Digital Transformation – Bigleaf Networks

What Is Dynamic QoS? Prioritize internet traffic intelligently & seamlessly

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:57:20 +0000

SaaS, cloud, and internet technology users rejoice – thanks to Bigleaf Dynamic QoS, your business-critical applications will still perform seamlessly no matter what’s going on in the background.

Networking is a distinct territory within IT with equally distinct jargon to match. One term you’ve probably heard of is quality of service (QoS) – technology that controls network traffic to ensure the performance of essential applications.

Although quality of service is not a new concept, QoS and its latest variations are a hot topic regarding today’s SMB IT infrastructure. But what is Dynamic QoS, and how does it work? Is Dynamic QoS necessary for your business continuity and success?

Read on as we answer your questions, explain its business implications, and show real-world examples of what makes Bigleaf Dynamic QoS technology an absolute game changer for SMBs.

Let’s dive in.

What Is [Dynamic] QoS and how does it work?

In a nutshell, quality of service is a set of technologies or tools that manage and prioritize network traffic, ensuring the smooth, consistent performance of high-priority and real-time applications & traffic (even with limited internet capacity).

These days, business applications aren’t only competing with many types of internet traffic; the applications are competing with one another (whether you work from home or a corporate office). While all apps within a network are subject to the consequences of bandwidth issues and poor connection quality, apps with real-time requirements feel the effects fast – think ~~crappy~~ choppy video conferences and VoIP calls.

Internet disruptions like those aren’t just annoying for your teams and your customers. When meetings are interrupted or sales calls drop, operations are stalled, costing your business revenue, productivity, recovery & more. In fact, according to the latest data from Gartner, the average cost of network downtime or unusable uptime (when your internet is live but unstable) to your business is upwards of $300K per hour.

QoS mitigates these all-too-common connectivity and performance problems by working to reduce the effects of packet loss, latency, and jitter on a network, prioritizing and routing traffic through circuits in a way to best handle that of your business-critical apps such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, RingCentral, and other SaaS and cloud-based tools for VoIP, video conferencing, and video-on-demand.

To put it simply, you can think of your internet connection as a massive, multi-lane freeway. When the flow of traffic starts to get heavy, QoS is like the carpool and bus-only lanes reserved for your high-priority apps, resolving traffic congestion.

Traditionally, QoS works by prioritizing packets based on manual policy and configuring routers that create separate virtual queues for each application. Bandwidth is reserved for the essential applications or websites that are assigned priority access. A network administrator usually allocates the order in which packets are handled and provides the appropriate level of bandwidth to each app or traffic flow.

If that sounds tedious and limiting, it’s because it is.

Plus, traditional solutions can only allocate bandwidth to internet traffic leaving the local network. Everything beyond the LAN is outside its control. So, traditional QoS solutions are helpful but, again, limited, especially in today’s work-from-anywhere business landscape.

Enter Dynamic QoS

Rather than using legacy, first-in-first-out (FIFO) methods, Dynamic QoS helps improve business-critical app performance by improving internet traffic management capabilities via bandwidth allocation and traffic prioritization techniques automatically. Instead of IT leaders or network administrators manually configuring QoS rules into your network, Dynamic QoS auto-adjusts traffic rules using intelligent software.

When your Dynamic QoS tools and other SD-WAN capabilities work cohesively, the way the health of your internet connection and bandwidth is monitored, managed, and prioritized ensures the silky-smooth performance of your much-needed business applications.

Whether you’re working in a household of hardcore gamers and streaming services junkies, or in a busy corporate office, Dynamic QoS recognizes and protects the services using minimum bandwidth + require low latency.

Since Dynamic QoS reduces disruptions caused by problems like downtime, latency, and jitter, your network automatically becomes more cost-effective. So, your business, by default, becomes more productive.

Is Dynamic QoS really beneficial for business?

In a word, yes. Without proper QoS, network data can become disorganized to the point of causing performance degradation or worse. As mentioned above, that’s a $300K per hour problem that most SMBs can’t weather.

And with Dynamic QoS, the identification and prioritization of traffic happen automatically, in real-time. So, you no longer need to spend time, and use staff or other resources to consistently monitor all the applications your business uses.

