In this final blog post of our series on the crazy ways businesses in 2023 have lost internet (and what to do to help safeguard yourself), we'll delve into some truly unexpected scenarios with reasons ranging from Taiwanize ships to angry beavers, and explore how investing in SD-WAN can ensure reliable and secure internet connectivity for your organization no matter what the crazy reason is.

Welcome back to part 2 of our blog series on real-life scenarios where organizations faced unexpected internet outages. In our previous post, we shared some humorous and frustrating stories, including an RV fire and a tractor-trailer accident causing internet outages. But as IT administrators, we know that internet disruptions can happen in various ways, and the impact can be significant. 

The spinning wheel of death is something nobody wants to see during their workday, whether you're a CEO, Director of IT, or a first-week intern. But what happens when it's not just your personal connection that's down, but the entire internet?

SD-WAN is certainly a popular tech buzzword nowadays, with a huge marketing effort and R&D dollars behind it. With all the buzz, the excitement can outweigh rational thought process and produce projects that are poorly planned and so end in disappointment. This article will help identify the keys to a successful project and provide a starting place for planning and selection of an SD-WAN solution that is right for your company.

Examining the Meraki Fullstack (Part 1)

Meraki was founded in 2006 by two MIT graduates with funding from Google and Sequoia Capital. The focus in Meraki's formative years was building a wireless solution that combined cloud-based ease of use and administration with analytics and reporting. In this article we will focus on the Cisco Meraki Wireless solution's approach to achieving high performance, security, and location analytics. 

The unsung heroes of the business world are IT professionals, who working tirelessly to mediate the relationship between mere mortal humans and business technology. After all, how many times can you tell grown adults to try rebooting before you lose your mind?

Meraki, a Cisco product, has grown leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, evolving from a niche wireless provider with an incredible set of management tools to a Cisco-owned full network stack product including network switching, next generation firewall, wireless LAN, mobile device management, security cameras, and phone system. The Meraki stack brings the incredible feature set offered by Cisco, but without the dependence on CLI (command line interface). Instead all management and reporting is offered in a single web-based portal. This combination of smart management with the most powerful network toolset in the world gives Meraki a significant edge that all the other major players are chasing. In this article we will expand on why Meraki is winning the battle for network infrastructure.

On the heels of our recently published article: 8 Reasons Retail is Migrating to Cloud Phones, Matrix Networks is taking a step back to discuss the value of building a modern network for retail. This article focuses on a network that is optimized for cloud voice migration and adoption. In this article you will learn the value of building a reliabile wide area network that improves bandwidth, enhances the user experience, while saving money and increasing sales! Enjoy.

Connectivity as a Service Explained ~ MCaaS vs. SD-WAN

SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Network, uses new SDN technology to connect organizations’ networks – everything from retail locations to data centers, and beyond. Its ability to provide active-active failover is a huge draw to many organizations, as it provides arguably the first true zero-downtime WAN solution. There is no doubt that SD-WAN will become a more prevalent solution in the years to come, but the question now: what is the best way to go about implementing it for your organization? 

Most of us have heard of SD-WAN and understand that it can have a huge impact on our networks and the way our businesses operate.  What is SD-WAN? SD-WAN is best defined as traffic monitoring and management from physical devices to the application itself, capitalizing on flexibility and agility. This intelligent routing is abstracted into a virtual overlay, enabling a secured pooling of both private and public connections allowing for automation, centralized network control and real-time management across multiple links. In other words, it is able to take multiple sources of internet, optimize them, control the network flow and provide seamless failover.  Sounds pretty great, right?

Cloud Phone systems, also known as Hosted Phone Systems, are the choice solution of enterprises large and small with 70% having made the move or planning to make the move per Information Week. The reasons for this vary dramatically based on the specific business and sector they belong to. Cost savings and productivity top the list.  

As I described in my previous post, it really sucks to work with carriers. A lesser known alternative solution, called “Connectivity as a Service” has started to evolve to replace direct carrier relationships, improve the support experience drastically, and introduce value-added services.

Dial Tone Carriers and Internet Service Providers (e.g. Comcast, CenturyLink, Frontier, Integra, etc.) are necessary evils in the world of IT Directors, CIO’s and Telecom Managers. Every business relies on connectivity, but at the same time they hate the people who provide their connectivity. On their list of “Vendors We Wish We Could Fire,” carriers are at the top. Too bad they can’t.

Portland's very own Bigleaf Networks is a local company with a very bright future!

Joel Mulkey and Jeff Burchett founded Bigleaf Networks after gaining experience with SD-WAN and Internet Optimization as part of the Freewire team, based out of Portland, Oregon. The two make a dynamic duo with a strong tailwind in an industry ready to explode. I am excited to see what the next 3 years bring. 

An unsung hero walks among us. She wears a cape of connectivity and empowers every organization that chooses to embrace her amazing abilities. Yet the tales of her triumph go without praise or even the slightest acknowledgement. Dramatic entrance I know... so before I unveil who this mysterious hero is, let me first set the stage for why her tale must be told.

When it comes to managing your business over the Internet, it’s important to have connectivity and solutions in place that allow you to monitor your network and ensure performance and reliability to remote applications. To that end, SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) is fast becoming the go-to option for companies both large and small who want to integrate more cloud services for employees to use.

As technology continues to evolve, a relatively new development is the move back to massive centralized infrastructure for application delivery to enterprises large and small. The trend brings with it incredible value but also new complexity that many firms haven't prepared for. The thought goes something like "if we move this to the cloud, all our technical needs are resolved!” Well now, someone is feeling a bit optimistic and definitely naive. Moving to the cloud requires a thoughtful approach for all aspects, from managing ever-increasing recurring costs, to how you plan to move data to and from cloud platforms.  The first place to begin your preparation has to be the network, now and always. 

IT administrators can generally always agree on one thing: dealing with carriers for their multi-site connectivity sucks! This connectivity normally comes in the form of a MPLS Private IP cloud, EPL, EVPL, VPLS, etc….  At this point in time it feels like so many carriers just make up new acronyms to try and make their service sound flashier. The industry consensus is that ordering new circuits takes forever and submitting trouble tickets is pretty much a “hurry up and wait” game. To receive SLA credits is near impossible, requiring you to use their own systems to prove they are incompetent. These are just the normal complaints about interacting with the carriers, when you start talking about how much money you send them every month...wow...just wow.

SIP isn’t a four letter word, but for many years it might as well have been for most of us trying to use it. The results of a SIP deployment could be messy: poor voice calls, issues with phone features, and dropped connections only scratch the tip of the iceberg. Despite this our clients have often insisted they wanted to deploy SIP to save money. Along the way we have learned some valuable lessons. There is a right and a wrong way to deploy SIP, and I am sorry to say there are good and bad reasons to deploy it, too.

SD-WAN Defined: SD-WAN stands for Software Defined Wide Area Networking. It’s a combination of Software Defined Networking (SDN), which was created for use in cloud datacenters, and Wide Area Networking (WAN) which is the network outside of your office (e.g. the Internet, or site-to-site networks like MPLS and Metro Ethernet).