Cloud 9 Advisers - News #SaaS

SaaS fears justified?

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:35:23 -0500

Software as a Service: Are Your Downtime Fears Justified?

Posted by Aaron Kaffen, Bigleaf Networks.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications have clear advantages. They have great pricing. They are convenient and easy to manage. You get cutting edge technology. However, to get them implemented we have to overcome a very valid objection:

Sometimes the internet breaks.

Over the course of two hours on 24 June 2019, the internet broke down for most of the United States. Popular websites and apps were inaccessible on browsers and phones.

The cause was achingly human while also being deeply technical. It is called a route leak: A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route list that was intended as a map to guide traffic between a few networks was published to networks that should not use those directions. It is like all the rush hour freeway traffic being routed to a suburban side street.

As a result, traffic for 2,400 networks was unfortunately sent through the network of Allegheny Technologies in Pennsylvania. Their infrastructure was not up to the task and most requests failed.

BGP is one of the many arcane arts that usher traffic across the internet. The “inter-net” is a connection of many autonomous networks, and BGP provides rules for how to get from here to there by moving data from one network to another. A BGP route is somewhat like the turn-by-turn directions you get from Waze or Google Maps, only it tells data how to get from a server in Bellevue, Washington to your customer support desk in Trenton, New Jersey.

Propagation of a bad BGP table is preventable. This was clearly an error that everyone agrees never should have happened, but it did. And while the Allegheny incident was a high-profile breakage whose source we can identify, this sort of thing happens in harder-to-diagnose ways all the time.

Due to the nature of internet infrastructure and the laws of probability, they are inevitable. The internet will break, connections will drop, services will fail for no obvious reason.

The more you know about how the internet functions the more difficult it is to believe that it works at all. Along with leaky BGP routes, services depend on DNS, content delivery networks, cloud service providers, and a variety of technologies run by different companies falling well beyond the reach of the customer support or sales person whose web browser is displaying a cute “504, timed out” message instead of the new customer’s loan document.

Where does that leave your business operations, particularly now that cloud-based SaaS applications are taking over?

If your vendor is not taking your concerns about outages seriously, they clearly don’t know much about the “modern” internet.

The concern naturally increases when the risks are greater. The closer the cloud-based solution is to customer engagement where customers are won and lost, the more reasonably nervous you would be about uptime.

If you are a car dealer and your parts lookup is cloud-based, short downtime is awkward and undesirable.
If your customer-facing staff rely on a scheduling system based in the cloud, downtime is an absolutely terrible prospect.
If your healthcare clinic’s electronic medical records are cloud-based, downtime is completely unacceptable.

For some locations, such as many rural and suburban areas of the US, the internet breaks worse and more often. When considering a cloud-based or SaaS solution for a business, concerns about downtime are legitimate and substantiated. Regardless of the technical advantages, inconveniencing customers isn’t worth it. Putting the weak links of the internet between the business and customer interaction at the service counter isn’t worth it.

As technologists, we can’t just complain and shirk connectivity. These applications are the key to being competitive in the modern marketplace. We have to make cloud solutions functional and reliable. They simplify business operations, keep technology up to date, and save money.

Despite everything fragile and subject to failure between that key service and our users, we have to create the right level of resilience.

Key Network Issues for SaaS Deployments

Uptime and bandwidth me and bandwidth me and bandwidth me and bandwidth me and bandwidth
Management and support requirements
Security

Uptime and bandwidth

Some things you don’t want to know, such as how many problems the internet has at any one time. Not every issue makes the news, but even very short incidents can cause problems for mission-critical real-time applications. A hiccup at the ISP can be enough to drop a call or tangle up a customer service response.

A study of router performance data shows that a typical single-ISP business experiences 3.5 hours of internet downtime a month. What’s more, they experience an additional 23 hours of severely degraded service from jitter, low throughput, and other internet problems that don’t register as downtime but the effect on applications – and thus customer experience – is the same. It is downtime by another name.

Calculating management and support

When networking gets critical, the solutions can be very involved. They can become a problem in themselves. When deciding on quality of service (QoS) settings to optimize a Voice over IP (VOIP) system, are you impacting another mission-critical system? Is YouTube video streaming important to a business operation or can you lower its priority? Do you have to manually tweak and then stress test these applications to see how they interact?

As new applications emerge and the business develops new expectations of network performance, maintaining the network, troubleshooting problems, and new installations can be significant time and budget burdens.

