Every Business Can Benefit From SD-WAN and a Second Internet Connection.

If you lived on an island that had only one bridge that connected you to the mainland for all of your food, water, and supplies, you would want find backup solutions in the event that the bridge was knocked out of service. You might get a boat, or a plane, but the most stable solution would be a a second bridge that connected you to another island. With SD-WAN and a second internet connection, we are basically doing the same thing.

Five years ago, only large business and enterprise customers had redundant networks and internet connections, because the monthly cost and the equipment and service was way to high for small and medium-sized businesses. Now, all of that has changed, and we recommend that all of our clients consider implementing SD-WAN and a second internet connection regardless of size.  

SD-WAN makes your business more resilient

With the rise of Office365, Google G Suite, and everything other cloud-based services you're using in your business, it is more important than ever to have have strong and reliable connections. SD-WAN allows you to have multiple Internet connections, ideally from two different providers,  managed by modern SD-WAN routers that don't require you to do anything. SD-WAN is the safest, most reliable, redundant, disaster-recovery-enabled Internet-access management scheme for business.

We help our customers find solutions that make their business more efficient and/or more resilient to interruptions in business. We with within our client's budgets, which sometimes means we recommend dual, less-expensive broadband Internet connections rather than one expensive connection, or finding savings in other areas to beef up your internet reliability. 

SD-WAN budgets are within your reach

Typically we see SD WAN pricing from a number of providers start around $130/month and business internet connections (cable, DSL, etc) around $100/month. So for under $500/month, you could have redundancy and reliability that will allow your business to operate, even if there is an issue happening with one of the providers.

You can self-manage SD-WAN without being an expert

One of the neat things about SD WAN is it is pretty much plug and play out of the box.  We set it up, you plug in your internet connection(s) and the box does the rest. It will automatically route traffic across the best path, so that you don't have to touch anything. You can be notified when a connection is down (or having issues), so that it can be reported to the carrier, but most likely your users won't be impacted. This is huge for businesses that need to have everything up and working all the time, like medical offices, sales organizations, or...just about every other business that is out there.

I have only one small office, why do I need it?

If your office uses services on the internet such as hosted phone service, accounting, video conferencing, or any other web service that you need access to throughout the day, then the internet is your lifeline. If that lifeline is cut, you are left calling into customer service and hoping that they aren't having a larger issue that is affecting multiple customers. Because when that happens, customers calling in about problems with their $80/month service do not get the highest priority.  It is better to plan redundancy across different carriers and across different types of Internet connections.

Should I just buy SD WAN from my phone company?

We evaluate the options on a case-by-case basis. In general, we like the idea of having multiple connections from DIFFERENT service providers, using DIVERSE transport connections (such as copper, coax cable, fiber, or wireless).  If you have two connections, both coming into your building on the same copper cable and riding in the same conduit, provided by the same carrier, you haven't really bought yourself any redundancy.

If you would like to talk about implementing SD-WAN and a second internet connection, or anything else we offer, please schedule a virtual meeting below.