Business Continuity – Bigleaf Networks

Lifesaving connectivity: How Life Flight Network stays connected in remote areas with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:08:49 +0000

Life Flight Network's reliability at forefront of emergency care

Life Flight Network, the largest not-for-profit air medical transport provider in the United States, epitomizes the critical importance of reliability in emergency medical service. With a steadfast commitment encapsulated by their company promise, “There. When you need us,” they ensure exceptional care, transporting patients with their fleet of helicopters, airplanes, and ground ambulances from accident sites or remote communities, between medical facilities, or to specialists in other states. From the rugged mountains of Montana and the remote backcountry of Idaho to the sprawling plains of Washington and the picturesque Oregon coastline, Life Flight Network’s workforce of over 900 professionals is dedicated to delivering safe and expeditious care.

Seamless communication: Lifeline to critical care

Life Flight Network’s ability to communicate and coordinate seamlessly plays a pivotal role in their life-saving mission. From the moment a dispatch call is received, effective communication ensures crucial details are conveyed accurately and promptly to the pilot and medical crew. This communication is essential for both the highly trained professionals delivering ICU-level care en route and the medical team at the hospital preparing to receive the patient. This allows all teams to prepare and ensure swift adaptation to changing circumstances, including pilots and transport crews who are navigating transport efficiency amid varying weather conditions and flight logistics.

Inside Life Flight Network's network infrastructure

Life Flight Network operates a sophisticated infrastructure designed to ensure uninterrupted communication and access to critical resources across its numerous aircraft bases and operational sites. Facilitating communication between different base networks is pivotal, particularly for their systems like radio over IP used in their dispatch centers.

Additionally, their network supports critical applications such as Flight Vector and Rescue Net, instrumental in tracking flights, facilitating real-time decision-making, and managing billing processes. Life Flight Network operates a hub-and-spoke topology, with their hub in Beaverton, Oregon, which extends connections to all their sites through point-to-point VPN connections.

In a bid to accommodate their continued growth, the organization is embarking on a transition journey, migrating their on-premises footprint into Azure. This strategic move underscores their commitment to evolving with technological advancements while maintaining the high standards of reliability and performance crucial for their life-saving operations.

How Bigleaf supports Life Flight Network's critical missions

Bigleaf emerges as a transformative solution in Life Flight Network’s network infrastructure, addressing challenges with remarkable efficacy. Through features like same IP failover, Life Flight Network achieves unparalleled reliability, seamlessly transitioning between circuits without disrupting operations or compromising connectivity. Leveraging public IPs provided by Bigleaf further enhances network stability and simplifies configuration processes, ensuring consistent performance across operational sites.

In managing VPN traffic, Bigleaf ensures it rides the most stable circuit while providing redundancy and failover for the VPN when a circuit goes down or degrades (without dropping the session) and prioritizes traffic type within the VPN tunnels—delivering stability otherwise unachievable when dependent on the performance of the public internet.

Bigleaf’s simplicity and reliability are hallmarks of its effectiveness in Life Flight Network’s operations. With Bigleaf, there’s no need for intricate configurations or constant monitoring; it simply works. “I really appreciate the simplicity of Bigleaf,” says Jonathan Knowles, Life Flight Network’s network engineer. “The entire network team is comprised of my manager and me; not having another thing I need to worry about or babysit is awesome.”

Bigleaf Wireless Connect: Elevating Life Flight's Network’s reliability in underserved areas

Bigleaf Wireless Connect adds to Life Flight Network’s arsenal of network solutions, providing essential redundancy and reliability particularly in areas where traditional connections are limited, but core operations and services are primarily centered. “Most of our bases are positioned in rural locations where, if someone were to have a horrible accident, you know, the worst day of their life, we would be able to get to them and then to a hospital much faster than with ground transport,” Knowles describes.

Historically, Life Flight Network relied on point-to-point wireless solutions, but these often proved unreliable, with connections frequently dropping in and out unpredictably. More recently, the company has deployed Starlink in some of their locations as a primary circuit.

