Internet Optimization – Bigleaf Networks

How to scale your network across multiple sites without upending your tech stack

Amy Chan — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:09:33 +0000

IT managers face a lot of challenges when scaling networked systems to multiple locations. The best-known methods include deploying the identical technology stack and processes at each site.

Unfortunately, IT can’t exert control over key aspects of application performance, especially when businesses are relying on cloud and internet-based applications.

That’s because it’s not enough to duplicate the software and hardware stack at each location. In a distributed, networked organization that relies on the public internet, the network itself does not perform identically at every site. So, employees and customers will not enjoy the same experience in every office, warehouse, or site on the network.

Same applications, different performance

For example, connections to cloud-based applications can be perfectly responsive at the company headquarters but sluggish in a branch office, or vice versa, due to any number of factors that are outside the IT team’s control:

Availability. It’s difficult to standardize on a uniform internet connection across the country, even across city neighborhoods. In each geographic location, there may be a limited number and/or different internet service providers (ISPs) with a specific selection of circuit types.
Traffic patterns. Even the same ISP, circuit type, and service package may perform differently from one location to another, due to real time jitter, latency, and packet loss.
Outages. Hardware and software issues, broken or downed circuits, cyberattacks, or power failures can disrupt network connections locally or globally.

Network optimization ensures consistency

One way to ensure consistency across multiple locations is to add the Bigleaf Networks optimization platform to the mix. Bigleaf sits outside the firewall, so there’s no need to make changes to established security protocols or other aspects of the tech stack at any individual site.

With a plug-and-play router at each site and a purpose-built IP network in between, Bigleaf monitors and directs network traffic along the optimal path over the public internet to and from the data’s destination. Bigleaf moves cloud network traffic seamlessly around blockages and outages to improve performance and reliability of business-critical, cloud-enabled applications.

With Bigleaf, employees and customers in every location will enjoy reliable connectivity that delivers a consistent user experience.

Bigleaf works with any ISP, any connection type, any technology stack, and any firewall, to connect the network with any cloud-based application or service. IT can continue to deploy a tried-and-true tech stack at every location, including SaaS, VoIP, and other business-critical services.

Bigleaf maintains the network’s stability and resilience, and the consistent network architecture supports optimal system performance in all locations.

Plus, Bigleaf Cloud Connect provides detailed insights into the performance of every circuit at every location, so the IT team can identify risks and prevent any impact on future performance.

Check out the power of network optimization with Bigleaf. Schedule a demo today.

[Infographic] Network Health: The Bedrock of Healthcare Cloud Migration

Amy Chan — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 21:45:54 +0000

Network health: The bedrock of healthcare cloud migration

As healthcare organizations navigate the digital shift, the cloud is not just a buzzword but a beacon for progress and innovation. By 2025, it’s projected that a sweeping 90% of these entities will have achieved healthcare cloud migration, creating a digital backbone for key services such as practice management, electronic medical records, patient communication, and especially telehealth visits. The dependency on cloud technology underscores the criticality of an unwavering internet connection for service delivery and patient care.

Network health is imperative

The importance of reliable network health in this migration is highlighted in our insightful infographic. With telehealth’s adoption increasing by 25% since 2022, the implications of network interruptions are not just inconvenient—they can be critical. A robust network is now an indispensable component of healthcare delivery.

Encouragingly, 94% of IT professionals champion cloud migration for its benefits, which include simplified compliance with regulatory standards like HIPAA. Pioneering this endeavor, Bigleaf Networks assures uninterrupted, secure connectivity—a cornerstone for modern healthcare operations.

The impact of network health on healthcare cloud migration

Understand the impact of network health on healthcare cloud migration, enriched with real-world applications and insights, through these curated resources:

Discover insights on why internet uptime is a significant investment for IT leaders, especially within healthcare, reflecting on the growth of SaaS and the crucial role of reliable internet connections.
Explore how Bigleaf’s SD-WAN solution addresses the critical needs of medical offices and care facilities, ensuring PHI is protected and HIPAA compliance is seamless, all while enhancing the digital experience.
Healthcare leaders looking to maintain the optimal performance of cloud technologies will find invaluable support through Bigleaf’s SD-WAN, ensuring continuous uptime and quality care delivery.
The increasing reliance of healthcare operations on internet technology demands a robust network solution. Bigleaf’s offerings aim to bolster the industry’s digital transformation.
A case study from DP Fox Ventures showcases how Bigleaf’s SD-WAN can sustain business operations and prevent costly downtimes, reflecting Bigleaf’s ability to maintain business continuity during critical cloud migration efforts.

Learn More About Bigleaf

For healthcare organizations poised to enhance care delivery via cloud services, the journey starts with a solid network foundation. Download our infographic for a deeper understanding and schedule a demo to discover how Bigleaf can enhance the reliability and performance of your healthcare applications in the cloud.