In general, QoS, especially Dynamic QoS, empowers businesses and end-users by ensuring the cloud and internet apps they rely on work optimally. Optimizing latency allows employees to be as productive and focused as possible while keeping users happy: no more dropped VoIP calls, video conferences, or VPN sessions.

Clearly, the benefits of QoS and its advanced, dynamic variant are integral to a thriving business. But are all services created equal? Not according to more than 100,000 users and counting who rely on Bigleaf Networks to provide them with truly reliable connectivity daily.

Why SMBs choose Bigleaf Dynamic QoS to intelligently prioritize internet traffic

“Bigleaf has architected a new kind of networking platform to deliver end-to-end connectivity to and from anywhere your traffic needs to go.”

Like other SD-WAN solutions, we do three things here at Bigleaf. We monitor connectivity, route your traffic, and prioritize it. However, the way we do it here uses intelligent software instead of manual policy and configuration work. So, our customers can simply plug into the Bigleaf service and reap the benefits of performant connectivity almost immediately.

Notably, the way we provide QoS prioritization across the public internet is unique even among other players in our industry. We can adapt to circuit conditions and bidirectionally control traffic over the internet to assure prioritization for your key applications. This means VoIP and video are always smooth, and those business-critical apps stay responsive even if other users in your network are downloading giant files.

Our Dynamic QoS also works on a single Internet connection. So, you can still enjoy all the prioritization, circuit monitoring, and proactive alerting benefits Bigleaf offers while sticking to one circuit.

Our self-driving AI approach utilizes Bigleaf Same-IP Failover and our patented Intelligent Load Balancing that all work together with our innovative Dynamic QoS technology to ensure your cloud applications are constantly performing.

The benefits and use cases of QoS, especially Bigleaf’s AI-driven, Dynamic QoS, are numerous and make implementation worth the investment for your growing business.

Dynamic QoS: You don’t need more speed, just better prioritization

Let’s check out a real-world scenario that may look close to a situation you’d find yourself in. It’s a perfect example of QoS prioritization in action.

Bigleaf Networks co-founder Joel Mulkey, an IT visionary, offers a quintessential example of the “less is more” approach.

View Graph A below.

At Joel’s home, the fastest circuit has about 6 Mbps of download speed. Recently, one of his kids purchased a brand-new video game from the digital distribution service Steam. Notice that the game was downloading during the day, saturating that circuit (red). Yet, throughout the day, that same circuit was the healthiest (in addition to being the fastest). So, our Intelligent Load Balancing placed Joel’s Zoom calls onto the path (green).

Notice how QoS slows down the lower priority bulk data during those periods, which kept Joel’s Zoom calls perfectly clear. Now that’s how you prioritize traffic on your internet connection, especially one with such limited bandwidth!

That’s the key value of Bigleaf’s AI-powered Dynamic QoS: it automatically identified the game as a type of traffic that shouldn’t have priority over a business-critical app like Zoom.

So, there was no need to notify IT of a new app running through his circuit, the team didn’t need to create a new policy, and Joel was able to stay focused and productive, completing his business tasks without distractions.

Now, this was at Joel’s home in the Northwest US. But whether you operate out of a home office or run a multi-site, multi-state enterprise, Bigleaf Networks’ site-to-cloud SD-WAN technology delivers consistency and performance you can count on

Imagine the same situation at a corporate office, where an employee might get invited to a video conference using an app that IT did not anticipate. Bigleaf Dynamic QoS recognizes that traffic and automatically prioritizes it, just as it would treat other VoIP and video call traffic.

Find more insights in Bigleaf’s customer success stories.

Dynamic QoS: Optimizing the internet for your business

At Bigleaf, we understand that when it comes to getting work done — no matter what internet provider you’re using, no matter your location, and no matter what kind of organization you run — if you rely on cloud and SaaS applications for business, they need to function optimally. So, we set out to create the most effective Dynamic QoS tools to help deliver the performance you need.

We provide AI-powered Dynamic QoS as a part of our SD-WAN solution to supercharge businesses throughout the USA and Europe, who need truly reliable internet connectivity for every application, every technology, every user, everywhere — over any ISP.