Bigleaf Wireless Connect offers a cost-effective and flexible solution for Life Flight Network’s diverse connectivity needs. “It’s absolutely crucial for us to have different flavors of connectivity because we can’t always get a hardline connection,” says Knowles. “We have such eclectic locations, from metro areas with millions of people to places that barely have a post office. To have another tool for backup is really great.”

Knowles further elaborates, “We’ve used other solutions but that adds another pane of glass to manage; whereas Wireless Connect is not only more affordable, but it’s managed by Bigleaf, which is more performant, in my opinion.”

With Bigleaf Wireless Connect, Life Flight Network gains peace of mind knowing that they have a robust backup solution in place, enhancing their overall network reliability and ensuring continuity of life-saving operations.

Experience transformation with Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Unlock the transformative potential of Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect to improve network reliability and performance. Enable uninterrupted operations, even in the most challenging environments.

Do you have limited connectivity options? Contact us for a demo and learn how Bigleaf Wireless Connect can help.

NEW! Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Amy Chan — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Empower your business with uninterrupted connectivity

Bigleaf is synonymous with optimized network connectivity and known for seamless failover in the event of a service outage, brownout, or other instability. We take your connectivity very seriously and want to make sure your business experiences minimal downtime, so your teams continue to run productively. With our new Bigleaf Wireless Connect service, we’re providing a new way to help you stay connected to your customers and your applications.

What is Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

Bigleaf Wireless Connect provides 5G cellular plans delivered through a dual-SIM mobile router. Designed to work with Bigleaf’s routers, Wireless Connect can be added to any Bigleaf service plan to work with your primary connection to provide business continuity.

Both 20 GB and 100 GB plans are available. The 20 GB is designed for failover, allowing you to take advantage of Bigleaf’s often-replicated-but-never-duplicated same-IP address failover, ensuring sensitive session-based calls, like VoIP and video conferences stay online even during internet outages. The 100 GB plan can be set for backup failover, or it can be set to load balance specific traffic classes to increase application reliability and performance.

Why Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

There are many wireless connectivity solutions already available in the market today, from unlimited data plans to Cradlepoint routers. The good news is that most of these options can already be paired with Bigleaf to deliver connectivity and failover. However, our customers have shared with us that evaluating, acquiring, and managing these additional products and services from multiple vendors is time consuming and an administrative chore.

With Wireless Connect, we’ve brought together a mobile router and the option of two straightforward data plans that can be added on to any Bigleaf service plan, whether it’s a new deployment or for a site with Bigleaf already in place. These plans are set up so there will never be any overage fees. Wireless Connect is also managed by Bigleaf, which means service agreements, billing, and technical support are all handled by our team—eliminating the extra time and effort often needed to work with additional vendors.

Your business can’t run without internet, and Wireless Connect presents an affordable, easy, and effective solution to ensuring uninterrupted connectivity across multiple sites, with:

A secondary connection that enables application performance optimization and downtime mitigation through Bigleaf’s same IP failover, real-time circuit monitoring, dynamic QoS, and intelligent load balancing
Convenient, single-vendor billing
No overage fees
Plug-and-play setup for reliable, high-speed 5G connectivity
Dual SIM support for multiple-carrier coverage options
24×7 one-stop, top-rated technical support

When to Install Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

Bigleaf Wireless Connect delivers high-speed, wireless internet that is ideal to ensure business continuity, especially in areas where wired ISP options may be limited.

Wireless Connect is also ideal when you need a “just-in-time” internet connection, like when you’re setting up a new office and waiting for your wired lines to be installed. Wireless Connect plans ship with pre-provisioned hardware equipped with pre-installed SIM cards and your selected data plan already activated for quick setup and connectivity. Then, as soon as your primary circuits are connected, Wireless Connect can immediately become your secondary, failover, or line for load balancing line.

