Site-to-Cloud Connectivity – Bigleaf Networks https://www.bigleaf.net Internet Connectivity Without Complexity Wed, 29 Nov 2023 03:34:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://www.bigleaf.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/favicon-70x70.png Site-to-Cloud Connectivity – Bigleaf Networks https://www.bigleaf.net 32 32 Bigleaf and MPLS https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/bigleaf-mpls/ Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:29:58 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=15932 Read More]]>
Graphic depiction of cityscape with icons representing internet and cloud connectivity

Bigleaf and MPLS

Optimizing your internet connectivity with Bigleaf while leveraging your MPLS connection

A very common question we hear from our partners and customers is whether Bigleaf’s service “works with MPLS.” The simple answer is “yes,” but the “when” and “how” components deserve some explanation. While Bigleaf is typically used as a replacement for MPLS, you can create a hybrid setup while you wait for your MPLS contract to run out and still leverage the use of that connection, or you simply want to keep an MPLS connection (or Layer 2/private line circuit) in your network.

Traditional Bigleaf model

Under Bigleaf’s traditional model, our customer premise router connects up to four Internet circuits. We encapsulate the customer’s traffic within tunnels across those Internet circuits that connect to Bigleaf’s redundant network of server clusters sitting in major peering centers across the country. Our router clusters then pass the customer’s traffic out to its destination (Google, VoIP Provider, etc.).

Internet and MPLS

For a customer who has previously invested in an MPLS network to connect multiple office locations, the question then becomes whether a location’s MPLS circuit can be utilized as a “2nd Internet” connection with Bigleaf’s service. And the answer is absolutely.

To set this up, you would have your MPLS circuit routing between your two sites via your firewall, add a Bigleaf device at each location, then create a VPN tunnel between the two sites. While you could just add Bigleaf to one site, we recommend it on both so we can protect and monitor that VPN traffic on the entire path between your sites.

In this setup, your firewalls will be doing the routing for both your site-to-site local traffic and your internet-based traffic. In this diagram below, we are showing the MPLS set up as a primary path for site-to-site traffic; however, it could instead be set as the backup.

Note, the reason MPLS is not connected through the Bigleaf router is because Bigleaf needs an internet connection so we can create our tunnel between our gateways and POPs.

On the LAN side of the equation

You do have configuration options:

Option #1: Connect your sites with your MPLS via your firewall + connect your site(s) to the Internet with Bigleaf

Configure to send Internet traffic through the Bigleaf system and MPLS traffic straight to the MPLS router. Your Internet traffic performance will be optimized by Bigleaf and your MPLS traffic will be steered directly to your MPLS network via your firewall/router.

Option #2: Add Bigleaf to each of your sites to create a VPN + use your MPLS as your site-to-site backup connection

This option applies if you want to eventually replace your MPLS network with a VPN connectivity solution. In this case, set up your firewall to send all traffic through Bigleaf’s system. Bigleaf then becomes the transport mechanism for both your Internet traffic and VPN connectivity traffic, and your MPLS connection becomes a backup path via the firewall/router.

This is a great way to leverage an MPLS network while it’s still under contract with your carrier if you want to migrate immediately to a VPN solution.

If you have any questions or would like to talk live to learn more about how we can work together to build more robust cloud connectivity solutions, please contact us. We’re here to help!

]]> Things to consider for a better internet failover setup https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/things-to-consider-for-a-better-internet-failover-setup/ Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:35:47 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=14732 Read More]]>
Manage internet failovers seamlessly by adding a second ISP or carrier connection and a Bigleaf solution for added assurance

No matter what internet connection or connections you have, they’re each going to have downtime and at times be practically unusable because of performance issues. Based on our customer data, we’ve calculated that ISP connections are providing an average of 93.1% of usable uptime. The remaining 6.9% translates to an average of 604 hours per year of effective downtime. And with so many important business technologies moving to the cloud, even a small amount of downtime is going to be painful and costly.

