Tag Archives: fatpipe networks

31 Mar

Network Connectivity and COVID-19

Network Connectivity and COVID-19

Yes, the COVID -19 virus has absolutely affected the global economy, and not in a good way.  It has also forced businesses, especially essential businesses, to be creative in the way they may not have expected even a few weeks ago.

Working from Home

Employees working from home is not necessarily new, but the number of employees working remotely has dramatically increased, thanks to the stay at home call from officials and business owners globally.   As a result, the demand for secure and most importantly, reliable connectivity, has never been more acute.   So how has the modern-day business adapted?   What are the essential needs for remote workers, and how does the WAN administrator of today deal with these significant changes?

Facts:   More than 25% of businesses have not updated their work from home security policies in the past 5 years.  Driven by the need for secure remote access, companies are scrambling to implement solutions that are robust, secure, and of course reliable. This dramatic increase in the need for remote secure and reliable connectivity has placed extraordinary demands on the carriers as well as network administrators, some of whom are also working from home.

“The spread of coronavirus and social distancing mandates have put many IT pros in a precarious, but necessary, position of having to quickly transition to a largely remote workforce”. (Jackie Crankshaw, Lifeboat Channel Chat, 03/27/2020).  “With more employees working from home, cybercriminals have more access points to exploit networks”

Hacking is always a present danger, but in today’s environment, the chances for breach of a network have significantly increased. Network administrators must be wary of the security issues they now face, and have to accommodate the changing business environment, especially as more workers are connecting from home offices.

Secure connections for remote workers

There are plenty of choices out there, and VPN connections are, for the most part, a logical way to go.   But what good is the VPN if the connection itself is less than reliable, or worse still, down.

The key to ensuring remote workers can do what they are asked to do and help keep businesses up and running is to have the data traffic be secure, and of course, reliable.

For example, Video conferencing and VoIP calls are bandwidth hogs, and with more and more remote workers using these methodologies to connect, the demand for reliability and continuity of call is paramount.

So how can businesses of today, with all the challenges of social distancing ensure their “connectivity” is reliable and secure?

Simply deploying a VPN is not the answer.   Without the ability to manage the links, or lines coming into the HQ data center, the VPN tunnels from all the remote workers will suffer from congestion and in some cases, the link may drop all together. This defeats the remote worker purpose.

The best possible way to ensure reliable connectivity is to enable software driven networking solutions to manage the connections.

FatPipe Networks have been developing and deploying software driven network solutions for well over 20 years, and have 13 seminal patents that enable customers to design, customize and manage how their data traffic is managed across the network.   This includes remote worker connectivity.

Road Warrior solutions from FatPipe Networks

In fact, FatPipe has had a remote worker solution for many years, FatPipe Road Warrior solutions, which give customers the ability to load balance the traffic across multiple links, as well as failover in a sub-second should a link degrade or fail completely.

The difference with FatPipe solutions is the seamless nature of how it works.  Just set it and watch how the traffic is automatically directed by the FatPipe software.   FatPipe Road Warrior solutions allow customers to enable as many VPN tunnels (Fatpipe has tested to over 9,000 simultaneous connections) as necessary, and use any link type, including copper, fiber, wireless (3G;4G;5G; LTE) and satellite to load balance and failover when the demand requires.

In today’s disrupted business environment, knowing your connectivity is reliable, secure and manageable is critical. FatPipe Networks has been in the market for over 20 years and has recently received a Gartner Peer Review rating of 4.9 out of 5, taking the top spot in recommendations from customers as a best of breed SD-WAN solution.

If you have employees working from home, students learning “on line”, citizens trying to get information from their local city council, or just want to be able to manage data traffic coming into the network, then FatPipe must be a solution worth exploring.

Call FatPipe Networks today – 801-683-5656 ask for sales.

www.fatpipeinc.com

 

17 Jan

Avaya and FatPipe Partner to improve customer mobile experience

Toll Free is still popular, but using a mobile provides new challenges

Toll-free numbers aren’t going away any time soon. Companies still use them to connect customers to their contact centers. What’s different from a few years ago is that most contact center calls now come from mobile devices. And while companies are confident that they’re providing a good mobile experience, their customers don’t often feel the same.