Dependability meets simplicity

This business-ready internet will keep your applications running flawlessly, ensuring high productivity, with plug-and-play simplicity. As a hassle-free solution for any business that needs affordable failover and redundancy, or as a stopgap for businesses awaiting a wired installation.

Bigleaf Wireless Connect isn’t just a backup solution; it’s a lifeline for your business operations. Minimize downtime worries, safeguard your operations, keep your applications running smoothly, and ensure your team stays productive.

Learn more about how Bigleaf Wireless Connect can benefit your business today!

TeleCost Savings leverages Bigleaf Networks for enhanced internet reliability

Tabby Worthington — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 16:42:33 +0000

Partner profile

TeleCost Savings is a leading telecommunications consulting firm specializing in helping businesses across various industries simplify the process of obtaining the highest quality internet, voice, and data services with a focus on delivering value and ensuring clients receive the most for their investments, TeleCost Savings has garnered a reputation for its commitment to excellence.

Challenge

Enhancing internet connectivity for business clients

Dean Stewart, CTO of TeleCost Savings, recognized the need to improve internet connectivity solutions for clients seeking reliable and uninterrupted service. In a world where businesses rely heavily on internet-dependent applications, maintaining network reliability is essential. He explains, “Businesses need a solution that goes beyond conventional backup internet. They require a reliable and robust system that ensures consistent connectivity.”

Solution

Bigleaf Networks revolutionizes internet reliability

TeleCost Savings became a partner with Bigleaf Networks to address the connectivity challenges faced by its clients. Bigleaf’s innovative SD-WAN technology offered a solution that went beyond redundancy and transformed the way businesses experienced internet connectivity.

“Bigleaf Internet is more than just a backup; it’s a game-changer,” says Stewart. “It ensures businesses get what they pay for and eliminates the chaos that typically accompanies network outages.”

The partnership with Bigleaf Networks allows businesses to seamlessly integrate their existing second circuit with Bigleaf’s technology, guaranteeing optimal performance. In scenarios where the primary circuit experiences downtime, Bigleaf’s technology effortlessly transitions to the secondary circuit, preventing disruptions to VPNs and critical applications.

Stewart adds, “With Bigleaf, clients can achieve better voice and video quality without the need for dedicated fiber. It’s a cost-effective and elegant solution.”

"Bigleaf Internet is more than just a backup; it's a game-changer. It ensures businesses get what they pay for and eliminates the chaos that typically accompanies network outages."

Dean Stewart

Demonstrating the power of Bigleaf

TeleCost Savings not only advocates for Bigleaf Networks as an agent but also educates clients on the technology’s capabilities. They provide clients with insights into how Bigleaf’s dual IPsec tunnels and real-time routing work to ensure uninterrupted connectivity.

Stewart further emphasizes, “Bigleaf’s setup is incredibly simple, and its support is exceptional. The setup takes less than a minute, and if clients ever need assistance, Bigleaf’s support team is readily available.”

Navigating the Complex Telecom Landscape

TeleCost Savings navigates the complexity of the telecommunications industry on behalf of its clients. By working closely with businesses to understand their unique needs and challenges, TeleCost Savings positions Bigleaf Networks as a pivotal component of their tailored solutions. Stewart comments, “Bigleaf Networks becomes the cornerstone of our solutions, ensuring that everything works seamlessly together. It doesn’t disrupt existing systems; it enhances them.”

Conclusion

Dean Stewart’s TeleCost Savings is committed to providing businesses with the best internet connectivity solutions. By partnering with Bigleaf Networks, they have transformed how businesses experience internet reliability. Stewart’s dedication to delivering value and his deep knowledge of Bigleaf’s capabilities have made him a trusted advocate for businesses seeking to enhance their network performance.

In a world where network interruptions can have significant repercussions, TeleCost Savings and Bigleaf Networks are working together to provide businesses with the peace of mind that comes from reliable and resilient internet connectivity. With a focus on education and advocacy, they ensure that clients not only have the right solution but also understand how it works and why it’s essential.