Learn how Bigleaf can transform your business for the better by requesting a FREE demo. If you have any questions, send us an email at sales@bigleaf.net.

Channel Partners interview with Jeff Burchett, Bigleaf Networks

Bigleaf Networks — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 04:12:00 +0000

Jeff Burchett, CRO at Bigleaf Networks, sits down with Allison Francis of Channel Partners in Las Vegas for a 1:1 interview. Jeff discusses how Bigleaf supports MSPs, living in a time of new digital transformation, and more!

Building a reliable connectivity foundation for your digital transformation

Amy Chan — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 23:19:27 +0000

70% of organizations have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one, while 45% of executives aren’t confident their companies have the right technology infrastructure in place to implement it.

For the business considering digital transformation initiatives for their employee applications, efforts will only be as successful as the user experiences they create. You can deploy the best applications money can buy and spend all the money you want on WiFi access points, but the user’s experience is only as good as the foundation of connectivity that it travels over.

Despite its vital role in the process, the concept of connectivity relative to digital transformation is not one of the more high-profile topics of discussion. Often overlooked in the planning phase, connectivity can compromise your digital transformation initiative if you don’t get it right.

In our recent webinar, “Building digital transformation success on a reliable connectivity foundation,” we discussed how to ensure that your connectivity foundation will fully support a successful digital transformation.

Rethinking how you look at connectivity

A big part of digital transformation is taking technology out of your server closet and migrating it to AWS, Azure, or data centers where software packages are installed. If you are a multi-site organization and choose to host an application at one of your locations, you have some options because you can put an SD-WAN device at either end to help manage traffic and get some predictable performance.

But a lot of other technologies will live on the internet, not in one of the company’s buildings. These are SaaS applications like Salesforce or Dropbox, VoIP phones like RingCentral, and collaboration tools like Slack. These tools don’t exist in a location you own, where you might put another device at the other end to maintain control. Cloud-based applications effectively place the internet in the middle of your network.

To ensure you can consistently provide a reliable experience for all users, you should rethink how you look at connectivity.

The internet wasn’t really designed for the kind of high-performance business technologies that we use today. Originally, we were mostly transferring small or straightforward files in a variety of ways. These processes were not significantly impacted by packet loss, latency, or jitter. But when your business relies on VoIP phone conversations and real-time video collaboration, a little bit of packet loss can derail an entire meeting.

The distributed nature of the public internet exacerbates the issue because it does not give you a single source of truth or means of control. Visibility is limited into the network that hosts your traffic, and it is often difficult to determine where the problems are, what you can do to fix problems when they arise, and who to turn to for help. This becomes a challenge, and it translates into real pain for businesses on their digital journey. Techaisle, a global SMB IT market research and industry analyst organization, completed a survey that found 69% of businesses are getting monthly connectivity complaints from their users, about everything from dropped calls to poor SaaS application performance. These issues can stop a digital transformation initiative in its tracks because they create friction for adoption, and it kills productivity.

Three pillars of connectivity for digital transformation

Creating reliable connectivity on the unreliable internet means rethinking the connectivity for the new needs of digital technologies. Think of connectivity as having three pillars:

Resilient connectivity — Make sure you have enough capacity for all of your traffic with redundancy built in.
Real-time control — Your system should be proactive and fix things in real time before an application fails and a complaint is registered.
Operationalization — Provide IT with the visibility, alerts, and troubleshooting tools they need to ensure the ongoing success of the connectivity and ultimately the digital technologies.

Real-time control requires building intelligence into your network. We recommend an active-active configuration versus paying for a second circuit that only sits there, idle, in failover mode. An active-active configuration provides the same failover protection and allows you to leverage the connection of both circuits as it can move traffic between those ISPs without being disruptive — for example, moving a Zoom call between circuits without interrupting the conversation.

Rearchitecting your network for resilient, reliable connectivity

In our model, reliable connectivity has three components: capacity, performance, and diversity.

Capacity refers to the total room you need for the type of traffic you have running through your applications, so you should think about capacity in those terms.

