Solving Site to Cloud Connectivity Issues at Home & in the Office

The July 7th Telarus Tuesday call welcomed Senior Director National Partner Programs, Eric Brooker, to discuss how to solve site to cloud connectivity issues at home and in the office. The entire recording is available here.

Every Company is on a Cloud Journey

When you get to know Bigleaf, you’re going to find that their core focus is pretty different from much of the SD-WAN industry.  If you look across the SD-WAN landscape, what you are largely going to find is architectures built for site-to-site networking, in other words, remote to HQ or remote to a Data Center.  This is the old MPLS model, only now with Internet connections.  If that’s what you’re looking for, you have a lot of options out there. At Bigleaf, rather than focusing on site-to-site architectures, they’re using their SD-WAN intelligence to build a new type of internet.  They offer a “cloud-ready” internet, they’re now layering in SD-WAN intelligence to ensure a high-quality experience at the application level for both Cloud-based content and site-to-site VPN traffic.

When you think about it, every company you interact with is on a Cloud journey of some type.  These journeys can be any of the following:

• First build – It usually starts with personal use, and every company is seeing that (individuals using their apps).
• Second build – At some point, department leaders want specific technologies for their teams.
• Third build – The next step for most companies is when an executive decision is made to move a company-wide technology to the Cloud. At this point, the entire company’s operations are tied to Cloud performance.
• Fourth build – Finally, many companies adopt a Cloud-first mandate. That means any new technology the company buys is expected to be Cloud-based.
• Fifth build – There’s an important distinction between the first two and second two stages.
• Sixth build – In the last two stages, IT or some central department is provisioning the software like they always have. But in the first two, IT may have no idea that these technologies are being used, even though they have become critical to day-to-day operations in the company.

For SMBs, SaaS is the new normal. Here’s a look at the number of SaaS apps per company:

It’s important to note the average company has fifty-one to one hundred employees who use seventy-nine different applications.

Cloud Networking Challenges

The first cloud networking challenge is that cloud technologies rely on the Internet, and no matter what kind of circuit you run, internet performance is unpredictable. This can lead to expensive downtime that’s frustrating to the company and potentially job-threatening to the person responsible for networking. The second challenge is that IT is no longer the sole gatekeeper of software provisioning. This means that even with all the IT resources in the world, critical technologies are being used that can’t be accounted for. Lastly, working from home is now the new normal.  As of mid-March, eighty percent of organizations have encouraged or required their employees to work from home. This means at least 311 million people in at least 41 states, three counties, eight cities, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, are being urged to stay home.

Today, millennials and Gen Z workers make up only thirty-eight percent of the workforce, but in 2028, they’ll amount to fifty-eight percent. Because of that, it’s no wonder that almost three-quarters of companies will employ some remote workers, while thirty-three percent of workers will be fully remote.

Bigleaf offerings solve challenges both in the office and in-home offices. And this is how we do it:

Bigleaf’s Service Architecture and Features

Bigleaf’s edge router is your disaster-proof connection to their Cloud Access Network. At the customer premise, they ship out their Bigleaf router pre-configured with the customer’s circuit details. When it arrives, it’s designed to be a self-install on the WAN side of the customer’s existing firewall.  The customer will plug their Internet connections into the WAN ports (they have four WAN ports), then they’ll plug a cable from Bigleaf’s LAN port to the WAN port on their firewall.  During the last step, they’ll issue a new public IP block out of their gateway, which the customer will enter into their firewall.  That’s it. No feature changes are needed on the firewall.

Their solution is completely firewall-friendly, which means they work transparently with any firewall.  While most other SD-WAN solutions either need to replace the firewall or require significant feature changes in the firewall to get their device to work, Bigleaf’s onsite router works with all existing firewall policies.

View from the Home Office

There are multiple demands on the Internet connection from households with more than one person.

• Could have two people working from home
• Students who are doing eLearning all day long
• Other family members or roommates streaming Netflix movies or gaming

Even if there’s just a single person working from home, internet connections are notoriously unreliable and unpredictable. This creates frustration and poor performance when it comes to trying to get work done from home. Wit Bigleaf Home Office you get:

To learn more about Bigleaf, visit, www.bigleaf.net.