intelligent software must make network changes in real time to adapt to changing needs and environments. It’s a shift in purchasing, delivery and architecture that requires a whole new way of thinking about networking. Bigleaf was built from the ground up for this new strategy. We’re ahead of the game a bit, on the leading edge, but we’re not the only ones who see it.

Microsoft sees that shift, too.

We’re excited to announce that Microsoft has invited Bigleaf to join its invite-only ScaleUp Accelerator Program. Microsoft ScaleUp is an immersive collaboration with successful companies like ours that offers access to sales, marketing and technical support around Microsoft’s enterprise technologies, as well as expanded joint go-to-market opportunities. As part of ScaleUp, we’ll sell side by side with Microsoft’s sales teams and have our solutions listed on the Azure Marketplace.

When our team works day to day writing software, we too often fail to notice how revolutionary the work we’re doing is. We’ve built a platform that does amazing things, improving people’s lives and solving huge problems. Customers love it. Partners love selling it. And it just so happens that Microsoft is building their own applications in this mirror. Bigleaf is aligned with Microsoft’s vision and the needs of its Azure, Office365, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams customers.

From day one, everything we built was created for businesses that don’t have the IT resources to manage a lumbering, policy-driven, private network. Our customers have giant needs but require a nimble and smart network that is built for this new cloud-based world. They’ve become the hidden enterprises of IT — stuck in the messy middle between enterprise aspiration and SMB challenge.

Joel Mulkey
CEO & Founder
Bigleaf Networks

These are businesses that are creating jobs and feeding families. They can do it better than ever today because of the proliferation of the cloud and all that it enables. That growth, though, hits a roadblock when these companies inevitably must deal with their Internet provider’s service going down without warning or the complexity of managing multiple connectivity paths across their decentralized locations. We remove that uncertainty and complexity. We believe they can have rock solid connectivity that doesn’t require a full time IT staff.

Our unique view of where networking is headed starts to feel a lot less contrarian when it aligns with the same future a company like Microsoft sees.

Alerts help you stay in-the-know without having to get involved

Bigleaf alerts let you know when there are issues with any of your company’s circuits. Our alerting categories let you know immediately whether you need to get involved.

Site down alerts notify you when an entire location is without Internet. For Bigleaf users with backup Internet circuits, this usually means that the power is out at that location. For users with a single circuit, this could simply mean that the circuit is down. Either way, part of your business is dead in the water and action is needed.

Circuit outage alerts let you know when an ISP circuit is down. For Bigleaf users with backup circuits, this usually won’t cause any issues for your users as traffic will be automatically routed over another connection. For users with a single circuit, this means that the site is offline and immediate action is needed. Either way, a call to the ISP is in order.

Circuit performance alerts ping you when circuits experience performance issues like packet loss, latency or jitter. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and Intelligent Load-balancing can usually compensate for these issues when multiple circuits are available. For higher-impact alerts, a quick outreach to the ISP might be in order to determine the cause of the issue. It could indicate that a second circuit would be helpful to prevent any impact down the road.

No matter what the issue, you can always contact your Bigleaf Support team to help you resolve the issue.

Now you can customize alerts to meet your needs

Bigleaf Alerts just got even more powerful with a host of updates designed to give you control over how and when you get Bigleaf Alerts. Now you can…

Choose which Alerts you get: So we gave our users the option to choose which alerts they want to get.

Decide between Individual alerts or a Site Summary: Users who manage multiple sites may not want to get an alert for every issue across every site. Likewise, single-site customers often want to reduce noise in their inbox. So we’ve introduced a new “Site Summary” option that will send you a digest email for each site at an interval you choose.

Set Alert severity thresholds: Some performance issues are bigger than others. Our users love Bigleaf because they don’t *have* to worry about Internet performance. That also means they don’t have to hear about every hiccup in Internet performance. Now you can set your Alert Volume from 0-7 to control how bad things need to get before we notify you. For example, a level-7 severity is a full outage, a level-2 issue is service-affecting, and level-0 means everything is healthy.

Enable renotifications: If an issue persists for a while, you may need a reminder to check back in on it. Renotificaitons allow you to set an interval after which we’ll send another alert about the same issue.

Alert delay: Performance issues can change up-and-down in severity, and many Bigleaf customers don’t want to hear about brief issues, only long on-going problems. Alert delays allow you to cut down on alert noise by changing how long a problem has to persist before you get an alert.

Choose between HTML and plain text notifications: HTML emails include color coding for alerts that make them easier to read. Plain text emails are generally easier to parse through automated systems. We let you decide which you prefer.

Get started today

If you’re a Bigleaf customer, your existing alert settings will be the same as they were before the updates. You can log in and update your preferences on the Account Setting page. In particular, we’d recommend trying the Site Digest option and setting the Alert Volume to your preference.

If you want to learn more about how we can give you worry-free Internet performance over broadband internet connections, contact us today.

Customers in the Southeast region will see even more significant improvement in their cloud and SaaS application performance. What’s more, this expansion adds to our list of directly peered networks, giving Bigleaf customers improved access to our cloud, content, and network peers.

Investing in the future of SD-WAN for the US and beyond

Over the past 12 months, we’ve expanded our presence across the US and specifically in the Southeast region. This expansion includes the addition of dedicated regional sales and channel personnel to the Southeast as well as several strategic partnerships. These efforts have driven significant growth in the region, making this expansion possible.

While a significant portion of the post-Series A funding for Bigleaf going to expanding our team, it’s also important to note that we are investing in our network as well. With the completion of the Atlanta Gateway Cluster, the network team at Bigleaf can now look ahead to our next round of expansion, which for the first time will take the network beyond the United States.

In the coming months, we will be excited to make similar announcements in the form of global expansion. With our Cloud Access Network at the core of our offering, these expansions will continue to position Bigleaf as the leader in Cloud-first SD-WAN.

The Bigleaf Status Page

At Bigleaf we have a culture of honesty and transparency, so we’ve just launched a public status page: status.bigleaf.net.

You can visit this page at any time to find both real-time and historical info about outages or performance problems affecting our service. This includes our datacenters, core network, IP connectivity, peering, web application dashboard, and other system-wide performance. Since we operate our own carrier-grade redundant network, we back it with an SLA.

As always, if you’re wondering about the status of a single customer site or circuit (instead of the network as a whole) you can see that via your private web app dashboard.

We hope this level of transparency, that is very unusual in the networking/telecom world, gives you comfort that we’re a partner with you, fighting hard to give you the best possible experience.