When Your Internet Goes Down, So Does Your Business
Matthew Onken knew that firsthand. As IT Director at Lionakis — a century-old architecture and engineering firm headquartered in Sacramento — he inherited a network with redundant connections but zero automatic failover. Within his first week on the job, an ISP outage knocked out VPN access and external web applications for nine hours. Remote offices couldn’t work. Employees had anxiety. And the manual switchover he rigged on the fly couldn’t preserve the static IPs his applications depended on.
That experience sent him looking for a better solution.
The Problem with the Old-School Fix
Onken’s first instinct was BGP — something he’d implemented before. But his ISP wanted $1,000 a month for a /24 network block. Beyond the cost, BGP doesn’t do much beyond failover. No load balancing or connection conditioning, and no visibility into what’s actually happening across your circuits.
So he looked at SD-WAN solutions. Most of them tried to bundle everything — firewall, SD-WAN, site-to-site VPN — into one box. Onken didn’t want that. He wanted flexibility. He wanted to keep his Cisco firewall. And he needed a static IP block that stayed with his device, not with his ISP.
Bigleaf checked every box.
Why the Static IP Block Was a Game-Changer
For Lionakis, static IPs weren’t a nice-to-have — they were essential. VPN, hosted web applications, site-to-site connections: all of it depended on a consistent public IP address. With Bigleaf, those IPs are tied to the device, not the ISP. That means Onken can swap carriers, move a device to a new location, or plug in any connection he wants — and his IP addresses stay the same. No DNS updates or application reconfiguration, and no calls to the ISP.
“As long as you’re staying with Bigleaf, you can change providers and you’ll never have to make that change again,” Onken explains.
Making the Case to Management
Justifying the investment wasn’t hard. Onken came to the table with side-by-side pricing — Bigleaf came in at roughly half the cost of the BGP option alone — and a clear picture of what downtime actually cost the business. Remote offices going dark. Employees unable to access systems. In an era where everyone works across distributed locations, that’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a business stoppage.
“I don’t know a business out there today that can operate without internet,” Onken says.
Hidden Benefits They Didn’t Expect
Once Bigleaf was in place, Onken discovered something beyond failover and load balancing: visibility. The Bigleaf dashboard showed real-time connection performance, traffic breakdowns, and an event log that surfaced issues his old monitoring setup would have missed entirely. At Lionakis’s Newport Beach office, the dashboard flagged an ISP interface that was bouncing up and down. They contacted the ISP, the ISP found the problem, and connection performance improved — a fix that never would have happened without that level of insight.
Before Bigleaf, getting usage data meant port mirroring to a switch, capturing traffic, and pushing it into SolarWinds. Now Onken checks the Bigleaf dashboard instead.
The Setup? Easier Than Expected.
Onken fills out a cut sheet — IP block size, ISP connection details, internal addressing — and Bigleaf pre-configures the device at the factory. It ships, you rack it, plug it in following a color-coded diagram, and it’s up. When he has needed support, he gets a person on the line quickly, no queue, no runaround.
“I’ve never had to call them too much, which is always good for a product,” he says. “But when I have, they’ve been super responsive.”
His Top Three Benefits
- Load balancing and failover — seamless, automatic, invisible to users and applications alike
- ISP-independent static IPs — swap providers without touching a single application config
- Dashboard visibility — real-time insight into traffic, performance, and connection health across every circuit
Ready to Build a Network That Doesn’t Let You Down?
Onken’s advice to other IT professionals: frame resilience in terms management understands. What goes down when the connection drops? Who can’t work? What does that cost? For most businesses, the answer makes the investment obvious.
Watch the full fireside chat with Matthew Onken above to hear how he built a resilient network for Lionakis — and what he’d tell every IT director facing the same challenge.