On August 30th, CenturyLink/Level 3 experienced a widespread internet outage lasting nearly 5 hours. This not only impacted their network and their direct customers, but it also affected many other ISPs and services that connected to their network, directly or indirectly.

Each year, there are numerous notable internet disruptions like that one, which can bring businesses to a grinding halt. In just the past few months, Comcast has experienced widespread outage, and AT&T internet service was interrupted or slowed throughout Florida.

Events like these affect every organization that relies on cloud-based applications and video-based communications to maintain day-to-day operations and serve customers. Outages reveal the increased power and indispensability of these tools for business and highlight the importance of internet performance — frequently shining a spotlight on poor WAN performance. This can cost a business even more than the estimated $5,600 per minute that Gartner calculated back in 2014.

While outages are show stoppers, they can still be considered relatively rare. However, jittery VoIP, flaky video calls, or lagging ERP and point-of-sale tools are everyday occurrences, with a significant impact on productivity and the bottom line. Depending on the size and nature your operation, poor network performance can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per minute.

It is an ongoing challenge for businesses to keep mission-critical operations running smoothly over internet connections, especially as more tools are regularly spun up as needed at the department, team, or even user level without IT involvement. And as adoption of cloud-based applications and SaaS solutions increases, traditional networks become even more complex and difficult to manage. Network engineers and IT teams are increasingly strained by dynamic technology stacks (cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid) and a workforce that is more geographically dispersed.

Smarter network operations

Bigleaf offers a cloud-first SD-WAN solution that improves network efficiency, optimizes IT resources, and helps you create a more resilient and dependable network for your mission-critical applications.

We make it easy to build a transparent, worry-free network that frees IT teams from cumbersome network management tasks and support calls. With our intelligent software, owned and operated Cloud Access Network, 99.99% SLA-backed uptime, tier one support, and firewall-friendly design, Bigleaf helps IT teams to deliver solid internet and cloud app performance more easily in an uncertain environment.

Bigleaf recognizes that tech stacks constantly evolve. Apps are deployed and retired almost daily because individual users have different requirements. If a webinar presenter is dissatisfied with one video conferencing tool, you can be sure they’ll deploy a different one next time. These types of changes don’t need to be a four-alarm fire that spurs the IT department to make manual SD-WAN configuration changes for QoS and firewall compatibility. Bigleaf’s intelligent solution makes it easy for businesses to scale and adjust to changes, in many cases automatically, while maintaining uptime and performance.

These applications and technologies represent investments that business need to see pay off every day. That requires reliable performance at headquarters, branch offices, and home offices no matter what tools are being used. Bigleaf meets those needs with redundant, dependable SD-WAN that’s smarter than your average network architecture.

By stabilizing the network for the technology that powers your business, you can rest easy knowing VoIP won’t fail during an all-hands conference call, video won’t get jittery or freeze during the next big sales presentation, and sales and inventory transactions will go through every time.

To learn more about Bigleaf’s intelligent networking solution from a real-world perspective, watch this webinar — Creating a resilient network: Q&A with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken.