Prioritize Cloud Business Apps – Bigleaf Networks

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.

[Video] See Bigleaf Home Office prioritize business app traffic

Amy Chan — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 15:30:56 +0000

Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization is like what medical professionals have said about social distancing, “It’s working when the possible problems don’t seem to be problems.”

In Bigleaf’s world, that means that when your business applications—like Zoom—are running smoothly without problem or issue, even when you’re running a host of other streaming apps, like Netflix or YouTube, your QoS is doing its job.

But how do you really know for sure? Well, we thought we’d show you.

Play Video

In this quick video we recorded, you’ll see us simultaneously run a Zoom session, play a YouTube video, and stream live TV broadcast on DirecTV on our computer—to replicate the traffic a household can get while you’re working from home. Then, you’ll see us flood the rest of connection with traffic by running a speed test to show how Zoom keeps working great even when we’ve maxed out its throughput capacity.

What you will notice is that there are no issues with the Zoom call—that both the voice and video work smoothly even while the internet connection they were running through was being hammered with non-business related traffic.

In addition to the video, you can see in the associated Bigleaf traffic optimization dashboard, how the number of high priority packets protected increased during the streaming of the apps and the speed test—representing how Bigleaf Home Office prioritizes your business traffic and your key applications will work with the reliability and quality that you need them to have.

High-priority packets protected before flooding the circuit with traffic.

High-priority packets protected after flooding the circuit with traffic.

Making home internet work

Amy Chan — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:00:19 +0000

Making Home Internet Work

How to support connectivity for business applications when everyone works from home

The challenges of managing IT for our newly remote workforce cannot be overstated. As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered our offices, the number of Americans working from home went from 15 million to an estimated 92 million. That means you have gone from supporting one, or maybe a handful of sites, to supporting all the business apps your users need on different devices connected in different ways to different ISPs.

As in-person meetings move to video conferencing apps and files are flying around inboxes and collaboration tools, your users are leveraging more digital apps than ever. They need fluid video and at-the-ready resources, while hooked up to a home internet service that you have no control over. As funny as it is to see the CEO’s video get stuck in an awkward pose during an all-hands call, these connectivity issues are disrupting the key apps that run your business. With the coronavirus pandemic keeping us all at home for the foreseeable future, it’s your role to lead your company to stable, reliable, working internet.

We’re wrangling terabytes on a system built for “Tiger King”

When trying to serve users at home, it’s useful to consider some fundamental differences in home and office internet contracts, infrastructure, and packages.

Data has a harder path to travel to residences. ISP points of presence tend to be closer to offices than homes. This means that there’s more infrastructure between your home and the closest internet ‘hub,’ increasing the chance of something breaking or slowing down your data.
Residential ISP contracts don’t have the service level agreements (SLA) that are usually a part of your business service. Your sales development rep Clara is now mission-critical from her home office, but does not have the power to enforce an SLA for service to her two-bedroom unit in the burbs.
You generally don’t use all of your bandwidth at home and neither do your neighbors. ISPs build their business model on oversubscription: selling more bandwidth potential than they can actually provide because they know it is unlikely for all of it to be used – sometimes at 40 to 1. Now we are all working from home, and their calculations are way off. They become a bottleneck.

Their home network is a black box

At the office, you know your equipment. You probably installed and configured much of it yourself. Maybe you named some of your favorites. It’s OK, we see you. The point is, you are in control of your stack and you know how it works. Your users’ home LAN and the ISPs WAN may as well be a black box and you have no way to figure out what’s going on with it.

Your customers (a.k.a. team members working from home) have their own customers – the other family members who are using the network for learning and entertainment. The LAN can have all manner of devices and configs. How do you troubleshoot a connection you can’t see?

