Two factors are currently driving businesses to become more and more reliant on stable internet connections. First, cloud adoption continues to surge. One recent survey showed that more than 88% of respondents used at least some cloud services, and 25% plan to move all operations to the cloud – and that was recorded in January 2020, before the pandemic focused even more attention on cloud solutions. Cloud services are increasingly flexible and scalable, allowing users and organizations to deploy them at any time.
Second, more workers are working from home over residential internet connections. Residential network connections are less stable than business networks and face a number of additional challenges, such as sharing bandwidth with non-business applications and offering less reliability. Most importantly, they are not in the control of the company’s IT department.
Network infrastructure isn’t keeping up with cloud adoption. IT teams are dealing with more pressure and responsibilities to create reliable and performant networks. Traditional networks require hands-on management for every change, from adopting new apps to internet connection issues. Internet connections see an average of 3.5 hours of downtime and 23 hours of unusable performance per month.
How can a business run well when its network is not set up to adapt to ongoing uncertainty and continuing changes? The solution is a smarter network which can automatically and dynamically adapt to changing conditions, delivering a reliable, high performing foundation for so much of the business operations.
Cloud applications and today’s IT teams need a new kind of network that focuses on adaptability, changing without manual efforts and configurations. Bigleaf is an intelligent, flexible solution delivering this autonomous and adaptable connectivity that ensures cloud applications behave as intended.
Simple setup, autonomous operation
It can take a lot of work and attention to ensure organizations have the reliable, high-performance network they need to thrive. Manually configuring, troubleshooting, and maintaining these high-performance networks across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations, users, and applications is a daunting task for any IT department.
Imagine a performant network that understands what’s happening within it, end to end, and can apply actions that help it run optimally. An intelligent network can do this dynamically and without regular attention and mindshare. It can be set up and managed simply, without weeks of planning, assessments and programming. This reduces the tactical workload placed on IT departments, bringing the best possible network connection to each application without prior planning or complex QoS schemes.
Bigleaf’s SD-WAN adapts intelligently to variable network performance across one or multiple connections. Bigleaf uses a cloud-based architecture that we own and operate to automate traffic monitoring and optimization. The Bigleaf router arrives pre-configured and sits outside of your existing firewall. It looks just like a normal internet connection to your firewall.
Not just a router
Buying multiple internet connections is simple, but getting the most of multiple connections is not. Bigleaf’s SD-WAN delivers performance benefits through an intelligent platform that is more than just a router. It combines routing with a cloud service, a dedicated network, a support package, and an intelligent, automated load balancer to maximize the performance of internet connections.
Bigleaf’s Cloud Access Network connects Bigleaf routers to major peering centers via a carrier-grade, purpose-built IP network. This system performs real-time monitoring of each network circuit ten times per second in both directions. It identifies applications and applies QoS policies to each circuit. It is always aware of circuit state and adapts in real time to network conditions, using all connections for their best use and, in the case of an outage, performing seamless automatic network failover. VoIP calls will continue on the same IP. All of the autonomous routing and failover work happens behind the scenes.
The Bigleaf approach to load balancing is the next generation of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). It provides more intelligence than BGP routing, more reliability than a simple dual-WAN firewall, and more flexibility than a traditional SD-WAN solution.
Autonomous routing drives great business stories
Bigleaf has already seen autonomous, intelligent routing help companies that were struggling with cloud adoption.
New Seasons Market was growing in locations and employees. As their IT infrastructure became more complex, they began moving critical line-of-business applications to the cloud. Reliability is crucial in a company that needs to manage inventory and customer transactions across so many locations. Bigleaf’s same-IP failover and other cloud-first SD-WAN features helped New Seasons optimize multiple internet connections to achieve zero down-time.
The mortgage credit union service TruHome has prioritized a cloud-first mindset. Adopting Bigleaf, with its plug-and-play configuration, allows TruHome to provide excellent, competitive service without requiring a full-time network technician.
To get more details about these Bigleaf customer success stories, and to learn more about how it has helped other businesses succeed, download the ebook, Building an Optimized Network with Bigleaf.