That’s why having a secondary internet connection that provides failover coverage is more than just a good idea; it’s now crucial for any modern business that relies on the internet.

That said, there are a lot of options and things to think about when choosing a second (or third) internet connection and creating the right internet failover setup for your business — whether it’s the first time your business or organization will have a backup internet connection, or you’re looking for a better and more reliable option.

Your primary goal

What do you want out of your additional internet connection and failover method? What’s most important for your business? Is it…
  • Getting your uptime percentage as high as possible?
  • Having the least possible downtime when a natural disaster hits your area?
  •  Improving the performance of a particular cloud technology — like video or VoIP calls, your CRM, or an application that’s specific to your industry or business? 
  • Avoiding interruptions when you fail over from one internet connection to another? For example, making sure VoIP calls or VPN sessions don’t drop. 
  • Something else? Explicitly identifying your main goal or goals will help you make the best decisions for your business and help you explain them to your manager, executive team, or company

All sorts of things can take an internet connection down:

  • ISP outage
  • Scheduled or unscheduled maintenance
  • Natural disasters
  • Cyberattacks
  • Human error
  • Hardware problems or failure
  • Power outage
  • Someone cutting a line to your building
  • Spikes in latency or packet loss that make the internet unusable

Getting the most out of your secondary internet connection(s)

ISP diversity

Even if you have multiple internet connections with a failover option that have so far worked perfectly, you can still have issues. When all your connections are from the same ISP or carrier, they will all experience downtime or serious performance issues when that ISP’s network goes down. When you have ISP diversity, that is, internet connections from different providers, you and your failover setup will have a much better chance of being able to route around issues affecting one ISP or carrier’s network.

Last-mile diversity

Similar to ISP diversity, it’s also helpful to have physically diverse paths in the “last mile” to your offices or locations. For example, you can combine fiber and cable, DSL and wireless, or T1 and cable so you have more than one method for getting traffic in and out of your site. That way, you don’t have to worry about a construction crew accidentally cutting the lines of both your internet connections.

The uptime of different connection types

If your business is in an area with a decent variety of ISPs and internet connection types, you might as well pick the connection types that provide an ISP, last-mile diversity, and the best shot at maximum uptime. From analyzing the uptime of our 1,700+ customers’ various internet connections, we saw these connection types deliver the most reliable percentage of uptime, in this order: fiber, enterprise fixed wireless, cable, copper, T1/T3, other fixed wireless, DSL, cellular, satellite.

Leveraging your internet failover setup

Think about outages and performance

Many traditional internet failover options — like dual-WAN firewalls and BGP routers — only jump into action when your primary internet connection fails completely. They don’t have any awareness of network performance metrics for things like packet loss, latency, and jitter that can make the internet practically unusable when they occur, especially when using Zoom, Teams, or other VoIP services. For many businesses, these performance issues are a bigger and more common problem than full-fledged outages. A basic failover setup will be of little help, as they monitor for connectivity failures, not connection health.

IP address change

When your primary internet connection fails and your traffic is moved to your secondary connection, do you want your users’ IP addresses to change or stay the same? For more simple things like email or loading web pages, a change in IP address isn’t a big deal and your users won’t know that your internet was having any issues. However, many cloud- and internet-based applications aren’t so forgiving.

Here are some of the things that can happen when an internet failover changes your IP address:

  • VoIP calls drop
  • VPN sessions disconnect
  • Virtual desktop sessions drop
  • SSH sessions drop
  • Valuable data is lost while people are editing electronic health/medical records, CRMs, etc
Most internet failover methods change your IP address(es) when they move your traffic from one internet connection to another. If keeping your IP address(es) the same through any failovers is important, you’ll want to look at options like Bigleaf Networks or a border gateway protocol (BGP) router.