Security in all things

Security has to be a part of every conversation now, and the resolution of our network challenges is no exception. The perimeter firewall is a centerpiece of current network security strategies. Particularly in regulated industries with compliance requirements, the business needs to have control over their firewall to keep rules and monitors up to snuff. Network solutions can interfere with existing firewalls and potentially provide a new attack vector.

The Uptime Reality

The SD-WAN industry was built with all of these concerns in mind. Ture SD-WAN platforms allow clients to seamlessly use multiple and various bandwidth connections for far greater resiliency, redundancy, and performance of their network making them more reliable than any one internet connection by itself.

SDWAN providers have a window into the reliability of the internet overall. In a recent month, individual circuits that clients used averaged 92.5 percent reliability. That is not measuring just major outages but also moments when throughput, errors, or jitter is preventing the internet from being usable.

Data also shows the solution: with the right SD-WAN solution in place, uptime was consistently and dramatically improve to 99.88 percent.

Bringing a business-critical SaaS application into the office is exciting, profitable, but can also be scary. There are no guarantees in this world, especially regarding the internet, but using the right SD-WAN solution means that, the next time someone transposes a couple numbers on a BGP table, your operation is more likely to stay up and running.

Learn more about SDWAN

This article was brought to you by Bigleaf Networks, one of the leading SD-WAN providers in the Cloud 9 Supplier Portfolio. See the full article here. Contact us to learn more about Bigleaf and over two-dozen other SDWAN provider companies. We'll uncover who's best for your needs.

Every company wants to be your partner, but let’s face it, if they are selling you something, they’re not your partner, they’re just another vendor. Cloud 9 is different. We don’t actually sell anything and we don't charge our clients. We become an extension of your team and help manage the often overwhelming process of finding, evaluating, and selecting the right technologies and competitive providers for your needs. Cloud 9, together with our distributors, is made up of more than 250 staff, all devoted to helping you save time and money. Our curated Supplier Portfolio contains nearly 200 of the best service provider companies. We are one of the largest buyers of technology in the country. Through us, you’ll get the collective buying power of thousands of other clients. Consider us your informed buyers, full-service technology agents, and strategic advisers. We are impartial, unbiased, and supplier-neutral. We sit on your side of the table to help you find, evaluate, and negotiate with service provider companies. We’ll help you design the right solution and identify the best technologies. We’ll get pricing from multiple competing companies, then guide you through the evaluation and procurement process. Use our evaluation tools for documentation and due diligence. Plus, have our entire team at your disposal before, during, and after the acquisition of your new services.

Technology Partners. Strategic Advisers.

Cloud Adoption: One Big Hurdle

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 17:20:42 -0500

Cloud Adoption: The Connectivity Challenge is Your Small Business’s Greatest Hidden Risk

Unreliable connectivity—defined by unpredictable downtime, jitter, and packet loss—can completely undermine the productivity gains and financial investment in every cloud service your business uses.

Cloud Adoption: The Connectivity Challenge is Your Small Business’s Greatest Hidden Risk

For the modern small business, "the cloud" is less about complex compute and storage in hyperscale environments like AWS and Azure, and more about the indispensable software services you use every hour of every day:

SaaS (Software as a Service): Microsoft 365, Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, and specialized industry applications.
UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service): Your cloud-hosted VoIP phone systems, video conferencing, and team collaboration platforms.
DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service): Your critical data backups and continuity solutions.

These services represent your entire operational reality. Yet, every single one of them relies on a single, fragile foundation: your internet connection.

The true challenge of cloud adoption isn't the software itself; it's the unpredictable nature of the connectivity between your office, your remote workers, and the cloud provider. One major challenge is connectivity, and its volatility can completely undermine the productivity gains and financial investment in every single service you adopt.

The Hidden Cost of "Unhealthy" Uptime

When business leaders think of network issues, they typically think of a catastrophic outage—the line goes dead, and work stops. While disruptive, this is a clean, visible problem.

The far more insidious and expensive problem is the "unhealthy" uptime. This is when your connection is technically "up" but is functionally unusable for critical cloud applications. This lack of reliability stems from four core technical issues:

High Latency: The delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer. In simple terms, the lag that makes your cloud-hosted accounting software feel slow and sluggish.
Jitter: The variation in the time delay between when a signal is sent and when it is received. This is the killer for real-time services like VoIP and video conferencing, causing dropped words and echoing.
Packet Loss: Data packets fail to reach their destination and must be re-sent, creating gaps in service. This results in dropped calls, frozen video streams, and slow file saves in your SaaS applications.
Asymmetric Speeds (Upload Bottleneck): Connections using Coax, usually from you typical local Cable internet provider, typically offer dramatically faster download speeds than upload speeds (asymmetric). Since modern cloud use—including phone calls, video conferencing, data backup, and saving large files to cloud storage (like SharePoint/OneDrive)—requires upload capacity, this bottleneck creates severe congestion and frustration.