Download infographic

How to right-size your internet connection

David McGiffin — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:50:32 +0000

Bigleaf customers typically enjoy a big improvement in the reliability and performance of their internet connections. There are other, lesser-known advantages to Bigleaf, too. One benefit is the chance to make better investment decisions when choosing ISP circuit types and services. The business intelligence provided by Bigleaf can help you to right-size internet connectivity while improving access for your entire organization.

Bigleaf provides detailed reports on each circuit, so it’s easy to see how much throughput is needed, and how much is delivered. The in-depth analysis in the Bigleaf Web Dashboard shows which circuit is providing the needed performance and which is falling short. The IT team can make better choices, which sometimes leads to lower total cost of operation (TCO) as well as higher-quality service.

Learn how Bigleaf improves quality of service.

With Bigleaf, you can achieve optimal performance on business-critical applications, to support greater productivity, seamless videoconferencing, responsive e-commerce, and real-time access to point-of-sale systems and electronic medical records.

More bandwidth is not always better

Without Bigleaf, organizations with inadequate connectivity will often follow the ISP’s advice. The ISP typically recommends upgrading to an expensive, broadband circuit, like fiber optic cable. I’ve seen this happen at lots of organizations, both during my time at Bigleaf and in my previous work at an MSP.

While that extra bandwidth may solve many connectivity problems, a gigabit line does not always provide consistent throughput. Users can still experience slowdowns and interruptions. And a high-bandwidth, fiber optic line can cost 4-6x more per month than the original 200 Mbps circuit.

Diversify ISPs and circuit types

A better choice would be to retain the original 100 Mbps or 200 Mbps line and add a second line. The redundancy helps to safeguard against downtime that can be caused by outages. The best option would be to work with more than one ISP and more than one circuit type, such as adding a cable, Starlink LEO satellite, or cellular line to supplement a primary circuit.

By choosing diverse suppliers and circuit types, you further reduce the risk of downtime. One ISP might fail, but it’s unlikely for two to fail at once. Likewise, the physical cable or wire might get cut by mistake in a nearby construction project, but it’s unlikely for two different connections to be disrupted simultaneously.

Add Bigleaf for reliable, high-performance connectivity

Add Bigleaf to connect two, three, or four circuits, and you can achieve better than 99.99% uptime. Bigleaf also optimizes internet connectivity and performance automatically for all your most important applications and use cases.

In many cases, the cost of two lines from two different ISPs will cost much less than one high-bandwidth connection. They provide all the benefits of reliable, stable internet connectivity that is right sized for your needs. Plus, customers can often pay for the Bigleaf solution out of their savings, and still have money left over.

Right-sizing internet connectivity with Bigleaf may not always save money. Some companies break even or spend just a bit more than before, depending on their choices of service and providers. Regardless, they get great value for their money, as they can depend on their internet connections to deliver the always-on, highly optimized performance that keeps their organizations running smoothly and productively.

Learn more about optimizing internet connectivity with Bigleaf.

[Webinar] Beyond uptime: Evaluating and assessing your internet maturity

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 03:36:00 +0000

Many IT leaders struggle to determine the connectivity infrastructure needed to ensure the greatest amount of usable uptime, downtime-free failover, and the ideal user experience for their staff. Using a real healthcare business as an example, we’ll explain the Internet Maturity Model framework and uncover best practices to enable optimal network resiliency and usable uptime in your organization. During this webinar you’ll learn: The difficulties businesses face when depending on the public internet to act as their primary network Why complete outages are not the only disruptions to internet-reliant businesses How to optimize for cloud applications using Bigleaf

Making network management manageable

Amy Chan — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 16:00:00 +0000

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 failove r. 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.

Finally: Resilient and autonomous networking for cloud-focused businesses

Amy Chan — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 20:15:38 +0000

In addition to being excellent tools for collaboration, voice and video are also effective network diagnostic tools. With their sensitivity to circuit conditions, interactive voice and video more easily reveal problems with internet performance that other applications can limp through. A certain amount of packet loss and jitter won’t do much to your email or even a file download, but a video call will freeze, distort, and drop.

These issues reveal that your network likely needs an update. It needs to be reimagined for what we need it to do today…and what we will need of it tomorrow.

Enabling cloud-first business

To run the business the way that they imagined, the leadership of the mortgage service provider TruHome had a vision of improving their telephony system and becoming a cloud-first organization. To support all of that, they needed a more resilient network that wasn’t subject to outages or poor performance. However, moving beyond traditional network transport was daunting, because their call center locations were the heartbeat of their business.

Although cloud-based voice over IP (VoIP) solutions offered a lot of tempting advantages, any move that would increase the risk of downtime or compromise call quality was a non-starter. Their leadership, IT team, and consultants knew the stakes were high as they forged ahead planning a resilient, multiple-location network. They imagined a network that didn’t just improve their call quality but also positioned them to take advantage of other cloud-based applications for the future.