Active-active or active-passive configuration

When you have multiple internet connections, your secondary circuit(s) can be passive—just sitting and waiting for your primary connection to go down—or active, sharing the traffic load with your primary connection. Traditional internet failover options have an active-passive configuration where the secondary circuit is there strictly as a backup. This helps you avoid outages, but when your internet connection fails over you will likely have some disruptions and dropped sessions when your IP address(es) change. With an active-active configuration, both or all your internet connections are actively carrying some of your traffic at any given time. You can even have different types of traffic routed to the connection that’s currently best, for example, the one with the lowest packet loss for your video conferencing platform and the one with the highest throughput for downloads. Additionally, an appropriately configured active-active configuration is unlikely to suffer disruption and dropped sessions when one or the two connections should fail, or suffer high congestion

Bi-directional Quality of Service (QoS)

Traditional failover options generally have not control over your download traffic. This could be fine for your business, but if you’d like to prioritize important traffic that’s particularly susceptible to internet performance issues over bulk downloads, for example, VoIP or video calls, or to be able to route upload and download traffic on different circuits based on the best path, you’ll want a failover option, like Bigleaf’s, that provides this bi-directional QoS.

Other optimizations

Beyond simple failover—when one of your internet connections goes down completely—there is a lot that can be included in a failover setup to prioritize and route different types of traffic so that your most important technologies work as well as they can. This can be done through either policies and custom configurations or intelligently-powered software.

How much time do you have?

With policies and custom configurations, you spell out all the things you think your failover setup will need to know—from telling it how to recognize traffic for your organization’s most important applications, to what to do if the packet loss on a circuit crosses a certain threshold. This gives you full manual control, but also takes a lot of time and creates opportunities for human error.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your policies and configurations can only be as good as what your team knows about and has the time to update. For example, when an employee uses a new application they didn’t get from the IT team—a potential customer invites your salesperson to a video conference on a different platform, or the new tool a team is trying out—they won’t get the preferred experience they do with the applications you’ve created manual policies for. 

Intelligently-powered software

If you include intelligent software as part of your internet failover setup, it can automatically monitor your circuit performance, detect and classify new technologies and traffic types on your network, and route and reroute your traffic to prevent disruptions. Instead of manually creating policies and configurations to try to account for anything that could happen, you can use software that incorporates all the knowledge from the networking experts who created it…the businesses that have already used it.

Adding this intelligence to your internet failover setup is something to seriously consider if you don’t have the time or people to write, test, and debug thousands of lines of policies and configurations, or if the uptime and performance of your cloud-and internet-based technologies is particularly important to your business.

Choosing the best internet failover setup for your business

Internet failover isn’t one-size-fits-all. What’s right for one business may not make sense or be reliable enough for another, particularly if they have a difference in IT staff resources, budget, and how much their business relies on cloud- and internet-based applications.
 
At Bigleaf, we’ve focused our product and support on making it easy for IT teams to effortlessly increase the reliability of their internet. We invite you to learn more about Bigleaf and request a demo.
]]> Building a reliable connectivity foundation for your digital transformation https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/building-a-reliable-connectivity-foundation-for-your-digital-transformation/ Fri, 30 Jul 2021 23:19:27 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=14073 Read More]]>

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.

Bigleaf web dashboard reliable connectivity and traffic optimization screenshot for digital transformation

 

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.

]]> 7 ways to increase your business’s internet uptime https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/7-ways-to-increase-your-businesss-internet-uptime/ Thu, 22 Jul 2021 17:32:22 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=14062 Read More]]>

In today’s world, one of the easiest and most common ways for a business to lose money — through lost sales, decreased employee productivity, or frustrated customers — is for the internet to go down in any of its offices or locations. Because most of the important applications businesses depend on are now cloud- and internet-based, when the internet goes down so does everything from your VoIP phones to your CRM to your security alarm systems. 

Fortunately, improving your internet uptime is more of an attainable goal than it used to be. Here are seven things you can do today, this week or this quarter to significantly increase the uptime at your offices or business locations. 

1. Switch to a connection type with less downtime

Every internet connection will experience some downtime, but there are some that generally experience less. We analyzed the data from 1,500+ customers here at Bigleaf and found the average uptime percentages for various internet connection types: 

Connection type   Uptime (%)  
Fiber   96.034  
Enterprise Fixed Wireless   95.412  
Cable   95.123  
Copper   93.040  
T1/T3   92.983  
Other Fixed Wireless   92.473  
DSL   89.243  
Cellular   85.251  
Satellite   75.568  

Before you just switch your one internet connection to fiber because it has the highest uptime here, keep in mind that even at 96% uptime, an average business is experiencing about 29 hours of downtime per month. So while upgrading from copper to fiber or from a T1 line to cable can help, it isn’t good enough for most businesses. Plus, not all those connection types are available everywhere, so switching to one with better uptime may not even be an option in your location. 

2. Get an additional internet connection  

Without a doubt, getting more than one internet connection is one of the most effective ways to increase your uptime. Instead of putting yourself at the mercy of one connection and the average amount of downtime associated with it — say, 4% for fiber — you can use two or more connections, so you have a failover option if your primary connection goes down. When you have two connections with lower uptime — like 93% for copper and 85% for cellular — having a backup in place will almost certainly give you better uptime than if you had just one connection, even if it’s fiber. 

3. Build in last mile and ISP diversity 

If you have multiple internet connections, but they’re all from the same ISP or carrier, you may still have downtime when there’s an issue on their network, because it would affect all your connections from that provider. When you diversify the ISPs you have plugged into your sites, you give yourself a better chance of being able to route around issues when one connection is affected. That can help bring your uptime as close to 100% as possible. 

You’ll also want to think about redundancy in the last mile to your offices and locations. For example, we recommend using physically diverse paths, such as fiber and cable, DSL and wireless, or T1 and cable. That way, if a construction crew accidentally cuts the physical line to your building, you would still have another internet connection to fail over to. 

4. Maintain the same IP address when you fail over 

It’s common for companies that have multiple internet connections to have one that’s just there as a backup. This is often referred to as an active-passive configuration because one of the connections is actively being used, while the other will only be used when their primary connection fails. While this is certainly better than not having another connection to fail over to, it isn’t ideal. For one thing, you’re paying for a second connection with enough capacity for all your traffic, even though you won’t be using it most of the time. But more importantly, this active-passive configuration means you can’t move traffic between your ISPs or carriers without a change in your IP address — and then anyone on a video conference, VoIP call, VPN session, or other session-based application will have their call or session drop. Additionally, your users will experience downtime with your other cloud- and internet-based applications while you manually change your IP address. 

When you have same-IP address failover, your traffic will automatically move to your second connection and keep your employees and customers from even noticing the switch. Plus, this setup will allow you to leverage an active-active configuration where you’re using both connections at the same time and traffic is being routed down the one that will provide the best performance for each application. 

5. Socialize your disaster recovery plan  

The next time your business experiences a disaster — like a flood or power outage — that takes your essential systems or internet down, you’ll almost certainly be able to get things up and running faster if you have a documented disaster recovery plan that your staff is familiar with. Your disaster recovery plan should identify potential problems, spell out how to prevent or solve them, and make it clear what your team’s roles and responsibilities are.  

When you have a disaster recovery plan for your cloud- and internet-based technologies, you will be much better prepared to handle problems that come up and minimize downtime and disruption to your business operations. 

6. Consider partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) 

If your IT team is small or overburdened (or you don’t have one), enlisting the help of an MSP can be a helpful way to improve your uptime and free yourself up from worrying about internet outages. Many of the medical offices, professional services firms and local government municipalities we work with turned to an MSP to keep the technology they and their customers rely on working at all their offices or locations. If you’d like to find a trusted MSP in your area, email us at sales@bigleaf.net and we’ll connect you.

