Agent Partner Story – Bigleaf Networks

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.

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.

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.

—-

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.

—
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!