One problem contact centers face is having to pay for each call going through a toll-free line, whether it originates from a smartphone or a landline. This significantly adds to a company’s operating expenses. The Avaya Mobile Experience (AME), launched in 2018, addresses this problem by lowering toll-free and agent costs. The cloud-based service can send incoming calls directly to a contact center without passing it to a fixed network.

AME identifies when a call is coming from a mobile phone, transfers contextual information on the caller to a contact center, and deflects calls to the mobile web for a richer customer service experience. If a caller chooses that option, the toll-free call ends and they receive a link for personalized access to a website. Customers can then use self-service tools like chatbots or a combination of voice, video, and co-browsing.

SD-WAN provides better visibility

With the proliferation of smartphones, consumers have come to expect a seamless digital experience. When dialing a toll-free number, they want agents to know who they are and have additional context that could speed up the call. AME was designed with those needs in mind. It collects customer information to assist contact center agents, so they can handle a call more efficiently if a customer prefers to interact via voice.

Greater multichannel engagement equips companies with valuable insight about customer behavior. But to pull it off, companies need a reliable network that prioritizes voice over IP (VoIP), video, and other real-time traffic without dropping sessions. By deploying a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), companies can have better visibility into their network. An SD-WAN performs over any type of transport—including MPLS, broadband, cellular, and satellite—and selects an optimal path for each data packet.

A SD-WAN infrastructure needs reliable internet connectivity with sufficient bandwidth. SD-WANs provide operational flexibility, but also create complexities that stem from implementing WAN load balancing for internal, internet-facing, and mobile workloads. Thus, they require monitoring and tuning internet throughput for performance. A SD-WAN infrastructure must also include secure access to mobile devices as traffic is transported outside the firewall.

FatPipe and Avaya Mobile Experience (AME) helps improve overall customer experience

FatPipe, a provider of intra-corporate WAN solutions, has developed a secure multi-path VPN (MPVPN) to be implemented for hybrid WAN. It supports bidirectional quality of service (QoS), which monitors the sending and receiving of calls/sessions. An advanced routing architecture that utilizes MPVPN can correct up to 15 percent packet loss on diverse circuits simultaneously, while maintaining toll-quality calls and seamless failover.

Contact centers with mobile customers looking to migrate away from high cost MPLS circuits, now have the option of deploying FatPipe’s dual-path SD-WAN for AME. FatPipe and Avaya came up with a combined solution that equips contact centers with a hybrid WAN mobile infrastructure, which can reduce toll call expenses by up 40 percent annually, per FatPipe.

Call center response is vastly improved

The vendors formed a global alliance to help contact centers achieve those cost savings through joint product verification, pre-integration, and certified solutions. Beyond cost savings, the vendors see companies bridging an existing technology gap.

Companies that implement FatPipe’s SD-WAN with AME can control, monitor, and maintain multiple WAN connections, eliminating the need for Internet Service Provider (ISP) management. As a result, smartphone users get more self-service options on a hybrid network that’s flexible and can accommodate new cloud-based applications.

Contact FatPipe Networks at 801-683-5656 x 1224 for more information.  www.fatpipeinc.com.

25 Nov

Cloud connectivity more important now than ever

Cloud connectivity more important now than ever.

The software-defined wide-area-networking (SD-WAN) ecosystem is expanding into multiple clouds as the largest public cloud providers race to provide connectivity and integrations with SD-WAN technology. This is a win for everybody.

Futuriom SD-WAN Survey 2019

With virtual networking connection program such as Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN and Amazon’s Direct Connect, application programming interfaces (APIs) make it easier for the SD-WAN technology providers to tie into the public cloud at nearby points-of-presence (PoPs), speeding up access to the public clouds.

Imagine a Web of virtualized services being connected across the globe at key interconnection points, with the capability to exchange key information about the performance standards for applications. This is one of the big drivers of SD-WAN, which enables enterprises to speed up performance and access to business applications in the cloud.