This data will help you establish an initial baseline and avoid wasting resources on excess capacity. The key here is to understand your total potential capacity consumption. Some apps are more volatile with respect to consumption, so your capacity needs can vary. You can start small, then increase capacity as you need more.

Enhanced network diversity makes it easier to route around performance issues. Relying on a single carrier leaves you vulnerable, because if that ISP has a problem such as low power at a data center or network equipment overload, it’s your problem. If you run a single connection through a single ISP, you are at risk for losing complete connectivity, but you’re also at risk for performance blips. Those are hard to collect metrics on and can create all sorts of headaches.

Performance has traditionally been all about metrics, specifically uptime. You should consider the variability that can come from a circuit, because there is a lot of real estate between a level seven outage and usable internet connectivity.

From our data, we’ve found that the average business internet connection experiences 2.6 hours of downtime and 47.75 hours of unusable internet per month.

Unusable connectivity directly correlates to an application not working effectively and that impacts your team’s productivity. This is why evaluating performance in this manner is vital to building a strong connectivity stack.

For more detail and color on all of this, watch the recording of our webinar on reliable connectivity for digital transformations.

Intelligent networking solutions can help

Using multiple connections does not have to be hard work. Intelligent network solutions like ours seamlessly maintain connectivity. Bigleaf’s active-active configuration provides the same fail-over protection as a redundant circuit and improves network performance at the same time.

With this resilient base as a foundation, we provide the intelligence to be able to move traffic back and forth between connections and prioritize traffic within those connections. Your users don’t wait for IT to be alerted to a problem, because we leverage tools like self-driving algorithms and AI and solve issues proactively.

The Bigleaf dashboard provides the visibility needed to troubleshoot WAN or internet issues, evaluate bandwidth/speed adjustments, and understand the impact of network performance on application experience.

When IT does need to become involved, intelligent networking makes their job easier by analyzing data anomalies and changes to the network, delivering alerts and creating visibility that will accelerate troubleshooting.

A proven solution, a trusted partner

Bigleaf has depth and breadth of experience helping our customers successfully build reliable, foundational connectivity to match their business needs. Bigleaf combines proven SD-WAN technology with groundbreaking AI to provide that resilient, reliable connectivity needed for successful digital transformation. And we make it easy so it’s not another item on the to-do list for the IT team to tweak or manage. The Bigleaf Cloud Access Network is a global backbone network that allows us to move traffic back and forth seamlessly on the same IP between different ISPs for whatever cloud application you’re using.

Our self-driving AI automatically classifies, prioritizes, and steers your traffic on the right path. Our solution provides alerts, reporting, and diagnostic tools to make sure that your IT team is always in the driver’s seat.

And if you run a lean IT shop, you will appreciate that Bigleaf’s solution doesn’t have any policies to build, test, or update. The Bigleaf AI takes care of that.

If you would like to learn more, request a demo. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thriving in the ‘next normal’

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 04:16:00 +0000

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TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:32:44 +0000

TruHome builds a cloud-based call center with Bigleaf

John Pentlin, VP of IT at TruHome, removed a roadblock from his company’s cloud journey with help from Bigleaf Networks.

Every day, IT leaders like John are moving critical business technologies like voice communications to cloud-based systems because of their reduced cost and increased flexibility. However, this transition leaves many IT leaders looking for more stable and reliable internet options to keep cloud technologies up and running as intended.

John sat down for an interview with Bigleaf and shared his reasons for moving TruHomes 200+ call center reps to a cloud-based phone system. He described the networking challenges his IT organization faced along the way and how Bigleaf has helped him to meet those challenges.

Read the full TruHome case study to get all the details. If you’d like to see how Bigleaf can help your company improve cloud performance and user experience, drop us a note or request a quote to get started.

[Video] How Bigleaf SD-WAN improves Office 365 adoption and experience

Amy Chan — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:52:27 +0000

This month, we headed up to Seattle, WA to talk at Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Data Science conference about Bigleaf’s unique SD-WAN approach and how we’re helping improve Office 365 adoption and experience. Our founder and CEO, Joel Mulkey, was there to help explain why companies using Office 365 are rethinking their network architecture as more and more of their business technologies are moving to the Cloud.