Give your traffic the right of way

The solution to internet connectivity problems is to prioritize the important business traffic above apps that are not business-critical. Sometimes, all it takes is a manual approach: Having your user identify the traffic hogs on their connection and curb their use – human or machine. This might be unpopular in the household, so for most users, you’ll need a more sophisticated solution. Configuring the user LAN’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings on their residential routers can help (if the router has a QoS capability), but only for problems that originate in the home. It won’t resolve issues between their ISP modem and the servers that host key business applications.

Bigleaf Home Office is a software-defined wide-area network, or SD-WAN, based on technology we have effectively delivered to support office environments. To optimize existing ISP service in the home office, Bigleaf Home Office automatically detects the needs of business applications and intelligently adapts traffic in real time. It supports single circuit connections that are typically found in homes and can also use two internet connections to load balance traffic and perform automatic failover.

Speed test results don’t tell you much

When users encounter a slowdown, their first port of call is frequently a web speed test like speedtest.net. When the results come back saying everything is peachy, they think their problem must have been a blip. We have found that some ISPs actively prioritize speed test traffic to reduce the number of angry customer calls. These popular tools can’t be relied upon to give you what you need to know to support them effectively.

With our technology, you get real-time and historical data and insights about what’s happening across your home office connections. So, when the call comes from a remote worker with internet or application issues, you’ll know what to do. Read about Bigleaf Home Office or request a demo if you want to learn more.

Prioritizing business traffic over Netflix in the home office

Amy Chan — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:30:26 +0000

Many of us are currently working out of home offices alongside our family members or roommates who are doing the same. In addition to sharing more meals and living space, we’re also sharing more of our home Internet connection during more hours of the day.

Over a week’s time, this household’s Internet traffic peaked at ~95 Mbps, while averaging about 10-20 Mbps.

This can mean that one or two people are in and out of video conferences and using collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams all day, while someone else is using Google Classroom for school or streaming Netflix or Disney+. All of these uses rely on the home’s internet connection, which is commonly unreliable at best.

An estimated 13.2M people working from home due to Coronavirus are experiencing daily Internet connectivity issues.

Waveform, April 2020 Report: Millions of Americans are Working from Home with Unreliable Cell Signal and Internet

In a standard home network, the traffic from all of these sources is treated equally. So, Sally’s twelfth viewing of “Frozen 2” is getting the same priority as Mom’s Zoom call, meaning that Mom could experience garbled audio or choppy video that keeps interrupting her important meeting, or worse yet, dropping it altogether.

Here we see the same traffic data displayed in the graph above but categorized by QoS class. The majority of the traffic is bulk data (general web, Netflix, YouTube, etc.), whereas only a small portion is higher priority traffic (VoIP, Zoom, Slack, Office 365).

In an enterprise office environment, traditional networking technologies can sometimes be implemented and managed by a team of network engineers, using policies to prioritize traffic related to VoIP, video calls and business applications over less important traffic.

In a home office environment, this policy-based approach becomes exponentially more challenging due to the huge variability and lack of visibility for the IT team with each employee’s residential ISP connections, usage patterns, and home networking equipment.

The story changes when IT can implement and scale automated QoS across all of your teams’ home office networks. When you can take advantage of intelligent software instead of having to manually build policies to automatically identify and prioritize traffic for your business communications and applications—supporting your remote workers becomes much more feasible.

Bigleaf Home Office was able to automatically enforce a QoS policy where high-priority packets were protected almost 300k times over bulk data, ensuring that key business applications worked without interruption or degradation.

As seen in the chart above, solutions like Bigleaf Home Office use proprietary algorithms, instead of manual policies, to prioritize high-priority business application traffic over less important bulk data, while monitoring and adjusting traffic in real time—to the varying broadband capacity home ISPs deliver.

When this can be done for home office workers, their business tools can get the VIP treatment over streaming services, like Netflix, so they don’t drop or lag and team members who are working from home can stay productive and frustration-free.

Want to learn more about home office networking?

If you’re interested in how to prioritize your key business applications over Netflix, YouTube, or other internet applications, check out Bigleaf remote office and let us know if you have any questions.