Microsoft has been the leader here, describing its Azure Virtual WAN as a way to provide optimized WAN branch connectivity to Azure, its cloud services. The access points are placed in regional hubs at Internet exchange points in carrier hotels or data centers. This can enable services such as site-to-site virtual private networking (VPN), point-to-site VPN (point-to-site), and ExpressRoute. In addition, direct connections into Azure virtual WAN can enable high-performance network connectivity for cloud applications such as Office 365. Microsoft has architected its entire network to bring apps closer to the service edge.

FatPipe Networks, like other SD-WAN vendors, is quickly adopting integrations with the major cloud providers to leverage these services. Earlier this year, FatPipe announced the availability of FatPipe SD-WAN for Azure, which provides SD-WAN customers direct connections into the Microsoft Azure cloud.

By hosting a virtual endpoint, or gateway in Azure, the FatPipe SD-WAN service can improve connection and customer experience for access to Azure applications and cloud-hosted business applications such as Microsoft Office 365. FatPipe says the direct cloud access will speed up connections and avoid problems such as session drops. FatPipe does this by hosting a specific FatPipe virtual machine on the Azure platform. FatPipe SD-WAN for Azure is built around FatPipe’s MPSec technology, which provides additional WAN transmission security versus standard encryption. The improved security is targeted first at small to medium businesses where FatPipe is primarily focused, then multinational corporations, and government agencies that want to use cloud applications but are concerned about security and compromised ISPs.

But such edge connectivity does not stop at the major clouds. It will also be used to optimize performance of specific business cloud applications, such as Unified communications as a service (UCaaS).

For example, FatPipe has announced a partnership with RingCentral to deliver higher quality VoIP calls. Other SD-WAN vendors are looking to forge relationship with VOIP and UCaaS services. Connecting directly to the cloud PoP for a specific VOIP services can help reduce jitter and latency.

FatPipe’s backing a strong trend of the broader SD-WAN ecosystem, in which software and service vendors partner with Microsoft and other cloud providers to provide integrated services for WAN connectivity to cloud apps.

Now, imagine this theme spreading, as it will – to Amazon, Google, and other major cloud provider. The expansion of edge-optimized cloud connectivity extends the edge networking capabilities among partners, building a robust ecosystem.

Futuriom research indicates that the top three reasons that enterprises are adopting SD-WAN including improving security, management, and support for edge cloud services.

Providing inter-connectivity with the major cloud providers has the potential to hit on all three of these, as managers can now provision and deploy secure virtual networks across clouds. This will help them manage the user experience in the increasingly cloudified world.

26 Jul

12 Attributes of a Best of Breed SD-WAN

12 Attributes of a Best of Breed SD-WAN Solution & Why You Need One for Secure Traffic Management

SD-WAN is really about traffic management.   Sure, zero touch deployment is not necessarily a traffic management solution, but the reason software is driving WAN deployments and configurations is simply that it is capable of managing your data links and traffic across these links.

Network Security

Extensive research has established that security is the number one issue faced by WAN administrators.  Hosting your data in the cloud, hybrid cloud or on premise has created the need for highly secure traffic management between users and your data.   There are a lot of SD-WAN solutions out there that claim to have the capabilities to manage this traffic securely, but not all SD-WAN is the same.

If you think security, firewalls are part of the conversation.   Firewalls are designed to detect and prevent intrusion, but are not WAN traffic management devices.   Traditional Routers are designed to route traffic over multiple links, but have been complicated to install and definitely complicated to manage.

SD-WAN has certainly disrupted the traditional networking industry and today, software managing your data traffic is becoming much more commonplace.   For SD-WAN to be successful in today’s complicated networks, it must be simple to install and, above all, simple to use and administrate.   It must be able to run on popular hypervisors, be compatible with cloud infrastructures and understand multiple link types, including legacy systems, such as BGP networks, as well as the less expensive and ubiquitous broadband networks.

So how does the WAN administrator find the best SD-WAN solution when there is so much choice and marketing hype?   Understanding the features and functions of pure SD-WAN is important, especially when it comes to security of your data.