Fortunately for us, the cameras were rolling…

Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Joel Mulkey, founder and CEO of Bigleaf networks. The world of business is in the middle of a massive shift right now. The cloud is taking over, and Office 365 is driving much of that. However, the connection between users and the cloud is preventing adoption in many cases. IT leaders are scared to deploy the great applications that folks like you were building. There are two main reasons for that.

The first is that the internet connection connecting to the cloud is unpredictable. We monitor thousands of internet connections all over and based on that data, we see that each internet connection on average experiences three and a half hours of downtime in given month. On top of that, if the connection up, it’s not necessarily healthy. You’ll see there are twenty-three hours of unhealthy time where the circuit is basically unusable.

The second major issue is that networks aren’t keeping up with the cloud revolution. Users are able to bring apps into their environment at any time, and Enterprise networks are built on static network policies. That’s a collision where the network is just simply not able to adapt as users procure and deploy these applications.

The cloud requires a new kind network, a new kind of Internet. One that’s smarter. That’s Bigleaf. Bigleaf has deployed software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to hundreds of mutual business customers. Those are Microsoft customers who are getting the application experience the developers intended because the network is no longer in the way.

Let me talk you through what this looks like.

Bigleaf is built into the internet backbone, the core of the internet. We also own and operate our own core Network. We deploy routers and servers and data centers all over.

We peer that network with hundreds of different networks, including [Microsoft’s]. We then deploy a small router at each customer location and between those endpoints we run our intelligent network software. This platform gives full visibility and control over the whole internet path ensuring that the application user is getting the experience that they should. Because we own this network, we peer it with over a thousand different Cloud applications. This means no matter what the user’s using, whether it’s a Microsoft app or something else, they get a consistent experience this what they were expecting.

Now want talk to you through four areas that we’re innovating in network today. The first is, when you deploy Network Technology, it needs to be easy to implement. Otherwise, it won’t be used. Bigleaf is simple. Our router drops in in between the customer’s firewall and their internet connections. That connects back to our core Network and that’s it. We don’t touch the LAN. We don’t touch the security. We simply focus on internet reliability and performance.

The second area is reliability. Users are expecting a very real-time experience today. If you’re on a key phone call and it drops, or even if it’s glitchy, people upset. Or, if you’ve got a video, you’re streaming and it picks the lates people wonder what’s wrong with the application or what’s wrong with the network. At Bigleaf, we address this through intelligent software that inspects each internet connection ten times second, gathering huge amounts of data on packet loss latency, jitter and capacity. We then take that data and make real-time routing decisions on it to keep the user experience great. You can think of it like a genius network engineer who has access to statistics on the whole internet path end-to-end, and who never takes any restroom breaks, never takes a day off and commits no errors.

The third area is flexibility. The problem with networks built on static policies, like much of today’s Network Technology, is that they don’t adapt to the continual evolution in applications where users are adding things constantly. At Bigleaf we believe users shouldn’t have to worry about how to make their network deal with new applications. So we use intelligent software that automatically identifies those applications through algorithms and heuristics and classifies them into six different categories. We then take that traffic end-to-end across the internet and prioritize it even when it’s congested our users get the best possible application experience without having to manually configure their Network.

The fourth area I want to touch on is autonomy. Autonomous software is very exciting. You’re all here because of that. What we see in the networking space is that it can be applicable to take away the low-level details of managing how to implement the network and releases people to focus more on the outcome that they really want. When I look at autonomous software, I see that it tends to sit in this Sweet Spot somewhere between full manual control and full automation in network software and routing technology.

Like what we do. You can automate it pretty heavily and have that be successful. That’s because computers are better than humans at real-time network monitoring and routing decisions. And the scope of the problem is small enough that you can build autonomous software effectively to accomplish things. Networks built on autonomous software means that administrators are happy because their networks behave like they intended them to, even when conditions change, and users are happy because their applications work right all the time. Bigleaf customers are happy customers.

We make their applications behave like they were intended with our direct peering to Microsoft network and our automatic classification of all types of cloud traffic. Bigleaf is the best way to connect to Office 365. If you want to learn more or talk about how we can work together. Please see me the back afterward. Thank you.

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.

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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.

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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!