Coronavirus Has Been Devastating Business - Time to Rethink Your Connectivity & Consider Video Conferencing?

The coronavirus outbreak has been devastating and will get worse before it gets better. As of mid March 2020, over 130,000 cases worldwide and some 5000+ deaths (and growing) has crippled families, businesses, states, and countries. Public school systems are being closed for extended periods and many hundreds of important conferences and trade shows have been cancelled outright or moved online. According to this recent Vox article, “Coronavirus has already dealt a half-billion-dollar blow to the tech industry’s events economy. Some of the industry’s biggest events have been postponed, moved online, or canceled altogether.” More and more companies are urging, or insisting, that employees stay away from work and telecommute from home and exploring meetings via video conferencing instead of in-person.

Due primarily from travel restrictions, quarantines, and the above mentioned trends, the stress that these developments place on our technology, and in particular, our Internet reliability and overall performance, is significant. Networks are now being overloaded as telecommuting significantly increases and companies scramble to either put in place, or improve, their video conferencing capabilities. Having an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution has never been more important.

But how to quickly increase reliability and capacity? By seamlessly aggregating all of your broadband sources. A Broadband Bonding device does exactly this. It uses SD-WAN to intelligently combine and manage disparate Internet transports such as MPLS, T1, DIA, DSL, Cable, fiber, satellite or 3G/4G/LTE/5G from any service providers. It also uses industry-leading overlay tunnels to optimize the performance of various classes of applications, including Video Conferencing, VoIP, Unified Communications, file transfers, VPN, Web traffic and others. Each internet line is continuously monitored for latency, packet loss and jitter and the best path is selected on a packet-by-packet basis.

Some of the key benefits of using a BBNA (Broadband Bonding Network Appliance) device to manage your WAN connectivity are:

• Improved Video Conferencing Capabilities: Ensures high quality and rock-solid connectivity by leveraging multiple WAN resources. Optionally, the ability to reliably live stream HD quality video using bonded cellular connections which allows live streaming from otherwise impossible locations.
• Boost in WAN Performance: Since Truffle appliances have the ability to bond multiple WAN lines for optimum performance, the overall WAN metrics will improve. As an example, a VPN connecting a branch office to the HQ office will have the full bonded speed as opposed to an individual line speed.
• Boost in WAN Reliability and Failover: Truffle provides self-healing WAN and dynamic failover capabilities. As an example, an ongoing Internet session will be shielded from any WAN outages, or WAN performance fluctuations, as long as one of the WAN connections is still up.
• Specialized SDN tunnels: Truffle offers SD-WAN with Broadband Bonding. This means that specialized tunnels customized for the specific application at hand will ensure optimal performance. As an example, VoIP Armor is a tunnel that optimizes VoIP/SIP traffic in the network to shield the phone conversations against any network performance fluctuations and network outages.
• Remote LAN Access: Via the advanced tunnels, are remote worker can securely connect right into the corporate LAN network with ease. This enables adding a desktop IP phone to your home network that can connect to the corporate IP-PBX with all its normal capabilities.
• Additional Benefits: Additional benefits include reduced downtime, elastic static IP, reduced WAN cost, reduced emergency calls and related costs, 3G/4G/LTE wireless failover, advanced QoS, layer7 deep packet inspection, traffic monitoring, bandwidth reservations, traffic shaping, traffic filtering, dynamic DNS, firewall and other advanced routing features.

Bottom Line

The coronavirus has already caused major disruptions for businesses worldwide and these disruptions figure to increase both in number and severity over the coming months. As businesses struggle to deal with cancelled conferences, quarantines and large-scale closures of schools and other institutions, quickly imposed mandatory telecommuting for large numbers of employees, and a general desire for social distancing, Internet connectivity is being stressed like never before. Being able to easily add more capability and customize your connectivity to support mission-critical activities is critical. SD-WAN with broadband bonding is a proven technology that has successfully addressed these issues and others.

The sooner you ensure that the Internet connectivity your business relies on can handle the challenges and stresses of a rapidly changing global environment, the better.

Rob Stone, Mushroom Networks, Inc. 

Mushroom Networks is the provider of Broadband Bonding appliances that put your networks on auto-pilot. Application flows are intelligently routed around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss. Network problems are solved even before you can notice.

https://www.mushroomnetworks.com