7. Get there faster with SD-WAN and AI 

While you and your team can do many of these things to improve your uptime on your own, you may decide it makes more sense to let an SD-WAN do the heavy lifting so you can focus on other priorities.   

Here at Bigleaf, we combine proven SD-WAN technology with groundbreaking AI software to automatically steer your important application traffic around internet issues. This way you can give your users an ideal experience and maximize your uptime and application performance without spending time creating and updating policies or manual configurations. To learn more about Bigleaf, check out our product page or request a demo. 

Is there something you’d add to this list? Email us at stories@bigleaf.net. 

]]> [Case Study] Bigleaf rescues Vern Fonk’s cloud migration https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/case-study-bigleaf-rescues-vern-fonks-cloud-migration/ Tue, 22 Sep 2020 04:42:00 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=16897

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

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]]> Crappy internet: It’s a bigger problem than you think https://www.bigleaf.net/resources/crappy-internet-the-most-important-business-problem-you-havent-solved-yet/ Tue, 26 Nov 2019 16:42:54 +0000 https://www.bigleaf.net/?p=6392 Read More]]>

If you’re responsible for IT at a small or mid-sized business (SMB) you know this pain all too well. It starts with a support ticket that the phones aren’t working right. But when you go to check them, they’re working fine.

You call the ISP and wait on hold for hours only to have them say, “There are no issues on our end.”

You call the VoIP provider and they tell you to call the ISP.

You’re left waiting until the next complaint with no idea how to fix the issue. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that leaves end users frustrated. New technologies start to look like bad choices, and IT pros are left with an embarrassing problem they can’t fix. 

Cloud and SaaS technologies are enabling a wave of growth and innovation for SMBs and mid-sized enterprises. Whether it’s UCaaS, Office 365, a point of sale (PoS) service, or an industry-standard SaaS app, cloud technologies can transform a business, making it more innovative and competitive. These technologies have something else in common: they all need a reliable connection from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to work properly.  

Unfortunately, as most have experienced, almost all ISPs have trouble providing a reliable and performant connection. The complex nature of the internet causes every ISP to have occasional outages and performance issues. In turn, those issues wreak havoc on end-user experience in the form of dropped VoIP calls, choppy video conferencing and unresponsive apps. These issues erode user confidence, reduce productivity, and prevent organizations from implementing and adopting the new cloud-based technologies they need to compete.    

So how do you end the cycle? Well, let’s start by taking a look at some of the root causes at play, some of the traditional approaches that have failed and how a new technology like Bigleaf could fix it all.  

Outages are only the beginning of your problems  

A quick visit to Downdetector demonstrates that there are always ISP outages somewhere. Sometimes outages last days, more often they’re over in seconds. Either way, outages are a major disruption. But as annoying and visible as they are, outages aren’t the real culprit of most ISP-related business disruptions.  

This outage map for a prominent carrier is indicative of broader ISP issues experienced on a daily basis.  

Most user complaints are caused by ISP performance issues that are far more common than outages. Latency and packet loss show up in choppy VoIP calls. Jitter can make calls sound robotic. These kinds of performance issues happen when the network is overloaded or a partial outage causes packets to re-route over sub-optimal paths. Problems like these create costly, time-consuming disruptions in a business precisely because the underlying issues are almost impossible to detect and resolve.  

Let’s put these outages and performance issues into perspective. According to Bigleaf’s own monitoring data, the average ISP circuit suffers 3.5 hours of downtime in a month. That’s pretty shocking. But what’s more surprising, and frankly more concerning, is the 23 hours of “unusable” performance in a month.  

“Unusable performance” happens when packet loss, latency and jitter are so bad that you can’t make a VoIP call, run a video conference, or use a real-time application effectively. So that’s almost a full day — or three full business days — of total disruption per month.