Do you need to ensure your business has consistent connectivity?

Connect with us and learn more.

Passero Associates mitigates internet disruptions and downtime, amid limited ISP options

Tabby Worthington — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:01:29 +0000

Overview

Engineering and architecture firms must continually adapt to evolving conditions in large-scale projects, necessitating seamless communication, collaboration, and uninterrupted connectivity. As an esteemed player in the fields of building and airport design as well as survey work, Passero Associates needed to guarantee uninterrupted and dependable connectivity for its second-largest site’s team and senior executives. They found that using Bigleaf allowed them to minimize outages and downtime that disrupted their business operations and productivity.

Customer profile

Passero Associates, based in Rochester, NY, is a well-established engineering and architecture firm with a sterling reputation for delivering innovative and aesthetic projects. With a team of around 170 employees spread across eight different sites, the company manages a harmonious work-sharing model where tasks are distributed and collaborated upon irrespective of geographic boundaries. Their main office in Rochester houses around 90 of their talented workforce, with the second-largest office situated in St Augustine, FL, where they recently integrated the Bigleaf solution. Their daily operations are heavily reliant on software suites such as AutoCAD for designs and Microsoft Teams for communication and collaboration.

Business challenge

Unreliable internet connectivity with limited ISP options

Passero’s St. Augustine office, uniquely situated on an airport property, faced a perplexing connectivity issue. While they believed they had a direct “Fiber” connection, their connection setup was more intricate. The data link involved an initial journey to a point-to-point antenna before making its way to the fiber network. Due to this indirect route, the connection didn’t regularly perform as needed. On top of that, it was exceptionally sensitive to weather conditions, which was particularly troublesome with Florida’s various weather patterns.

This created productivity disruptions and business-stopping outages caused by jitter-laden public internet connections and adverse weather. More than the hours-long downtimes, the unpredictability of these disruptions was a menace. Imagine the uncertainty and stress of not knowing when or for how long your business-critical tools, like AutoCAD and Microsoft 365, including Teams, might be unavailable. It’s akin to driving on a road with random roadblocks. Such uncertainties can be as disruptive as consistent outages, if not more. The erratic nature of these connectivity issues made it challenging for key team members, including the CEO and CFO, to effectively operate their business. This recurrent and unpredictable problem nudged them to seek a failproof solution that would bring back reliability to their network.

Goals

Eliminate downtime caused by unstable connectivity, which directly affected important members like the CEO and CFO.
Adopt a quick-to-implement solution that didn’t require a prolonged setup process.
Find a flexible option since there were ongoing discussions about relocating their site. The company wanted to avoid committing to ISPs that mandated multiple-year contracts.

Solution

Bigleaf's network optimization SD-WAN

Understanding their needs, Chad Krout, Passero’s Director of IT, received a recommendation from Paul Miller of Integritas Group, LLC to try out Bigleaf’s network optimization solution. Being familiar with many solutions and their impact on business needs, Paul understood Bigleaf’s ability to quickly drop into a site and immediately resolve connectivity issues that caused outages and downtime. Given the pressing need and Chad’s trust in Paul, Krout decided to try Bigleaf for himself.

Along with the Bigleaf service, Chad added a Verizon 5G device as his second circuit that allowed him to take advantage of Bigleaf’s same-IP address failover, collective circuit monitoring, dynamic QoS, and intelligent load balancing.

In turn, Chad saw a difference almost right away. Within the first week, the airport fiber unexpectedly suffered an outage, but the office operations didn’t skip a beat. Thanks to Bigleaf, the staff in St. Augustine carried on with their work, blissfully unaware of any connectivity hiccup. Krout pointed out, “They were still able to make Teams calls and continue working without disruption. In the past, they would have been completely dead in the water.”