Best of breed SD-WAN solutions will come with the following features:

  1. Easy to install
  2. Support ALL link types (existing legacy systems (BGP) as well as Internet, satellite, 3G,4G,5G, LTE, cable)
  3. Support multiple links in one device (up to 12 interfaces is not uncommon)
  4. Support bandwidth ranges from 10Mb up to 40 Gig.
  5. Provide secure management of BOTH inbound and outbound traffic.
  6. Allow customization and assignment of application traffic on certain links with instant failover
  7. Ability to determine healthy links instantly, which allows for instant failover, of BOTH inbound and outbound traffic. This usually means the methodology used to test the links is very important.  Ask what algorithms the software uses to test the links.
  8. Cloud support with emphasis on secure traffic transmission and instant failover capabilities to multiple link types.
  9. Zero touch branch deployment
  10. Options to host or outsource to MSP
  11. Opex or Capex offerings
  12. Most important! Easy to use management tool!   It must provide a simple to use traffic management tool that allows for quick, easy and intuitive changes to any link or application traffic not matter where that application or link is located on the WAN.   You should NOT have to retrain your IT staff or pay for certified staff to manage your SD-WAN implementation.

Of course, this is not a comprehensive list, but if you are looking for an SD-WAN solution to sustain your systems for some time to come, you need to consider each of the features above and map them to your long-term plan.  Remember, security is the number one issue, so do not look at any SD-WAN solution that cannot provide selective encrypted data flow across the network, and preferably choose solutions that incorporate stateful firewall IDS/IPS features.    SD-WAN will definitely benefit the efficiency of your network, but do not settle for limited capabilities, knowing that your user count will increase and your network will expand.

FatPipe Networks has been developing and selling SD-WAN solutions for over 17 years, and are widely known as the “inventors” of SD-WAN.   The software suite is extremely comprehensive, but what is most talked about is the easy to use interface, EnterpriseView™ – which is a single pane view of the network allowing administrators easy access and with simple to understand menus, administrators can make changes to traffic management, no matter the destination, starting point or route taken.

FatPipe Networks encryption is FIPS 140-2 certified, making it the only SD-WAN vendor with an encryption module approved by government agencies.  To add to the security capabilities, FatPipe recently announced firewall support next generation firewall IPS/IDS features allowing users the luxury of having a highly secure traffic management solution with integrated firewalling.

FatPipe’s comprehensive SD-WAN suite is unique in the industry especially its patented SmartDNS™ which provides customers with INBOUND fail-over capabilities, not seen in other SD-WAN offerings.   FatPipe also provides industry leading policy-based routing, giving administrators the ability to set thresholds based on common network issues, such as latency, jitter, and packet loss that will trigger if certain user defined conditions are met, ensuring data is not lost or compromised due to congestion or other link issues.

FatPipe is certainly a top contender if you are seriously considering SD-WAN or are upgrading your current network solution.  Call FatPipe today at 1-801-683-5656 x 1224.

www.fatpipeinc.com

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31 Jan

Cloud-Hosted, Cloud Enabled Unified Communications WAN

Securely Evolving UC and CC with FatPipe SD-WAN for Success in the Cloud

At Avaya Engage, we featured our recently completed Avaya DevConnect test results. Successful UC and CC deployments must be architected on a network with reliable, redundant, load-balanced internet connectivity delivering ample bandwidth. Avaya Aura 8.0 and Avaya IP Office 11.0 combined with FatPipe SD-WAN has been DevConnect tested to complement and extend joint value from premised based and between the cloud or HQ and the branch. FatPipe’s policy engine manages QOS, jitter, latency, and WAN Optimization ensures good call quality and sub-second failover for NO dropped calls.

All About the Cloud

It’s was all about the cloud! FatPipe Networks Dynamic Path Selection of Multiple Active Hybrid wide area network (WAN) paths is an effective Next GEN SD-WAN transformation solution that provides a critical aspect of a diversified hybrid Cloud WAN infrastructure.

We reviewed investment areas in the cloud for next generation WANs and how FatPipe’s routing options for internet traffic flow deliver an optimal user experience for business cloud applications like Avaya.