So, with those two challenges in mind, we’re now talking about more than 24 hours each month where sales can’t make calls, customers can’t reach support and productivity grinds to a halt.   

A lot of us tend to assume these ISP issues only happen in places like Drain, Iowa or the middle of the Mojave Desert because of lack of choice. The reality is that business and tech hubs like Denver, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and much of the Bay Area are also danger zones for many prominent service providers because of oversubscription and aging infrastructure. 

But it’s been this way for decades. What’s the big deal?  

Unreliable internet isn’t just an IT annoyance, it’s a companywide problem 

Many SMB and mid-size enterprises tend to overlook these bandwidth and performance issues until it’s too late. You can overlook a faulty ISP if Dan from accounting experiences buffering while watching a cat video at lunch. But there will be organization-wide heartburn if the CEO’s conference call fails while he’s presenting to the London branch about their new GDPR mandates.   

Quite often, a high-profile failure like this leads to frustration across the organization, and the onus of that failure typically falls squarely on the IT department or MSP.  As you might remember from the intro, that process rarely turns out the way we might hope. These technology failures continue, eroding trust in that tech personnel and casting doubt on the new technologies themselves.   

We’ve found that application reliability drives end-user adoption of new technologies. When you roll out mission-critical software that doesn’t function right, that impacts every corner of your organization in the form of downtime, lost revenue, and erosion of trust from customers.  

Why wait for an embarrassing disaster to learn that your ISP is hindering new technology adoption or frustrating your colleagues and customers?   

It’s time for a cloud-first approach to internet connectivity  

Whether your business is already knee-deep in Cloud applications or just starting out with VoIP phones, you need a reliable network for them to ride on, one that is 100% dependable for both today’s usage and tomorrow’s demands. The real goal here is to build an architecture that transforms commodity broadband into enterprise-grade service and does not send you diving for the antacid all the time. We call this a Cloud-first approach to internet connectivity 

It starts with redundancy. Since every ISP has outages and performance issues, it’s essential to have multiple ISPs connecting you to your critical Cloud applications. Instead of betting on one big fiber circuit, diversify across a smaller fiber and cable provider. It’s great to have a 4G circuit for diversity in the worst-case scenario.  

Redundancy can’t prevent disruption in real-time if it’s not managed in real-time. Your dual-WAN firewall can failover in the case of a hard outage, but any calls or session-based traffic will drop. Even then, you’re only using one connection at a time, and not to the best effect. Luckily there are new intelligent technologies like Bigleaf SD-WAN that auto-detects your application needs and adapt to changing ISP conditions in real-time. It monitors circuits constantly, prioritizes your most important apps and ensures that ISP performance never impacts the end-user experience.  

No technology stack remains static for long. When more new apps are deployed and traffic patterns change, your network should adapt without having to change policies or configurations. With Bigleaf SD-WAN, performance-sensitive traffic is instantly classified and prioritized over functions such as bulk file download. This isn’t based on static app-specific rules, but instead intelligent auto-adaptive heuristics and algorithms. In other words, no matter what technologies you adopt your network will always keep up…and the CFO’s London conference call is never derailed by Dan’s cat video.   

With the right solution, it’s possible for SMB and mid-sized enterprises to realize the same performance, redundancy, and reliability enjoyed by enterprise-level corporations. With a cloud-first network purpose-built for your needs, you don’t suffer from daily internet woes.  

With the right solution, everyone in your business receives the same cloud-ready Internet. VoIP and UCaaS perform flawlessly regardless of outages, packet-loss, jitter, or lag. Critical apps never fail because their traffic is always prioritized. Your users never feel the impact of ISP issues and your cloud technologies always perform the way they should.   

Because we do ask a lot from our ISPs, it is critical that we strengthen them with technologies capable of delivering enterprise-grade, worry-free service — improved performance for every app, anywhere in the world.   

You can finally solve the “crappy internet” problem. 

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