While a nationwide survey may cite an average of a few hours of total downtime per month, that same data often reveals dozens of hours of unhealthy uptime—where employees are technically connected but experiencing frustration, lag, and decreased productivity. This is a non-stop drain on efficiency and staff morale.

Why Small Businesses are Uniquely Vulnerable

Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are disproportionately affected by poor connectivity because of common infrastructure choices:

1. Over-reliance on Single ISP Links

Many small businesses rely on a single, often residential-grade or lower-tier commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) link. When that single connection fails, everything stops. Even fiber connections are not immune to issues like fiber cuts, power outages at the local node, or ISP equipment failures. The lack of true geographic or provider redundancy means the entire business is running on a single point of failure.

2. The Unpredictability of Shared Infrastructure

The infrastructure used by most mass-market ISPs is shared. This means your available bandwidth, latency, and performance are often dictated by what your neighbors or other businesses are doing at any given moment. During peak usage hours, service quality degrades, making high-priority tasks like a team video conference or a large file upload frustratingly slow.

3. VoIP/UCaaS Requires Enterprise-Grade Quality

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) are business-critical, but they are unforgiving. Unlike email, which can tolerate high latency, UCaaS requires a consistent, low-latency, low-jitter connection. Running your phone system over an "unhealthy" network guarantees poor call quality, which erodes professionalism and frustrates clients. Small businesses must prioritize Quality of Service (QoS) management, which is often complex and impossible to implement effectively on basic ISP links.

Building a Bulletproof Connectivity Strategy

Solving the connectivity challenge is not about overpaying for bandwidth; it's about engineering resilience and performance into your network foundation. This requires a shift from a reactive mindset to a strategic one.

1. Embrace Diversity and Redundancy

The absolute first step is eliminating the single point of failure. This means establishing true network redundancy by adopting a Multi-ISP Strategy. This is about getting diverse connections—two different physical lines from two different carriers that enter the building at two different points. This protects you from common failures like local fiber cuts or a single ISP's regional outage. Technologies like 5G wireless backup can provide excellent resilience for smaller offices when wired options are limited.

2. Deploy SD-WAN for Traffic Intelligence

Simply having two connections is not enough; you need a brain to manage them. Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is that brain. SD-WAN intelligently monitors the performance metrics of all available links (latency, jitter, and packet loss) in real-time.

Automatic Prioritization: SD-WAN automatically routes critical traffic (like VoIP and video) over the best-performing link, even if the primary link is experiencing a period of "unhealthy" uptime.
Failover and Load Balancing: It enables seamless, millisecond-level failover between links and allows you to load balance non-critical traffic, ensuring you utilize the full capacity of your bandwidth portfolio. SD-WAN is essential insurance against the unpredictable nature of the internet.

3. Assess Requirements, Not Just Bandwidth

Before signing any contract, businesses must calculate their true needs based on application requirements. You must move beyond the simple "speed" number (Mbps) and assess the technical requirements for applications like your ERP, VoIP, and video conferencing. A strategic partner can help you define service level agreements (SLAs) that hold providers accountable not just for uptime, but for specific performance metrics like latency and packet loss.

Create a Sure Foundation

The digital transformation driven by the cloud has empowered small businesses with tools previously available only to large enterprises. However, this shift has also transferred the risk of connectivity directly to the business owner. Without a reliable network foundation, the benefits of SaaS, UCaaS, and all other cloud investments will never be fully realized.

The key to de-risking your cloud adoption is understanding that your connectivity strategy must be as robust as the services you are adopting. It requires impartial evaluation, a clear understanding of the risks posed by "unhealthy" uptime, and access to a portfolio of solutions beyond the standard ISP offering.

Technology. Driven. Outcomes.

Next Step

If your business is plagued by dropped calls, slow cloud applications, or general frustration due to network unpredictability, it's time to build a resilient connection strategy.

If you are ready to identify and evaluate the best connectivity solutions and providers—including SD-WAN, multi-ISP redundancy, and specialized high-performance options—to create a bulletproof connection strategy, get in touch to explore your options.

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