Data networks that use legacy architecture designed with an on-premise server mindset can hamper the evolution of business technology. Branch offices traditionally used carrier-based circuits on costly, rigid MPLS networks that centralize connectivity and bind together the network reliability of every location. This made sense when business resources were hosted on-premise at a single location.

Now and into the future, traffic is increasingly going to cloud-based resources, not to a central office. TruHome’s vision of a resilient, distributed network that relied on the internet and cloud-based solutions was a good plan. Unfortunately, the challenges they faced were different than what they were familiar with or prepared for.

The internet is a jungle filled with potential outages, poor BGP configurations, and flaky routers. The more you learn about how the internet functions, the riskier it sounds to rely on it as your business lifeline every second of every day.

And yet, this is what we do. The good news is that reliable, cost-effective internet performance is possible. With an intelligent software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), businesses can run mission-critical applications in the cloud without worry. As needs and applications change, the business can continue to adapt, all without major overhauls or downtime.

The SD-WAN needed today

The new technologies that enable business operations are less often found at centrally located on-premises servers. Other services are not all at the same location, either: phone, collaboration, transactions, and data originate with different providers that each need to be reliably accessible.

Networks should be more intelligent, dynamically and autonomously supporting the continuous evolution of business technology. IT teams can’t be focused on the day-to-day changes, particularly for their distributed workforce. SMBs need their IT staff and vendors to be working on long-term initiatives, not constant tweaks to QoS or troubleshooting flaky phone calls.

Organizations, especially SMBs, benefit greatly when they can count on their network to manage their traffic intelligently. The type of SD-WAN needed today understands the current challenges of ISPs and IT teams. It adds intelligence to an organization’s network by autonomously:

assessing and adjusting to the conditions of a circuit in real-time
recognizing business-type application traffic and prioritizing it end-to-end across a network, even when new technologies are introduced
utilizing multiple connections for their best use, from load-balancing traffic across all circuits to delivering redundancy and seamless failover where connections stay up; continuing phone calls and internet access like nothing happened.

Today’s SD-WAN needs to achieve reliability and resilience without constant personal attention. Business-class traffic should travel reliably across commodity broadband without the need for technical staff to constantly monitor and make complex, manual configurations or compromise on firewall security.

The Right SD-WAN

The key to the TruHome plan was an SD-WAN that could intelligently optimize how traffic behaved on a network and provide the performance that VoIP and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) required. For it to have long term value, the implementation and ongoing management needed to be simple.

Before they found Bigleaf, the TruHome implementation was in trouble. The cost and complexity of a cloud-first network with the appropriate security controls was daunting. Knowing what problems the internet would throw at them, the planners were not convinced the architecture would be reliable. There was too much on the line to accept that.

“It’s one thing to run your data applications on ISP circuits and your telephony on a standard carrier separately. If one is down, some operations can still continue. When you are running data and telephony needs over the same solution, that means you must up the ante on your edge network and data circuits. It means you need a topology that allows you to leverage multiple diverse carriers and solves every outage scenario you can throw at it, not just the ones you think to write policies for.”
John Pentlin, Vice President of IT, TruHome

Resilient and Autonomous Networks to Ignite Distance Collaboration

TruHome has been able to realize its vision of a resilient and autonomous network by implementing Bigleaf.

The Bigleaf Cloud Access Network peers to 150 cloud host providers, bringing cloud resources “closer.” Operations are less vulnerable to the many outages, breakages and slowdowns that occur across the internet.

The Bigleaf equipment and the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network function autonomously, providing intelligent responses to issues on the internet and to new applications brought online. No IT person needs to be available. No QoS rules need to be configured.

Operating as the firewall’s connection to the internet, the Bigleaf SD-WAN solution does not require any modifications to the firewall itself.

With reliable business-class voice and UCaaS over their internet connections, TruHome relies on intelligent, autonomous networks built with Bigleaf. With redundancy that maximizes the function of all connections and dynamically optimizes for mission critical services, they can move into their cloud-based future.

Want to see intelligent networking in action? Check out our webinar with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken, “Creating a Resilient Network.”

[Case Study] Bigleaf rescues Vern Fonk’s cloud migration

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 04:42:00 +0000

Learn how Bigleaf solved Vern Fonk’s Internet issues and realize the full potential of their services.

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Why MSPs love Bigleaf

Bigleaf Networks — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 22:41:00 +0000

Learn how Bigleaf provides an SD-WAN solution that allows MSPs to increase the quality of their service without additional support staff.

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Improving UCaaS with purpose-built SD-WAN

Bigleaf Networks — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 03:40:00 +0000

Learn how to deploy any UCaaS platform with a reliable connection to the Cloud.

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