If the cloud has done anything, it has turned a magnifying glass on once mundane WAN connections. Back in the day, it was OK for file transfers to take a bit too long or the Internet to be a little dicey. After all, the really critical operations were confined to the company LAN and in-house data center. No more. Once your services are hosted in the cloud, WAN performance becomes just as critical as LAN performance.
The New WAN Problem
There’s only one problem. YOU don’t own the WAN like you do your LAN wiring. You are at the mercy of wireless, cable, DSL, fiber and copper wireline service providers. Any issues in their networks have an immediate impact on your business.
How Do You Protect Yourself?
The answer is increasingly SDN or Software Defined Network solutions. SDN covers a lot of technology, but one very popular implementation for business is the integration of multiple, diverse WAN connections. You have several connections to the cloud, but they are coordinated by SDN.
Nature Knows How
Bigleaf Networks calls their process for doing this “Natural Networking.” They create a redundancy of connections with fault tolerance similar to how leaves protect themselves in nature. Here’s how Bigleaf explains their system:
Pretty clever, right? The SDN performance optimization that Bigleaf provides can also save you money. Without traffic management, many businesses wouldn’t even consider “best effort” broadband services like wireless, cable, DSL or low cost fiber options. The cost of outages and variations in performance was too great. The only acceptable WAN solutions were multiple dedicated private line services set up with automatic instant failover. These lines can get pretty expensive and you still have the headache of having to manage this system yourself.
Don't Do It Yourself
Bigleaf makes optimizing multiple Internet connections painless. They provide the managed router that tunnels traffic to their gateway clusters in the cloud. It’s all plug-and-play for you. For the ultimate in reliability, they even have an option to install redundant routers and switches at your site to match the redundancy of their cloud cluster.
Are you frustrated with the performance of your business broadband connection for cloud services? It’s time to take a closer look at what Software Defined Networks can do to improve both quality and reliability of your WAN services. Bigleaf technology is now offered by Telarus, along with services from over 50 data, voice and cloud providers. Discuss your issues and needs with an expert consultant now at no charge.
