Keeping your business moving with Enhanced Internet, SD-WAN’s secret ingredient
It’s amazing how the Internet works. Data floods and flows magically around the world, billions of pages, files, images, and video served up to half the planet every day that somehow never clash or get lost as they ricochet around the world. Except that’s not really what it’s like.
Packetized routing, the basic method for data exchange of every office network, every VPN, every SD-WAN, isn’t a work of art. It’s a functional solution to the messy problems of real life.
Emails, application data, and discrete files get chopped into chunks, sent on their way, and reassembled at their destination after hopping across multiple peering points and servers. It works well and often those problems slowing down your data may not be obvious.
In the real world, servers suffer timeouts and bandwidth gets choked. Routings take the long way round and packets fizzle out. That’s why Expereo has developed a solution minimize the logjams and get your data moving again and keeping it moving, fast.
Let’s see how Enhanced Internet from Expereo keeps your business operating.
What causes network traffic congestion? Peering problems and packet loss explained
The self-healing nature of Internet Protocol (IP) hides how haphazardly traffic is moving beneath. Your data and files usually get to their destinations no matter what. But what end-users never see is the struggle going on beneath the surface and how much those struggles are costing them.
Where do peering problems come from?
Since its early days, the Global Internet has worked on peering: different waystations around the network agreeing to forward packets onward, in the understanding others will do the same for their packets. That worked fine when the net had a few hundred sysadmins and most of them knew each other by name. But today, whole countries suffer from asymmetric peering, with even large telcos not having full peering agreements.
What else causes packet loss?
That’s one (among many) causes of dropped packets, a phenomenon where data has to be resent when its route becomes impassable resulting in a broken or unstable connection. The end-user may never notice a second’s delay. But when it happens thousands of times across the whole organization, the network manager will.
Solving the issue of slow packets to China
Expereo’s Director of Global Solutions Engineering, Salim Khouri, says: “Without cloud optimization, a link between a mainland Chinese city and Singapore involved 25% of packets needing to be resent, with all the lags and latency that implies. But with Enhanced Internet that dropped to basically zero… and latency went from a laggy 450ms to just 80.”
Cranking up the bandwidth doesn’t make problems like packet loss go away. But Enhanced Internet does. And it’s about much more than dropped packets.
Recognizing the human element in cloud optimization
Some might say cloud optimization is a technological challenge. It is. But it’s a human problem too. Cloud optimization involves human skill and judgment matching cloud-based resources to each application in use, provisioning to suit unique business demands.
But SD-WANs are in play 24/7, with demand patterns changing constantly. That’s why cloud cost optimization (the financial benefit of Enhanced Internet) isn’t about limiting capacity or overprovisioning it. It’s about finding that optimal state. Enhanced Internet finds that optimized state using artificial intelligence.
Enhanced Internet helps you match in-office and hybrid demand
When your office workers fire up their PCs at 9AM, capacity for cloud productivity apps is ready and waiting. It is also able to support your hybrid remote working employees with no change in end-user experience.
It’s called theintra-day workload pattern.
Smoothing out migration to cloud & SaaS applications
The dynamic nature of cloud optimization makes it especially useful in migration projects—both bet-the-company transformations and those smaller single-app lift-and-shifts that happen in multi-location enterprises all the time.
As a new application moves into the cloud, the demand patterns of users will change. Perhaps that demand isn’t from where you thought it was. Enhanced Internet can optimize routings, minimize packet loss, cut down latencies and provide critical reporting that guides further decision making. It doesn’t replace human ingenuity; it gives you tools for using it better.
Real-time insights, outcomes and performance improvements
Optimization, of course, isn’t a one-off task, but a process. The key takeaway of Expereo’s Enhanced Internet for SD-WAN: it’s always-on. There in the background, watching network traffic and actively seeking problems to solve, whether it’s persistent dropped packets between two European capitals or unusual latency on a single application.
This 24/7 monitoring and reporting both fixes bottlenecks as they arise, and allocates resources for expected hikes in demand. There’s one further benefit: the way machine intelligence can present those problems to managers as insights for decision support.
Ready to explore how Enhanced Internet can support your SD-WAN?
That’s Enhanced Internet. And the more applications and data you use, the better it gets. In our experience: the more locations your business has, and the more international borders it crosses, the more your organization will benefit from it.
By reducing the load on every connection, while increasing the availability of applications, Enhanced Internet keeps everyone from the C-Suite to the shopfloor happy and productive.
If you’re ready to learn more, get in touch today with one of our experts.