Furthermore, Bigleaf ensures Microsoft Teams and other cloud-based applications run smoothly even during brown-outs, times when the internet connection doesn’t completely drop (so traditional failover doesn’t kick in), but rather performs so poorly that internet-based apps are practically unusable. With Bigleaf, Passero has revamped their connectivity landscape, ensuring a smoother workflow even when facing internet challenges.

See how Microsoft Teams performs with and without Bigleaf

Passero's future plans with Bigleaf

Bigleaf’s ease of setup and use was also a notable advantage for Passero Associates. It allowed them to immediately deploy a solution and paid off quickly when the outage hit the week following the installation. Krout emphasizes the straightforward implementation process, noting, “The ease and reliability that Bigleaf offers stand out. After setting it up, the only change we made was to our VPN configuration. It works efficiently right from the start.”

Moreover, the flexibility of Bigleaf’s solution provides Passero with the agility it needs. As the firm considers possible relocations or expansions, they’ll know they’ll be able to bring along and set up their Bigleaf router and Verizon 5G to connect their site to the internet immediately, even if they’ll have to wait for a primary line to be pulled in. Then after a second line is installed, they’ll be able to return to their redundant 2-circuit setup that provides the optimized network connectivity they enjoy today. With Bigleaf, wherever Passero decides to operate, they’ll be assured of a robust and reliable internet connection and optimally performing cloud apps.

Are you struggling with internet outages and downtime but limited by your ISP options? Connect with us and learn more.

Bigleaf preserves continuity of service for Innovation Refunds

Amy Chan — Tue, 02 May 2023 21:22:34 +0000

Innovation Refunds is a fintech-based tax specialist that helps its clients to obtain tax refunds under a federal program that is due to expire in April 2024. To prepare for the upcoming deadline-driven surge in activity, the company is adding additional locations and moving its headquarters in 2023, while tripling its staff of accountants, tax attorneys, and other professionals. During this growth phase and beyond, Innovation Refunds relies on Bigleaf to support business continuity with stable, consistent network performance across all locations.

Customer profile: Innovation Refunds

Innovation Refunds employs a staff of 1,063, including over 700 who were hired in the past year. About a third of employees currently work in their West Des Moines, Iowa office.

For the past two years, Innovation Refunds has focused on obtaining tax refunds for company clients who qualify for an employee retention credit (ERC) under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The ERC expires in April 2024, and Innovation Refunds expects activity to increase dramatically as the deadline approaches.

Challenge: Maintain service levels amid rapid expansion

To prepare for the additional activity, the company is continuing to execute its staffing plan with additional locations and capacity in Arizona, Iowa, and Florida, including new headquarters in downtown Miami. The move will improve the company’s proximity to key financial partners and markets.

Innovation Refunds manages its business entirely online, including exchanging private, confidential information with clients, tax attorneys, tax preparers, and the Federal Government. “Downtime and poor connectivity pose huge risks to the business,” said Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds. “We’ve effectively mitigated those risks with Bigleaf’s SD-WAN technology,” he added.

Solution: Bigleaf delivers reliable, consistent network performance

Nathan introduced Innovation Refunds to Bigleaf Networks when he served the company as a managed service provider. Prior to that, the company had set up internet connectivity with redundant fiber lines from two separate carriers. Both carriers used the same provider for the last mile, however. While each line was reliable, the combination was not fault-tolerant, according to Nathan. He brought in multiple carriers and partnered with Bigleaf to deliver last-mile diversity that optimized network performance and resilience.

Bigleaf has been instrumental in the company’s expansion plans, as well. Each of the new Innovation Refunds offices is serviced by a different set of ISPs who don’t offer a uniform choice of circuit types or service packages. Bigleaf works with any ISP and connection type, so Nathan can ensure a consistent, stable internet connection for all of the company’s disparate locations.

Since adding Bigleaf, Innovation Refunds has weathered several outages – including planned maintenance – without any downtime or disruption. When potential issues arise, Nathan’s IT team receives email or Slack alerts from Bigleaf. The team can address those problems proactively, without any degradation in the user experience for employees or clients. If one of the circuits experiences problems or even fails entirely, Bigleaf Same-IP Failover moves network traffic to a working circuit, automatically and seamlessly.

