How many times has your business experienced the wonderful telecom/technology blame game? It goes something like this:
Customer: “My Internet is really slow and is constantly going down.”
Carrier: “Well, we have looked at everything and your signal levels, ping times, packet loss all seem to be in line. It’s not our service, so it must be something on your network causing the issue.”
SOUND FAMILIAR?
In today’s business environment, we are so reliant on technology, specifically in having a good reliable internet connection. In fact, I often hear from customers that Internet is more important than their phones ringing. A phone call can go to voicemail or get a fast busy signal, and it is tolerable for a while, but if the internet has issues…the world may be coming to an end. How does InteleCONNECT help these customers stay connected?
Years ago, an MPLS environment was a proven solution to keep a customer’s WAN up and running. However, it came with a higher price tag, and may not have been feasible for many businesses.
Deployment of redundant internet (a secondary connection) into a customer’s firewall can also be a great solution. But what happens when the primary internet is just having a bad day with packet loss and slow speeds? The secondary or back up internet does not necessarily kick in because the primary is still, for all intents and purposes, up and running. Businesses need their primary and secondary internet connections to work well together.
So, what can a business do to keep your internet stable and operational with limited outages?
Let me introduce you to SDWAN – Software Defined Wide Area Networks.
SDWAN will allow two internet connections into a piece of hardware that sits before your firewall/router. This device will continuously monitor both connections and send your packets of information down the better path at the time it is transmitted. It is a way to not only have failover, but also a way to always optimize your experience with performance of your network.
We recently worked with a client that had put most of their critical software applications in the cloud. However, their internet was constantly causing them to lose connection to their software. Imagine trying to assist clients and there was a constant delay in getting the information they needed to perform the task at hand? No matter how many times we called the carrier, we got the same excuses, we got the blame game.
Enter an SDWAN solution. We installed a secondary internet connection and an SDWAN appliance. Now, the monitoring and reports the appliance provided to us and our customer gave us the leverage we needed to go back to the primary carrier and readdress the issues we were experiencing on their connection with hard facts/data for them to fix the connection. And our customers clients? Well, they were in and out in a timely fashion and offered an enhanced overall customer experience.
Sound too good to be true? It’s not!
Wish you had this solution for your home office as you might still be working remotely? Well, you can!
Our May Lunch GIG is going to be hosted by Bigleaf, an SDWAN provider that we have tremendous success with. We would invite you to join us and learn more.