“Even when there’s an outage, our users don’t know there’s anything wrong,” Nathan asserted.

Because Bigleaf operates outside the firewall, Innovation Refunds was able to maintain its established networking and security policies. Those specific, mission-critical technologies enable the company to remain in compliance with regulations that govern financial institutions and accounting firms. Recently, the company earned AICPA SOC2 attestation, allowing Innovation Refunds to work directly with banks and other financial service providers.

“Our success depends on reliable and resilient internet connectivity.And there’s no way I’d want to do this without Bigleaf."

Nathan Phinney

CIO, Innovation Refunds

Relocating with cellular service — and Bigleaf

As Innovation Refunds began transitioning its headquarters from Iowa to Florida, employees were eager to begin work in the Miami office. Unfortunately, the fiber circuits had not been set up yet. In the interim, Nathan’s team provided internet access by connecting multiple cellular providers to the Bigleaf service, via a pair of Cradlepoint wireless routers, so employees could begin work immediately at the new headquarters.

Bigleaf supported internet-based applications, including business-critical voice and video calls, over the relatively low-bandwidth cellular connections. Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS and intelligent load balancing work together to automatically identify and prioritize VoIP and video session traffic, which is particularly sensitive to internet performance issues. Bigleaf routes those sessions to the best available path, so employees can communicate without disruptions or distractions.

“Bigleaf’s automated QoS does a remarkable job,” Nathan said. “The default settings have worked 100% of the time, so we don’t need to worry about programming any of it.”

Once the new fiber circuits were installed, Innovation Refunds retained the cellular services for redundancy. Nathan expects the company to be increasingly busy as the ERC claims deadline approaches, and the expanding workload will make further disruptions intolerable. It’s a significant amount of work to collect the required documentation for a single refund, and time is growing short for the potential claimants who have yet to begin the process.

“The cost of downtime will also rise as the deadline approaches,” Nathan explained. “The last two months are more valuable than the previous ten months,” he said. “Especially during this busy period, our success depends on reliable and resilient internet connectivity.”

“And there’s no way I’d want to do this without Bigleaf,” he concluded.

About the Employee Retention Credit

Businesses may qualify for a refundable tax credit if they retained salaried employees – and paid employment taxes – despite sustaining losses during the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020 and 2021.

Qualifying businesses may receive Employee Retention Credit (ERC) tax refunds of up to $26,000 per employee. Innovation Refunds offers free payroll tax refund estimates at getrefunds.com.

Watch our webinar with Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds

Don’t miss our upcoming webinar: “Does your network…not-work? Eliminating internet unpredictability in 2023.” Nathan Phinney, CIO of Innovation Refunds and Lori Stout, CMO of Bigleaf Networks will discuss proven technologies and strategies for preserving business-critical network operations with Michael Krieger of Network Computing.

[Webinar] How to eliminate internet unpredictability

Bigleaf Networks — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:31:33 +0000

Organizations of all sizes and types depend on reliable internet connectivity to support vital activities.

But what if your network does not support your business-critical needs?

You’ll find the answers in our webinar “Does your network…NOT work? Eliminating internet unpredictability in 2023,” available on demand.

This lively forum reveals proven strategies from industry experts Nathan Phinney, CIO of fintech company Innovation Refunds and Bigleaf CMO Lori Stout, with moderator Michael Krieger of Network Computing.

You’ll learn:

The true cost of downtime and how to eliminate the risks to your business
How your internet connection can become your biggest competitive advantage
How to create a seamless user experience across multiple locations
The benefits of 360-degree network monitoring and proactive troubleshooting

Register now to watch this insightful webinar.

Meanwhile, check out this case study to learn more about webinar guest Nathan Phinney and his work as CIO of Innovation Refunds.

Things to consider for a better internet failover setup

Amy Chan — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:35:47 +0000

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.